Sacramento-area students facing Hamlet's soliloquy or a Shakespeare sonnet, don't despair -- help is on the way through a new agreement between the Globe Theatre of London and the University of California, Davis.

The arrangement will bring enriched understandings of The Bard and his era to UC Davis and high school students in the surrounding eight-county region through teacher training, undergraduate and graduate classes, scholar exchanges and courses at the re-created Elizabethan theatre in London.

UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef traveled to London this summer to sign the agreement, which calls on the campus to explore how it can take advantage of the extensive education resources that the Globe Theatre has amassed.

"The Globe project will start a conversation between how we teach Shakespeare here and how they do it in England," said Barbara Sellers-Young, interim director of the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, pointing to the wealth of educational research and teacher training conducted at the Globe.

UC Davis is the only university in the West that has a formal relationship with the Globe, according to Peter Lichenfels, the theatre and dance professor and department chair who is directing the UC Davis Globe program.

"The affiliation between UC Davis and the Globe is unique in its comprehensive scale for being the only American university offering graduate students access and developing a joint research institute," he said.

Reconstructed in 1992, the Globe Theatre is a replica of the 1599 open-air playhouse in London where Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote many of his greatest plays. The theatre has developed a robust educational program that serves as an international resource for performance and education, extending beyond theatre studies and Renaissance England to a broader look at science, medicine and sociology in the same era across the world.

The program, which UC Davis will launch in the 2006-07 academic year, has two prongs:

• providing continuing education credit for high school instructors in literature and drama through a professional development program at Mondavi Center; the curriculum, still being written, is expected to include instruction from Globe professionals and UC Davis professors, with the opportunity to study abroad at the Globe during the summer; and
• boosting the focus on Renaissance scholarship at UC Davis and, at a later time, at the other UC campuses. The program will include graduate student and faculty scholarships for study at the Globe, and visits to UC Davis by Globe theatre professionals who will work with undergraduate and graduate students. The program will be housed formally in the Davis Humanities Institute.

The eight Northern California counties served through the Mondavi K-12 outreach program include El Dorado, Napa, Placer, Sacramento, Solano, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba.

Two organizational changes at Mondavi Center, which each year brings at least one Shakespearean play to its stage by American as well as by foreign acting troupes, will pave the way for the Globe partnership.

Sarah Anderberg has been hired as director of arts education, professional development and school programs. She will be working with Joyce Donaldson, Mondavi director of arts education and community programs, in connecting the performing arts center with 250 K-12 schools in the region.

Anderberg and Donaldson will visit the Globe in London in late spring to tie up the last details before the new teacher program begins in the upcoming 2006-07 academic year. The Mondavi program will be affiliated with UC Davis Extension, which provides continuing education for professionals.

Anderberg, former director of the Sierra Nevada Arts Program, has long been involved with the California Arts Project, the statewide subject-matter project in visual and performing arts for pre-kindergarten through post-secondary teachers.

In addition, undergraduate students participating in ArtsBridge, an arts education program that sends them into K-12 public schools, will be invited to participate in the professional development program, said Sellers-Young of the Mondavi Center.

ArtsBridge is UC Davis' incubator for future arts teachers administered by Lara Downes that moved this fall from the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies to Mondavi Center.

Earlier this year, UC Davis theatre students previewed what the Globe agreement might offer. They got the chance to try out the London stage four times in a Summer Abroad class, says UC Davis Globe leader Lichtenfels, who has been connected with the British theatre program for the past eight years.

"They got a better understanding of the play by understanding how it was produced physically," said Lichtenfels, a professional director in Britain for nearly 30 years. "We don't know how the Elizabethans spoke -- there is no recordation -- but there are artifacts at the theatre that can help us try to understand what a performance would be like."

Lichtenfels foresees cross-disciplinary work throughout the campus among faculty and students interested in connections between science, health, politics, sociology, history, astronomy, religion and other disciplines.

Two scholarships for graduate students will be available next academic year. One is being supported by the English department for a graduate student in its program, but the other is available to a graduate student in any discipline with a tie to Renaissance studies.

Besides Lichtenfels, UC Davis experts in Shakespeare and Renaissance-era literature involved in the project include fellow theatre and dance professor Lynette Hunter; Fran Dolan, UC Davis English professor and outgoing president of the Shakespeare Association of America; and Adrienne Martin, a professor of Spanish who specializes in Spanish Golden Age literature and Cervantes.

Beyond the boost to university education, Lichtenfels has great hope for reaching out to high schools, especially low-achieving high schools in the region. He says high school teachers must overcome resistance in their students.

"Students say to themselves, 'Shakespeare is the world's greatest genius. His mind is too big for me to understand.' We can help make it concrete for them," he says.

"We hope to give teachers tools about how their students can look at Shakespeare's language without being afraid."

The goal, says Lichtenfels, is to bring to students and scholars, whether in high school or college, "what it is in Shakespeare that everybody feels so passionate about."