Shakespeare dances.

The most illuminating comment ever made to me about Shakespeare was a throwaway remark by Peter Brook, who casually suggested that the most common mistake in approaching Shakespeare was simply to consider him "the greatest of playwrights, when in fact he was a different kind of playwright altogether." There were, in effect, playwrights and there was Shakespeare. Certainly few men have ever possessed such profound and seemingly universal insights on the human soul, heart, and mind, dealing equally with our moral sense, our intellect, and our emotions. And, without any question, no writer has used the English language with such power, grace, and subtlety. As a moralist, thinker, and poet, Shakespeare does indeed seem to be an artist so far above as to be an artist apart.

Yet his stories are the least of him. Very few were invented; scholars can provide sources for even the most seemingly original, and although his narratives obviously engage the attention, what is important is the humanity and sheer poetry he drapes upon them. Shakespearean action finds meaning only in the interplay it has with Shakespearean character. This must give the translater or adaptor pause. To translate Shakespeare into another language creates the special problem of somehow finding alien verbal equivalents for the original's arrow-sharp accuracy, that particular aptness that shatters conventional communication, leaving uncommon but universal truth. But to translate Shakespeare not just into another language but into another medium, particularly ballet, has a touch of impossibility to it that verges on idiocy.

The risk is that instead of adapting Shakespeare you will simply be left with Shakespeare's story. In fairness, with a movie version you can retain the play as written--or as much as might prove palatable to a modern mass audience. And with opera, as Arrigo Boito, the librettist of both Verdi's Otello and his Falstaff demonstrated, it is occasionally possible--although I personally cannot think of another occasion--to distill the spirit of Shakespeare into another elixir that combines with music to attain its own validity. However, an opera librettist is still working with the original poetry and characters. Words into words can always go, or at worst, always try. Yet even then, how often does opera capture what Brook discerned as Shakespeare the unique artist?

Now how about ballet, with all its expressive ambiguities of choreography? To be or not to be left to the uncertainty of an enchainment, Romeo's love and Juliet's enchantment a matter of entrechats and pirouettes, the fall of Caesar to be suggested by an arabesque? Words, words, words--are they not the total matter of Shakespeare's art? Could a mute Shakespeare ever be glorious? A tough proposition. Yet there has never been any shortage of ballets based on Shakespeare. This past summer in New York we have had both Ashton's and Balanchine's musings on A Midsummer Night's Dream. And all over the world for more than two hundred years--one of the first was certainly Noverre's Antony and Cleopatra in Ludwigsburg in 1765--Shakespeare has inspired choreographers and dancers. I think one major reason for the popularity of Shakespearean ballets is simply the familiarity of the stories; Shakespeare may not have invented many of his themes, but he certainly popularized them. And people like seeing some of the stage's best-loved characters set to dance.

Some of the plays have been done almost to death--notably Romeo and Juliet, which stands alone among the Shakespearean ballets in having had a famous score specially commissioned for it (unless one erroneously counts Mendelssohn and The Dream, of course). And even so, other Romeo ballets (with one or two scores commissioned, others simply borrowed) have been created to composers as various as Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Delius, and Constant Lambert, not to mention Claus Schall, who wrote the music for Vincenzo Galeotti's version for the Danes in 1811.

Admittedly no Shakespearean subject has been so thoroughly explored by dance as Romeo and Juliet--ballet loves lovers--but Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, of course, The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windor (yes, in 1956 I actually saw a prancing Falstaff, courtesy of Vladimir Bourmeister and Moscow's Stanislavsky Ballet), Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth--even King Lear--have all, just during the past half-century, served their turn on the ballet stage. Why--oddest of all--in Images of Love, created specially for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, Kenneth Mac Millan even used the Sonnets as grist for his choreographic mill.

The strange thing is how little such familiarity has bred, well, not contempt, but just simple daring. Comparatively few choreographers have used the Bard for a justifiable dramatic launching pad, and offered (in more senses than one) variations on a Shakespearean theme. There was, indeed, Martha Graham's apparently obscure and unsuccessful exegesis on Lear called Eye of Anguish, which I unfortunately didn't see, and John Neumeier's equally obscure and unsuccessful Hamlet Connotations, which I unfortunately did. Talking of Hamlet, there was also Robert Helpmann's underdanced but dramatically interesting phantasmagoric Freudian psychodrama on that same melancholy Dane, which certainly provided some commentary and comment on the play rather than a mere meek retelling.

Two of the most rewarding Shake spearean ballets happen, not I think by chance, to be two of the most oblique--Jerome Robbins's sadly now lost The Guests and Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane. The Robbins was not overtly about Romeo (it preceded West Side Story by eight years), but its touching, almost abstract masked ballroom for the "ins" and the "outs" irresistibly recalled it, just as the Limon suggests the subtle dramatic essence of Othello distilled into a passionate dance of exquisitely fractured formality.

There are surely lessons here. Perhaps choreographers brushing up their Shakespeare should follow Shakespeare's narratives less slavishly and echo his spirit more poetically, thus, unlike the garrulous Polonius, employing more art and less matter. It could be a twist for the better.