Greg Bell

As a playwright and Shakespearean actor, Bell has performed in several of the Bard's plays, including leads on stage in Troilus & Cressida, Henry V, Richard II, and the roles of Oberon and Theseus in A Midsummer Nights' Dream, as well as Prospero in The Tempest. However, his deepest insights into the immortal Bard began when he took on the role of Shakespeare at the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1984, continuing on through 1989. It was this challenging improvisational portrayal at the...See more

As a playwright and Shakespearean actor, Bell has performed in several of the Bard's plays, including leads on stage in Troilus & Cressida, Henry V, Richard II, and the roles of Oberon and Theseus in A Midsummer Nights' Dream, as well as Prospero in The Tempest. However, his deepest insights into the immortal Bard began when he took on the role of Shakespeare at the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1984, continuing on through 1989. It was this challenging improvisational portrayal at the Faire (where he would be Shakespeare for eight hours a day), along with numerous film and TV parts as the Bard, that gave Bell his unique understanding of the man and his life in Elizabethan England. This fascination with Shakespeare and Bell's resultant inquiry into the 'authorship question' led inevitably to Bell's crowning work, the aforementioned Alms for Oblivion, where Bell would stand before audiences as Shakespeare for the entire play, thus personalizing and bringing alive this heretofore dry, vague historical figure, inviting audiences into a new and much more intimate relationship with the Bard. So far, Alms has been performed, as Bell says, "about a hundred times," and has played in California, Utah, Hawaii, and the UK. Here is what T.H. McCulloh of The Los Angeles Times had to say about Alms: [An] "insightful portrait, physically inventive, varied in tone and splashing joyfully over the playwright's life like a cascade of recalled incident and emotion... This is a Shakespeare as alive as his plays and sonnets, as much fun as a romp in the Forest of Arden, as full of truth and humanity as any character born through his pen." After Alms, Bell moved on to other projects: it took a critical illness and near-death experience, however, to renew his dedication to what he has to say about Shakespeare via the written and spoken word. This new book is the result, lavishly illustrated and beautifully layed out. Currently, Bell leads the Green Poets Workshop at Los Angeles cultural mecca Beyond Baroque. Says he, "We are the witnesses, the Jiminy Crickets of conscience, the agents of change, and we have a deal of work yet to do!" See less