09 Thursday Jun 2016
Posted in Theatre
Tags
And so it is that the Squirrels’ Shakespeare is beginning to shape up and blossom.
Amongst other things, we have an ending now – or rather, we have the ending. And a title: Shakespeare in Words – and hang the risotto…
And when I say “we”… Continue reading
07 Tuesday Jun 2016
Posted in Books
In a slightly roundabout way I’ve come across a short story of José Luis Borges called La Memoria de Shakespeare, that is, Shakespeare’s Memory.
It’s a beautiful story – and by now I should know that, whenever I cross paths with Borges, I come away with wonders and discoveries. It starts, in a way that put me in mind of Kipling, with a rather dull Shakespearian scholar who, over dinner, gets offered the gift of Shakespeare’s memory. There are warnings – it will be hard, it will be dangerous… but frankly, would you refuse such an offer?
Hermann Soergel doesn’t, and in the following weeks find himself gradually flooded by Shakespeare’s memories, knowledge, likes and dislikes… I won’t tell you how it ends. It’s a pretty eerie ending, though not unexpected, but that’s not the point. The point is that, Borges being Borges, the story becomes a chance to illustrate the author’s… I was going to write “the author’s theories on Shakespeare”, but it’s not quite it. Borges is no Wilbur G. Zeigler or Gene Ayres, trying to smuggle some bizarre theory in fiction’s form. On the contrary, he adds layers and depth to a fictional story with a handful of unprovable but beautiful intuitions.
Here is my favourite:
I know that for Shakespeare the moon was less the moon than it was Diana, and less Diana than that dark drawn-out word – moon.*
I love it. This is Shakespeare in twenty-five words. Not Shakespeare’s works, but 
who Shakespeare was – or may have been. The Grammar Schoolboy with enough Latin and rhethoric to identify the moon with its mythological counterpart – but, more than that, the man with the exquisite ear, the poet who sees sounds, and uses each word as a brush-stroke. Borges is a genius.
Moreover, this gem of characterization doesn’t come just like that. It’s one of the tidal waves of Shakespeare’s mind flooding the narrator’s. You can almost see him – Hermann Soergel, absentmindedly watching the moon, one summer night, and suddenly he catches his breath as the alien awareness invades him. Diana first, and then the silvery light, the half-gloom containted in the “dark drawn-out word”.
I’ll say it again: it’s beautiful. Shakespeare imagined – seen – by moonlight. I do love Borges.
___________________________________
* Translation by Andrew Hurley.
04 Saturday Jun 2016
I think I’ve mentioned this before – but, as a Saturday thought, I’ll post a bit of the Author’s Greeting from George Garrett’s Entered from the Sun – the Murder of Marlowe.
It’s an irritatingly wonderful book, by the way, and one of these days I’ll have to write about it at some length. For now, let’s content ourselves with this… Continue reading
02 Thursday Jun 2016
Tags
Alexandre Dumas Père, Buckingham assassination, historical novel, John Felton, Ronald Blythe, The Assassin
I had never read anything of Ronald Blythe’s before, and The Assassin was one of those serendipitous finds. I’m glad it happened, because it is a wonderful book.
The eponymous assassin is John Felton, the officer who stabbed George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in a Portsmouth inn, in 1628. In Twenty Years Later, Dumas Père paints Felton as a mad-eyed fanatic manipulated by the wicked Milady – but the story was quite different. A greedy royal favourite and an incompetent military leader, Buckingham was so extremely unpopular that his death was met with much rejoicing, and Felton was celebrated as a hero… Continue reading
31 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
blogging, David Nicol, Edward Alleyn, Elizabethan theatre, Lord Strange's Men, Philip Henslowe's Diary, The Rose Playhouse
Henslowe’s Diary as a blog? Daily life at the Rose Playhouse?
This brilliant idea belongs to David Nicol, a Canadian teacher of Theatre Studies: daily entries from Philip Henslowe’s journal – the single most important document about the workings of an Elizabethan playhouse and playing company – complete with information on plays, thoughts about popularity and box office, and then questions, links and further readings. A very good introduction to the Diary itself, and to the cogs and wheels of Elizabethan theatre in general. Continue reading
28 Saturday May 2016
Tags
christopher marlowe, Edward Alleyn, Infinite riches in a little room, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta
F. Murray Abraham as Barabas
It has always seemed to me that, while the first part of Tamburlaine the Great is all
black and white and red and gold, Marlowe’s later play, The Jew of Malta, bursts with colours.
It struck me from the very first time I met on the page Barabas, the eponymous Jew, first seen in his counting-house, lamenting the nuisance of counting silver… Continue reading
26 Thursday May 2016
Tags
Alfred Noyes, Ben Jonson, christopher marlowe, Leslie Hotson, narrative poem, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, Thomas Nashe, William Shakespeare
Alfred Noyes wrote a good deal, and in many genres. A poet, novelist, sci-fictioneer, essayist and pamphleteer, he was especially famous for his narrative poems – first of all the highly melodramatic The Highwayman.
Whether these poems have aged all that well is… er, open to debate – but I must confess a partiality for Noyes’s Tales of the Mermaid Tavern. Continue reading
24 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
@ChaucerDothTweet, BBC News, excavations, James Burbage, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Love, The Chamberlain's Men, The Curtain, William Shakespeare
So they are excavating the Curtain, Burbage’s “other” Shoreditch playhouse, where the Chamberlain’s Men played for a couple of years between the Theatre and the Globe. The place was thought to have been Shakespeare’s “Wooden O” in the prologue to Henry V, and there was much rejoicing when in 2012, its remains were found… Continue reading
21 Saturday May 2016
Posted in History
A little Saturday thought, from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain.
Something about history, and truth, and what – and how – is remembered or forgotten.
Something that goes very well with my own pet theory about the iridescence of history…
Says Kundera:
This is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
A realm that, I might add, makes for wonderful hunting grounds, when you happen to write historical fiction…
19 Thursday May 2016
First, you have to know that a risotto is a first course of rice cooked with a variety of ingredients. In my corner of Northern Italy, it’s pork sausage and grated parmesan, basically – and it’s not just a staple food. In the words of my friend Milla, who moved here nearly twenty years ago, “it’s far more than a dish. It possesses quasi miraculous powers. It sates hunger, cures all ills, seals friendships and celebrates any and every occasion.”
In other words, it’s a persecution
Now don’t mistake me: it’s quite delicious. My troubles are with the way it’s made the focus of all social and cultural life… At times it seems that, here around, nothing can be done without risotto – and that the safest way to keep local folks quiet and reasonably attentive for an hour or two, is to promise plenty of risotto afterwards.
Oh, all right – I’m slightly exaggerating, but not all that much. The fact is, I’m being bitter and sarcastic, because… Continue reading
Scribblings 