07 Saturday Jul 2018
I first came across Tom o’Bedlam via Kipling – in Stalky & Co., when Beetle (or was it M’Turk?) copies in his notebook the eerie and fantastical last verse:
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.
19 Saturday May 2018
And then there is the Shakespeare Quarterly, the Folger Library’s journal – that has a double life, as a physical publication and as its web version. No need to stress that the SQ is always full of interesting essays, articles, insights, interviews, and is a great way to have to pulse of ongoing Shakespearean research.
Have a look, for instance, at this conversation with Ewan Fernie and Paul Kottman about freedom: Shakespeare and freedom, freedom in Shakespeare’s works, freedom and Shakespearean studies – together with a good hint at the always interesting question of how, apparently, no time can help the temptation of building its own Shakespeare.
Well worth a look – and an exploration of the good amounts of SQ material available online.
12 Saturday May 2018
Posted in Books
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I’ve always wanted to draw – and it rather pains me that I cannot. But really, as we say in my corner of the world, I can’t draw an O around a glass…
I usually live with my lack of drawing skills, but now and then it will up and bite me. Continue reading
19 Thursday Apr 2018
I have this memory of reading, decades ago, a story about a boy player named Tom – apprenticed to some member of the Chamberlain’s Men…
Or, well: I’m assuming it was the Chamberlain’s Men, but I do now, because I know that’s the company Shakespeare wrote for. I don’t remember whether Tom played any specific role – but he made Will mad by going and buying some unauthorised, pirated quarto of… Romeo and Juliet, perhaps? And I remember poor, mortified Tom’s master (Pope? Heminges?) saying that Will was not really mad at the boy, but at the unscrupulous printers. Continue reading
26 Thursday Oct 2017
Théophile Gautier first promised The Captain Fracasse to his readers in 1836, when he had yet to put pen to paper.
What he wanted to do, was a picaresque, baroque tale, in the way of Scarron and Scudery… only, he must not have wanted it too much, because in 1845, when he signed a publishing contract (and received a substantial advance), he forgot to mention that he still had to write a single word of the novel. Worse still, he kept procrastinating for years, while the publisher Buloz grew understandably nervous… Continue reading
14 Saturday Oct 2017
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Or at least Charles Arrowby – the protagonist and narrator of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. And Charles, a retired director, playwright, and sometime actor, has a lot to say about the theatre… Continue reading
07 Saturday Oct 2017
Posted in Books
I’ve been thinking, it’s high time I went back to the Saturday Tidbits – as promised by the blackboard here on the left… so, here we go: a Saturday Tidbit.
Did you that know you can go to Paris and stay for free at Shakespeare and Company, the famous Rive Gauche bookshop, in exchange for a few hours of work and reading? Continue reading
17 Thursday Aug 2017
Posted in Books
You know how I’m forever bemoaning the Reading Weeks I never get?
Well, this year, thanks to a longer rehearsals break, I’ve decided that things can take care of themselves for a few days while I read a little for fun and pleasure… Continue reading
15 Saturday Jul 2017
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#Swashathon, Alan Breck Stewart, David McCallum, Iain Glen, Kidnapped, Michael Caine, Movies Silently, Peter Finch, R. L. Stevenson, Robert Cain
Hooray: the #Swashathon, Movies Silently’s “blogathon of swashbuckling adventure“, is back! Four days of cloaks and daggers, swords and sails, fops (or not) and farthingales, derring-do and damsels not-quite-in-distress… Does it get more fun than that?
Let’s get dancing, then – and discuss my favourite swashbuckler of all times: Stevenson’s Alan Breck Stewart. Alan is a wonderful character – the most perfect one in English literature, according to Henry James, no less – but how has he fared on the screen? Ah now, this is a tricky question – so be warned: it’s going to be a long, long post. Continue reading
13 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Books
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Great Siege of Malta, historical novel, Mattias Tannhauser, Omnicompetent Hero, Pet peeves, The Religion, Tim Willocks
On the plane to Malta, I began reading Tim Willocks’ The Religion, one of a few Siege-themed novels I’d purchased in view of the journey. I rather liked the prologue, and my first glimpse of Grand Master La Valette and Sir Oliver Starkey, and the preparations for the siege.
If I was tempted to raise an eyebrow at La Valette’s life-or-death insistence that they must have Tannhauser at all costs… well, he is the hero, after all, and he’s been a Janissary for part of his life – so he must be in the thick of things, and there is some sort of reason for it, right? Continue reading
