Tags
Historical fiction, HNS Conference, Melvyn Bragg, Michael Caines, Oxford, Times Literary Supplement, Toby Litt
So the Times Literary Supplement was in Oxford for the HNS Conference, in the person of Michael Caines, who covered “us” with a nice set of musings about what goes on behind the curtain of historical fiction.
He quotes from an essay of Toby Litt’s, affectionately calling HF a “deeply bogus” oxymoron of genre, in that its trick is done by conjoining “what was with what might have been”. Continue reading
I told you about 
My acquaintance with 
Saturday morning we were at rehearsals, Gemma and the Squirrels and I – with Turkey very much on everybody’s mind. We were going through Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2: Brutus and then Antony addressing the crowds. And as we worked our way through it, I had goosebumps and one of those small epiphanies: Shakespeare’s Rome and our Istanbul… 
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.
Henslowe’s Diary as a blog? Daily life at the Rose Playhouse?
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.
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… 
A little Saturday thought, from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain.
Scribblings 