29 Tuesday Dec 2015
Celia Fiennes, with this lovely, novel-worthy name, was a remarkable Restoration lady.
Though well-born and well-connected (her father was a Viscount’s younger son), she stayed single, which was quite uncommon for her time and station, and occupied her life otherwise.
In 1684, when she was 22, she began to travel around, because it struck her as a healthy occupation – and never stopped (or very little) for nearly three decades. Continue reading
30 Thursday Jul 2015
Tags
Charles Macready, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Happy ending, King Lear, Nahum Tate, Restoration, William Shakespeare
Imagine you are in England in 1660. Imagine theatres opening again after eighteen years of civil war and general bleakness. Imagine to crave only fun, and music, and gaiety…
And now imagine to find yourself with Shakespeare’s works. And yes, yes – Elizabethan golden age and all that, but it’s been sixty, seventy years, and taste changes. Shakespeare, who was going out of fashion during the last years of his life, by now is mostly the relic of another, cruder era. And mind: the stories are great – if a tad glum – and the poetry has its beauties: if only it weren’t all so desperately old-fashioned, if only it were a little cheerier…But this can be remedied, can’t it? How hard can it be to rewrite the rusty old things? Continue reading
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