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Tag Archives: shakespeare

Form and substance

06 Friday May 2022

Posted by la Clarina in Things

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form and substance, shakespeare, technique, theatre, writing

It mostly comes in two flavours.

Flavour the first: now and then, when I hyperventilate over some (more or less) minute detail gone wrong in a play, a story, a talk, or whatnot, some sympathetic soul will try to convince me that it was a negligible hitch in the form – but the substance was there, and substance is what truly matters…

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Borges, the moon, and Shakespeare

22 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Stories

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Habla, José Luis Borges, La Memoria de Shakespeare, Mnemosina, shakespeare, Shakespeare's Memory

I stumbled across Borges’s Shakespeare’s Memory a few years ago, while on a quest for memory-themed readings. And I have to say, it was a rather intricate kind of “stumbling”, because I became aware of the story only to find that, for some reason, it was the one piece missing from my mother’s supposedly Complete Works of Borges in Italian translation… Continue reading →

Do as you will – the Volumnia technique

26 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Theatre

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Coriolanus, mothers, shakespeare

There is this thing in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – Act 3, Scene 2 – where the eponymous hero is dragged home by his friends after wrecking his campaign for Consulship.

Caius Martius’s unwilling bid for popular vote in the Forum began badly, and ended worse when the two People’s Tribunes goaded him into a shouting match. All patience lost, he gave them all a very abrasive piece of his mind on the rabble and its representatives – the sort that the Tribunes can easily construe as treasonous speech. So now he is at home, with family and friends trying to talk him into what he perceives as a humiliating apology, unless he wants to face charges of treason for himself and/or civil strife in the City. Continue reading →

A tall and freckled wench – or, the (French) R in “character”

05 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories, Theatre

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characterisation, characters, Charles Nicholl, distance learning, playwriting, shakespeare, the lodger, writing

Teaching in the Covid era – even teaching playwriting in a drama school – means that we are back to distance learning, these days. My corner of Italy is shut down again, and last night’s class happened on Zoom.

It was all about dialogue, you see, and using it to either forward action, or enhance characterization. Well – both, ideally, and all the more when writing for the stage, where dialogue is one of only two tools the playwright has to tell a story, the other being action.

But as we discussed ways to use dialogue to build character, I was reminded of a bit in Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger. Now, The Lodger is wonderful nonfiction, focusing on Shakespeare’s time as a lodger with the Mountjoys, a family of successful tyrers (or wig-makers) of French origins.

Shakespeare managed to get himself embroiled with a lawsuit between Christopher Mountjoy and his son-in-law, and let us say that the Bard doesn’t cut his finest figure – but that’s hardly the point. The point is the Bard’s landlady, Marie Mountjoy, who went from Huguenot refugee to tyre-maker to Anne of Denmark, no less. Well, at one point Marie, a wealthy businesswoman and perhaps an adulteress, goes to see astrologer and physician Dr. Simon Forman, in the hope of recovering a couple of lost ring and some equally lost money. It was a common practice, at the time, and Forman was a man of huge renown in the field. The good doctor used to take copious and detailed notes of his cases, and his notebooks have largely survived, to provide us with a treasure trove of details. Details like the very short list of Marie’s suspect thieves – one being Margery, a servant in the Mountjoy household. A tall and freckled wench, in Marie’s words.

These few words, jotted down by Foreman as he listened to Marie, have always given me the shivers – in the best possible way. It’s a bit of a voice from four hundred years ago, unphiltered by the conventions of literature, law or ritual. It’s a small window thrown open across the centuries to show us, to make us hear this long dead woman… Nicholl loves it just as much as I do, and goes a step further: Whenever I try to conjure up a sense of Marie, he writes, I imagine her while she pronounces “freckled” with a French accent.

Try Nicholl’s little game – and here is Marie at thirty, leaning forward in her seat in the flickering light from a pair of candles, with a disapproving frown, and pursed lips, with her hands folded in her lap, and her French ‘r… So vividly alive, after four hundred something years, and all because of five words told to an astrologer. Five words that keep a trace of her origins, her mindset, her beliefs, her voice, her personality. Five words.

It goes to show how a few well-chosen words of dialogue  can go very far in creating a voice and a character – whether history kindly provides them, or we make them up ourselves.

Hunting for a lost story

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Stories

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boy player, Elizabethan theatre, shakespeare, story

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 →

Mucho Ruido in Mexico

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by la Clarina in Theatre

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Beatriz Romilly, Globe theatre, Matthew Dunster, Mexican Revolution, Much Ado About Nothing, shakespeare

So, I was at the Globe for Matthew Dunster’s “Mexican” production of Much Ado About Nothing,and loved it.

Let’s begin with the time-travel quality of just entering the place, climbing up the wooden stairs (we opted for the gallery benches – with cushions), watching from above the groundlings standing in the pit… Oh, the thrill of it!

And then the play itself: lively, colourful, full of song and music, with touches of that kind of melancholy, angry lust for love and life that goes with wartime – given that the setting is the Mexican Revolution… Continue reading →

Shylock’s Appeal

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by la Clarina in Things

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appeal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Venice

And here I was, staring at the screen, quite at a loss about what to write…  So very much at a loss that I asked for help.

“Write about the opaque days between around the end of the year,” Lady’s Mantle said. “Not enough of 2016 left, not yet 2017…” Which strikes me as a fitting theme for poetry, rather than a post.

“Write about the lovely sunsets we get whenever the fog allows it,” said Mother. Pretty, but not quite like Scribblings…

shylAnd so here I sat, staring at the screen and even more at a loss than before, when Rodolfo called, ordering me to turn on the telly, and have a look at a thing called Perché Shylock, that is Why Shylock. Continue reading →

Theatre – a Tide Chart

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by la Clarina in Theatre

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rehearsals, shakespeare, theatre

Rehearsal2And 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 →

Toy Shakespeare

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by la Clarina in Theatre, Things

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Julius Caesar, Matthew Powell, shakespeare, Shakespeare for kids, toy theatre

ToyShakespeare I love toy theatres and I love Shakespeare… Toy theatre productions of Shakespeare, being a combination of two of my favourite things, make me ludicrously happy.

There’s been a time when I thought I’d find some like-minded soul and put together a large toy theatre and a little collection of (much abridged) Shakespeare plays for schools. Well, perhaps not just Shakespeare – but still. Continue reading →

A Peek Backstage

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by la Clarina in Theatre

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backstage, blogging, Royal Shakespeare Company, shakespeare, theatre

rsc_logo.tmb-logo-200Did you know that the Royal Shakespeare Company has not one, but three fabulous blogs?

There is Pathways to Shakespeare, in which RSC actors and directors tell of their Shakespearean rites of passage: how they first met the bard, what drew them, what made them Shakespearean actors, how they entered the company… Continue reading →

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