25 Thursday Aug 2016
Oh yes, there is another one. Same title, but a very different book. Antonia Forest was a children’s writer – and, although this is one of those children’s book that are a pleasure to an adult reader, it’s definitely lighter fare than Bryher’s novel.
The story itself is of the Runaway Boy sort: at eleven, Nicholas Marlow lives with his much older, wealthy and indulgent brother, and studies at the local grammar school… Continue reading
06 Saturday Aug 2016
Posted in Theatre
A lovely garden in a lovely summer night, things going (nearly) smooth, not messing up one’s lines, finding again the golden thread with the (large) audience, applause, applause, applause…
Colour me very happy.
Antony and the Chorus
26 Tuesday Jul 2016
Last night, after rehearsals, it was far too hot to go home – and, the rehearsals having gone passably well, we weren’t in the mood to disperse yet anyway. So we sat, more or less in the dark, in the garden of our makeshift rehearsal room. We sat in a circle, and began to tell each other the combination of Sonnets 55 and 81 that ends the play.
We all said it in turn, the game being to do it as differently as we could from the person before us. Again and again we said it… Continue reading
19 Tuesday Jul 2016
Tags
Brutus, communication, Erdogan, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, military coup, theatre, Turkey, William Shakespeare
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… Continue reading
16 Saturday Jul 2016
Tags
christopher marlowe, Open Source Shakespeare, searchable works, the Literature Network, William Shakespeare
You know when you know there is that perfect bit in Shakespeare, that line about this or that? You know the speech you need is there, somewhere – but can’t exactly place it, let alone find it… Continue reading
14 Thursday Jul 2016
Posted in Theatre
Remember the Squirrels, and Shakespeare in Words and everything? The last time I wrote about it all, I was soaring on the wings of enthusiasm….
Well, as I rather expected, we are now in the deepest gloom. Continue reading
02 Saturday Jul 2016
Posted in Theatre
Tags
Ed Sylvanus Iskandar, Italy, Jeremy S. Bloom, obsessions, Shakespeare Theatre Company, sound design, The Taming of the Shrew, theatre, William Shakespeare
So it seems that, when you have to do with theatre, you develop this tendency to see, find or seek theatre – or theatrical potential at least – in everything you come across.
I know I function like this, at least in part*. Friends and family have learned to tell the relevant mad glimmer in my eyes. I zone out during dinner, or I enter a lovely courtyard, or I hear drums, or I see drapery falling just so, and… Continue reading
23 Thursday Jun 2016
Posted in Theatre
Tags
Anne Hathaway, blank verse, Charles Marowitz, christopher marlowe, Clemence Dane, Emilia Lanier, Murdering Marlowe, William Shakespeare
On the face of it, Charles Marowitz’s play Murdering Marlowe has more than a little in common with Clemence Dane’s Will Shakespeare.
Like Miss Dane, Marowitz goes for blank verse. Like Miss Dane, he places young Shakespeare firmly in the shadow of young Marlowe. Like Miss Dane, puts a woman between the two – more or less torn. Like Miss Dane’s, his Anne Hathaway is left-behind and whiny. Continue reading
16 Thursday Jun 2016
Tags
christopher marlowe, Clemence Dane, Dark Lady, Emilia Bassano Lanier, Lucy Morgan, Mary Fitton, the Sonnets, William Shakespeare
Of the several candidates for the role of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets, three seem to catch (or have caught) the imagination of novelists and playwrights: Emilia Bassano Lanier, Lucy Morgan, and – though less and less – Mary Fitton.
Usually Emilia is depicted as fiery, passionate, wilful and intelligent – juggling her talents at the virginals and in bed, with a short temper and a calculating streak, while Lucy is usually the plucky “blackamoor” girl, striving hard against prejudice and terrible odds as she tries to make an independent life for herself. Both are portrayed sympathetically – Lucy even more so. Mary Fitton, though, is a dark horse of another colour. Fictional Marys are growing few and far between, but used to be to be cold-hearted, cruel, calculating and ambitious, regarding poor Will Shakespeare as an amusing interlude and/or a stumble in their Court career… 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.
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* Translation by Andrew Hurley.
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