Monday September 16 2013

It seems that every time we finish a play I say, “xxx is a strange play!” And then I start looking more closely at it.  Such is the case with Timon. We’ve been reading other people’s analyses and yesterday evening we watched the BBC production and things are starting to fall into place.  I started writing the text this morning.  Maybe it will be ready for the blog next week. But now, this week:

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Clare, or Saint Clare as she is named here, was the founder of the order that Isabella in Measure for Measure belonged to. It emphasized poverty and the order was introduced to England around 1293. The vows of poverty were hard for everyone to keep and other more moderate groups broke away to start their own orders.
• Clement’s Inn, mentioned in Henry IV, Part Two, lodged young men training for the law.  George’s Inn sounds like more fun.

 Shakespeare sightings:

• In the last pages of Shakespeare’s Local by Pete Brown, about the George Inn where the Swedish Shakespeare Society’s course was held this summer (see the report under “Ruby’s Reflections” and the last three weeks’ Monday reports), the author gets to the point where Sam Wanamaker starts the Globe project and Southwark and Shakespeare become big tourist attractions.  And the George Inn “still caters for people a long way from home, who have come to see the sights and reconnect with age of Dickens and Shakespeare.”  I can only add that next time you’re in London, make sure you go to the George. It was a real experience when we were there this summer. Having now read about its history, we really must go there again. Thank you, Pete Brown!
• In the unlikely but engaging novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, one of the drippier of the many absurd characters tells us that her eighth grade son and his classmates are doing Shakespeare in school and she uses Othello’s words “she loved me for the dangers I had passed/And I loved her that she did pity them” to describe her own pathetic one night stand with the main character’s husband.
• IMDb, a website I visit lots of times every day, tells us that Dennis Lipscomb (in the cast of Slow Burn which I reviewed on the movie blog yesterday) “trained as a Shakespearian stage actor.”  He should have stuck with that and not made bad movies like this one.

Further this week:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: Timon of Athens.
• Watched: the BBC production of same.
• Started writing: text on same.
• Received: from Bokus:
• Shakespeare and the American Musical by Irene Dash
• Shakespeare’s Freedom by Stephen Greenblatt
• Practicing New Historicism by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. Not really a Shakespeare book but since Greenblatt is my favorite Shakespearian I’m listing it anyway. And of course Shakespeare is mentioned a lot in the book.

 Posted this week:

• A report on Andrew Hadfield’s  Shakespeare and Republicanism.
• This Monday report.