Shakespeare Calling: Monday March 31 2014

Monday, March 31, 2014

Monday March 31 2014

And now we’ve finished reading Pericles. I’ve even written most of the first draft on the text. There are still the intro and other analyses to read and the BBC production to watch but there is a possibility that the text will be up next week.

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

Hotspur, i.e. Henry Percy, was a real person and he had real reason to be annoyed with Henry IV as he is in Henry IV Parts One and Two but he wasn’t Prince Hal’s age (he was older) and he probably wasn’t killed by Prince Hal, as in Shakespeare’s plays.
Hybla was a town on Sicily near Syracuse known for its honey. It’s mentioned in Henry IV Part One and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare sightings:

In the book Idiomantics – The Weird World of Popular Phrases by Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis there was one more Shakespeare reference. It was in the explanation for “What goes around comes around”: “Shakespeare has two versions...both negative. In King Lear, a fatally wounded character says ‘the wheel has come full circle’ acknowledging the justice of his death and referring to the wheel of fortune. And in Twelfth Night, the humiliated Malvolio is told ‘thus the whirligig of time brings in [its] revenge.’”
In London a Social History by Roy Porter, we haven’t even quite reached Shakespeare’s time but there have already been three references:

Flemish artist Antonis van der Wyngaerde’s map “hints at the local colour Shakespeare dramatized though the Bankside theatres had not yet been built.”
Eastcheap, as we know, was where Falstaff liked to drink.
London was quite a peaceful city compared to other European metropolises of the Renaissance period and Porter points out that “London never had Montagues and Capulets.” It did have red roses and white roses but porter doesn’t mention that here and, to be sure, most of that conflict didn’t take place in London.

The young Japanese gold medal winner in the skating World Cup did some of his final skating to music by the Scottish Craig Armstrong composer to the soundtrack of Luhrman’s film Romeo and Juliet.
Dagens Nyheter had a full page, in honour of Shakespeare’s coming 450^th birthday, on novels written about him or his works. Among those mentioned are Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (Richard III), Astrid Lindgren (War of the Roses), Margaret Atwood (Gertrude), Virginia Woolf (Shakespeare’s sister), Mark Twain (Romeo and Juliet) and Agatha Christie (Macbeth and Lear).