Monday April 7 2014

Monday April 7 2014

Now I’ve posted the text on Pericles.  That all went very quickly, didn’t it?  Next up is Coriolanus.  I think I wrote a couple of weeks ago that The Winter’s Tale came next but I was a little ahead of myself.  There are only five plays left (if we do Henry VIII (which is included in the BBC box) and don’t do Two Noble Kinsmen (which isn’t) so I’m already starting to wonder what comes after that. Hal and I have discussed doing the history plays. I’ve thought of a thematic reading, although there are so many themes that it would be difficult to know where to start. Ah well, it will be a few months before I have to deal with that.  For now, this week:

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Iceland, mentioned in Henry V, was in Shakespeare’s day an exporter to England of a popular breed of dog. Wha’? What dog is that, I ask and add, Iceland probably exported more than that. Fish, for example?
• Ireland is mentioned in the history plays as well as A Comedy of Errors and Macbeth. Ireland was settled by the Celts in the 4^th century B.C. and was spared the destruction that came with the fall of the Roman Empire and the invasion of the Saxons, but not the invasion of the Vikings.  The Roman popes did not like the independent spirit of the Irish church and gave England permission to take over. They tried. And tried. And tried. Not the least during Shakespeare’s time. It took awhile though...

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the second season of Hustle Danny says to Mickey after Mickey and the gorgeous but icy crooked cop (I’ve forgotten her name) glare at each other over a disputed £10.000, “Well done, Romeo.”
• In her detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling Robert Galbraith (do you know who this is an alias for?) the detective Cormoran Strike sees a painting of Bottom in ass’s ears and recognises it as a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• In London a Social History Roy Porter
• asks if there really existed in London a picturesque brotherhood of malefactors like the one mentioned in Much Ado about Nothing
• claims that though Shakespeare portrays Dogberry as a fool, “London possessed a thorough policing apparatus.”
• tells us that Shakespeare arrived in London at the time of the Spanish Armada and that Shakespeare’s greatest triumphs took place on the Globe.
• Dagens Nyheter still has Rickard III as number one on the best on stage list right now.
• IMDB tells us that Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes) is going to play Richard III in BBC’s new production. I look forward to seeing that.

Further since last time:

• Finished: the text on Pericles
• Watched: the BBC version

Posted this week:

• This Monday report.
• “Oddities in Pericles Prince of Tyre”