Monday May 5 2014

Corialanus.  You’ve read it, seen it right? No, maybe not. If not, you’re among the great majority.  I suggest you join us in the minority.  It’s a very good play.  Disturbing, yes. Hard to follow, too. But intriguing. I’m a little obsessed with Corialanus at the moment. We’ve watched the BBC version (good) and the Ralph Fiennes version (excellent) and while both performances clarify some things, they make others more difficult to interpret.  Still, I know what I want to write. But the pen is finding it hard to meet the paper. Ah well, it will come.  Not this week, and maybe not next week but it will come.  Meantime, we realize that it will be the last play we do before our trip to London which is – OMG – just a month away.  We’ll use the time to brush up on our Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra in preparations for the two Globe performances.  That sentence sends little shivers down my spine. Us. At the Globe. Again.  But not yet! Now just a normal Shakespeare Monday, rather quieter than some.  But not a complete dearth:

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• William Kemp, a contemporary and colleague of Shakespeare, was the main clown for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and played Dogberry and Peter (in Romeo and Juliet) and probably many more. For unknown reasons he left the theatre in 1599, became known for Morris dancing from London to Norwich and then he disappears from history.
• Labio helped Brutus and Cassius plot the assassination of Julius Caesar. I don’t remember him in the play but maybe I will when we see it.

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel The Generation Game by Sophie Duffy the teenage protagonist writes of 1978 as being the Winter of Discontent, uses the old Romeo-Juliet reference to passionate love, is reading Shakespeare at school and at a party meets a man with the voice of a Shakespearian actor.
• Dagens Nyheter has Rickard III as number two on the best on stage list this week too.
• DN’s crossword had the clue “Lear” and the answer was “tragedy.”
• In the second season of Fringe, the fourth episode is called “To sleep perchance to dream.”
• In the rather bad, but fascinating, film Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Johnny Depp’s eyes are gouged out à la Gloucester in King Lear. Yuck. But JD gets on rather better than poor old Gloucester.

Further since last time:

• Read aloud with Hal: The Norton Intro and the chapter in Bloom about Coriolanus
• Watched: the BBC production and the Fiennes version of same.
• Started writing: text about same.
• Finished reading myself: Shakespeare and the American Musical by Irene G. Dash

Posted this week:

• This Monday report.