Monday July 14 2014

How did that happen?  My holiday is drawing to an end and this will be the last Shakespeare Monday for awhile because I go back up to full time for a month or so starting next Monday. When I return it will hopefully be to post a text on The Winter’s Tale. Until then, have a good Shakespeare summer.  

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Maria, the one in Love’s Labour’s Lost, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess of France and was wooed by Longueville.
• The Earl of Marle was one of the French nobles would died at the battle of Agincourt.
• Marseilles is mentioned in The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well that Ends Well.

Shakespeare sightings:

• There was a review in Dagens Nyheter of The Comedy of Errors at the Roma ruins on the island of Gotland (mentioned last time). The reviewer quite liked it, claiming that it is probably close to the way Shakespeare himself had envisioned it. High praise indeed! She goes on to mention “deft farce and snorting despair” (it sounds better in Swedish: “flyhänta farsinslag och frustande förtvivlan”.  Other words: energetic, furious, frustrating, magnificent, comical, melancholy.  The review ends with mentioning the triple anniversary: the Roma Cloister 850 years, Shakespeare 450 years and the Roma Theatre 25 years.  Happy anniversary, everyone!
• In A History of World Societies by John McKay et al. I’ve reached (and passed) Shakespeare’s time. In a book of over 1300 pages Shakespeare is granted almost half a page, ending with “Hamlet’s sad cry, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking make it so,’ expresses the anguish and uncertainty of modern man.”  That’s one way of looking at it. I’ve always seen this quote as an “aha” of enlightenment.  Some two hundred pages later the Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu is compared to Shakespeare “for the richness and complexity of character and plot.”
• In Beautiful Darkness, the second in the Beautiful series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Olivia utters the quote, “Hollow laughter in marble halls” and Ethan ventures a guess: “Shakespeare?” To which Olivia replies, “Pink Floyd.” Later Ethan compares his mother to “Juliet in some kind of twisted play where Romeo was in Incubus” which in this novel means vampire.                                              

Further since last time:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: The Winter’s Tale.
• Seen on stage in Galärparken with Hal and friends AB and UJ: Much Ado about Nothing with the Stockholm English Speaking Theatre http://sestcompany.com/ .  It was great fun. The weather was perfect, the company extremely pleasant, the crowd full-sized and enthusiastic and the performance witty, colourful and imaginative.  I failed to get the names of the actors but Benedick was superb as were Beatrice and Hero, with Hero doubling as the hilarious Dogberry in the form of a mad blind nun.  Another successful gender bend was Leonata as Hero’s mother. For those of you living in the Stockholm area they will be performing at Drottningholm and Rosendahls Wärdshus through July. Don’t miss it!
  

Posted this week:

• This Monday report.