Happy New Year! 2016, the year of the
400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, is at an end. For me it’s
been an exciting year with lectures and theatrical activities in connection
with the anniversary. Hal’s and my third or fourth reading of the plays has
continued and you can find my analyses here on the blog. Otherwise, for the
world, it has been rather a disastrous year and I sincerely hope we can weather
the crises, resist the advances of the racists and deniers of environmental disaster
and turn ourselves round to working together to develop a world in solidarity,
equality and humanism.
As always I will once again mention to
visitors of this blog that Shakespeare Calling – the book is
available for purchase. Please
help promote the book by buying it, of course, and telling your friends about
it, by liking and sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Bokus…. And please encourage your local book shops
and libraries to buy it. Thank you. Your
support is needed to keep this project alive.
or
Shakespeare Calling – the book is promoted by
and
Shakespeare sightings:
- In the YA novel Follow Me Back by Nicci Cloke the young protagonists are involved throughout the book in productions of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
- In Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII Shakespeare is referred to several times, especially in connection with his play All Is True.
- In Peter Ackroyd’s The Tudors
- Malvolio is given as example of the figures of fun used in theatre in Elizabeth’s time to ridicule the Puritans.
- Titania’s complaint to Oberon of the famine in the land is a reference to the famine in England at the time of writing the play.
- The translation of the Bible into English, it is pointed out, inspired such writers as Shakespeare and Milton.
- In Jodie Tyler’s third volume of the Chronicles of St Mary’s, A Second Chance, Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, the bard Bill, Henry V and his ‘Once more into the breach’ all make their appearances.
- In Season Five of Doctor Who Bill Nighy as a guide at la Musée D’Orsay describes Van Gogh’s last production as being ‘like Shakespeare knocking off Othello, Macbeth and King Lear over the summer hols.’
- In Dagens Nyheter there was a review of The Tempest in the town Örebro in which six actors do all the roles. Miranda is a boy and Ferdinand is a girl, Prospero is a woman, Caliban and Ariel are combined to Ariban. A highly respectable production, writes the critic.
- In the novel The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones, one of the young protagonists Nick is coerced into going to a convention of detective writers who all thought they were important ‘apart from one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something…’
Further since last
time:
- Finished reading aloud with Hal: The Tempest
- Watched:
- The rather lacklustre BBC production from 1979 with the creepy dead-eyed Ariel
- Julie Taymore’s The Tempest http://rubyjandsmovieblog.blogspot.se/2014/11/the-tempest-taymor.html
Posted this month
- This report
