March 2018

A busy month with Shakespeare, of course, but also with Merlin and Shakespeare. Please do visit my alter ego’s new web page, especially the Shakespeare bits! https://themerlinchronicles.wordpress.com/ One of history’s greatest secrets is revealed – Merlin and Shakespeare were good friends!

Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet have all figured in this month’s Shakespearising. And there have been a lot of sighting. So, let’s get to it.

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.

FINALLY easily available for those of you in Great Britain and Europe on this site:

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Also available on  http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Calling-book-Ruby-Jand/dp/9163782626/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436073737&sr=1-1&keywords=Ruby+Jand+shakespeare+calling  

or

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or Adlibris. Or contact the publisher info@vulkan.se

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel The Purchase by Linda Spalding the girl Mary writes in the year 1799 to her friend from Virginia and wonders if her old school was performing Shakespeare while she had only one student, a slave boy, to teach in the wilderness.
• There are so many references to Shakespeare in Philip Roth’s incoherent, almost unreadable but somehow fascinating novel I Married a Communist that the page notations almost filled the inside back cover. Here just a few of them:
• It starts out with 90-year-old Murray enrolling in a course ‘Shakespeare at the Millennium’. He had taught Shakespeare throughout his teaching career and refers to him often throughout his narration to Nathan
• As Ira is betrayed, Murray (his brother) mentions the betrayal in Othello, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth.
• Just a few minutes after writing in An Isle Full of Noises – the Merlin Chronicles Volume 3 about Merlin’s reaction to seeing the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy at the Globe, I read in this novel: ‘the three-hundred-word assignment – discuss, from the perspective of a lifetime, any one line in Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy…’
• Christopher Hill also refers often to Shakespeare in his The World Turned Upside Down – radical ideas during the English Revolution. Here are the best:
• ‘The Forest of Arden gave shelter to a shifting population of blacksmiths and nailers as well as to Shakespeare’s artless countrymen.’
• ‘…both Spenser and Shakespeare had clearly heard communist propaganda.’
• ‘In the freer circumstances of the 1640s and 50s most “madmen” appeared to be political radicals…One wonders how conscious Shakespeare was of what he was doing when he put significant social criticism into the mouths of fools and those, like Lear, under extreme mental stress.’
• The film The Holiday starts with the quote ‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’ and one of the characters telling us that she now knows that ‘love is blind’ is true.
• In Prunella Scales and Timothy West’s delightful program about canals they make the journey to Stratford by boat. The whole program is filled with quotes and recitations by these two brilliant Shakespearean actors, though perhaps we remember Scales best as Sybil in Fawlty Towers.
• Dagens Nyheter had an article about the book published in 1970 by Maja Ekelöf, Report from a Cleaning Bucket, about supporting five children on the salary of a cleaner while studying at university. The article ended with a list of books about scrubbing and included Macbeth with the comment that Lady Macbeth had history’s worst cleaning problem, going mad because the spots of blood would not wash out.
• In the YA fantasy Linger by Maggie Stiefvater, bad girl Isabel opened the Shakespeare she was supposed to be reading. 

Further since last time:

• Finished writing: a text on Twelfth Night
• Watched: the Globe version of same.
• Read aloud with Hal: Romeo and Juliet
• Watched: the Globe version of the same
• Appeared on alter ego’s new webpage:
• https://themerlinchronicles.wordpress.com/ruby-and-shakespeare/shakespeare-calling-the-book/
• https://themerlinchronicles.wordpress.com/ruby-and-shakespeare/spoiler-merlin-and-shakespeare/
• The insult for today, 4 March 2018, in our calendar of Shakespeare insults, a gift from JS, is ‘Then he’s a rogue, and a passy-measures pavin. I hate a drunken roague.’ Twelfth Night. Well, that’s a coincidence.

Posted this month

• ‘A horribly funny play – Twelfth Night’
•  https://rubyjandshakespearecalling.blogspot.se/2018/03/a-horribly-funny-play-is-twelfth-night.html
• This report

  

Shakespeare Calling – the book is promoted by

http://shakespearesallskapet.se/

and

http://www.britishshakespeare.ws/new-book-by-bsa-member/

A horribly funny play is Twelfth Night

How can a play in which there is a shipwreck which surely kills many people, a male romantic lead who is murderous misogynist (and almost a stalker), a pathetic vain old man who is shut up in the dark and told he is mad, two sisters grieving over the deaths of their beloved brothers, a loyal friend who is betrayed then abandoned, and two old men who live as parasitic, drunken sots – how can a play with all this be so funny?

      Well, to start with there are some great one-liners.

      Sir Toby: ‘He…speaks three or four languages word for word without book’ (Act 1.3).

      Sir Andrew: ‘I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm to my wit’ (Act 1.3). Hmmm, maybe not so funny after all! But clever.

      Orsino: ‘I myself am best when least in company’ (Act 1.4). Again, not so funny but in Orsino’s case (and often mine!) so true.

      Maria: ‘Go shake your ears!’ (Act 2.3). Must remember that one and use it sometime.

      Sebastian: ‘ …let me be boiled to death with melancholy’ (Act 2.5). Not funny at all but such an unexpected turn of a phrase that I laughed out loud.

      Sir Toby: ‘For Andrew, if he were opened and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I’ll eat the rest of th’ anatomy’ (Act 3.2). What an image!

      And then there are those silly, fast-paced scenes.  Feste showing Olivia why she’s the fool, not he. Viola in her first meeting with Olivia and trying to give her prepared speech: ‘Alas, I took great pains to study it, and ‘tis poetical’ (Act 1.5). Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, Maria and Malvolio upon partying late into the night: Sir Toby, ‘To be up after midnight and to go to bed then is early’ (Act 2.3). The duel between Sir Andrew and Cesario, from planning, to challenging, to evading and finally to almost fighting – classic slapstick!

      And, of course, poor Malvolio’s entire yellow-stockings-crossed-garters-and-smiles episode. Poor ridiculed humiliated Malvolio. We cringe, we pity him, and we laugh. It can’t be helped. Malvolio making a fool of himself is simply hilarious.

      One final little detail that endears this play to me. Sir Andrew’s name. Aguecheek. It sums him up perfectly. Pale, insipid, bloodless, pathetic aristocrat. It’s even better in Swedish. Blek af nosen.  Pale of snout. What a perfect name.

      What a perfect comedy, steeped as Shakespeare so well understood – in tragedy and human foibles. If we didn’t laugh we’d never survive.

Films seen this time:        

• BBC, 1979. Director: John Gorrie. Cast: Orsino – Clive Arrendell; Viola – Felicity Kendal; Olivia – Sinead Cusack: Feste – Trevor Peacock; Malvolio – Alec McCowen; Sir Toby Belch – Robert Hardy; Maria – Annette Crosbie; Sir Andrew Aguecheek – Ronnie Stevens; Sebastian – Michael Thomas; Antonio – Maurice Roeves; Fabian – Robert Lindsay. 
• A well done enjoyable production.  The cast is very competent but sadly Felicity Kendal is just too sweet and girly to make a convincing Cesario. I have a hard time seeing Trevor Peacock as anybody but Talbot but he’s OK as Feste.  Best is Robert Lindsay (Benedick in BBC’s Much Ado about Nothing and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)  He might have been better as Feste here.
• 1988. Director: Kenneth Branagh. Cast: Orsino – Christopher Ravenscroft; Viola – Frances Barber; Olivia – Caroline Langrishe: Feste – Anton Lesser; Malvolio – Richard Briers; Sir Toby Belch – James Saxon; Maria – Abigail McKern; Sir Andrew Aguecheek – James Simmons; Sebastian – Christopher Hollis; Antonio – Tim Barker; Fabian – Shaun Prendergast.
• One of Branagh’s earliest film efforts, it already shows the greatness that he soon became known for.  Anton Lesser is the perfect clown, rough, subtle, sad and very funny, not to mention very good-looking in his rags and dreads.  James Simmons is the perfect Aguecheek – dumb, sad and funny.  Christopher Ravenscroft makes a great Orsino although he’s a bit too dignified.  Wonderful music by Patrick Doyle.  My only complaints – I don’t like Frances Barber as Viola - too teary and weepy and uncharismatic.  Best laugh: Aguecheek entering on snowshoes.
• The Globe production, 2012. Director: Tim Carroll Cast: Orsino – Liam Brennan; Viola – Johnny Flynn; Olivia – Mark Rylance; Feste – Peter Hamilton Dyer; Malvolio – Stephen Fry; Sir Toby Belch – Colin Hurley; Maria – Paul Chahidi; Sir Andrew Aguecheek – Roger Lloyd Pack
• A very successful all-male cast. Stephen Fry is always a sweetie and Mark Rylance has the perfect balance of comedy and sorrow.