Shakespeare Calling: May 2018

Sunday, May 6, 2018

May 2018

There has been a lot of other things happening this month so this Shakespeare report will be quite short.

As always, I will 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.

Available for those of you in Great Britain and Europe on this site:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/9163782626/ref=tmm_hrd_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=1514378301&sr=8-1

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

http://www.bokus.com/bok/9789163782626/shakespeare-calling-the-book/

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

Shakespeare sightings:

In Stephen King’s The Gunslinger the man in black says to the gunslinger, ‘Sleep now...Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.’
In David Almond’s My Name Is Mina, the girl Mina, about ten years old, protests against the SATS writing test: ‘And what about Shakespeare? “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” What level’s that? Would Shakespeare have been well above average?’
On TV’s Kulturnytt we were informed that Shakespeare in Love is being performed as a play this autumn at Stockholm’s Stadsteater.
DagensNyheter

in one of its many reports on the scandal within the Swedish Academy (very embarrassing for Sweden!) the whole thing is described as ‘a power struggle that beats any Shakespeare drama.’
has a review of a Richard III in which it is described as a ‘bloody bubble bath’.

Shakespeare is mentioned many times in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Here some of the best:

On the subject of astrology it is mentioned that Edmund the Bastard in King Lear is sceptical: ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune...we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars; as if we were...fools by heavenly compulsion...’
On almanacs: ‘...the porter in Macbeth had presumably been studying the latest prognostications...’
Henry IV, Part 1 is quoted: ‘...of the dreamer Merlin and his propehecies...’
On curses: ‘In Shakespeare’s plays, the curses pronounced by the characters invariably work.’
As a chapter heading: ‘They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.’ Al’s Well that Ends Well
On purgatory and ghosts, which could not be the souls of dead men, ‘for those had gone to “The undiscover’d country from whose bourne/ No traveller returns”.’ After which the role of Hamlet’s father is discussed. Later it is mentioned that sometimes only the guilty party saw the ghost, for example Banquo.
The chapter ‘Decline of Magic’ is headed by ‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,/ And what strength I have’s mine own,/ Which is most faint’, from The Tempest.
There may be more quotes in the last 25 pages which I haven’t read yet.

In The King’s Speech

Lionel Logue, the speech therapist played brilliantly by Geoffrey Rush, is an amateur actor trying to get a part by auditioning with ‘This is the winter of our discontent’ from Richard III
He has the Duke/King George VI (Colin Firth) lose his stammer by quoting ‘To be or not to be’ to music
Plays Shakespeare quote games with his sons.

Further since last time:

Watched with friends EG and EG, with whom we have tickets for Hamlet at the Globe in July: RSC’s version of Hamlet with the brilliant David Tennant.
One of the bookshops that carries Shakespeare Calling – the book as well as my alter ego Rhuddem Gwelin’s The Merlin Chronicles was given ‘The Bookstore of the Year’ award at the London Book Fair. A huge honour! I’m very proud to have a small part in this wonderful bookshop’s activities. http://www.bookshop.se/
Still on my alter ego’s new webpage:

The insult for today, 7 May 2018, in our calendar of Shakespeare insults, a gift from JS, is ‘I prithee, vent thy folly somewhere else. Thou know’st not me.’ From Twelfth Night