June 2019

There has been an election to the European Parliament. The extreme right, the racists, the ultranationalists, have gained so many seats it’s frightening. And Trump is still threatening Mexico (and the world). They are sawing off the branch we are all sitting on. They must be stopped. I’ve posted this quote from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More before. It bears repetition:

Should so much come to short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whether would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—

Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;

And this your mountanish inhumanity.

Last time, I started the report with some questions for you. These too bear repeating, even though they are insignificant (or are they?) compared to the above quote:

• Have you bought Shakespeare calling – the book? I would be so happy if the answer were yes.
• Have you asked your local library to buy it? Ditto.
• Have you told your friends about it? Ditto.
• Have you promoted it on Facebook and all the others? Ditto.
• Have you put the book on your want-to-read list on Good Reads? Ditto.
• Have you read it, rated it, even reviewed it on the sites available, Good Reads, your library, Amazon etc? Ditto.

In other words, I really need your help in promoting the book, and keeping the project alive. It’s a very large book jungle out there and even Shakespeare’s voice can disappear in the din without your help.

Thank you!

The book is 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

Or in Sweden

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

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

Shakespeare sightings:

• Mark Forsyth, in his The Elements of Eloquence – How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, refers to Shakespeare so many times (of course) that it could almost be called a Shakespeare book. He starts the book with the claim, ‘Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines. No fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.’ It’s a book about different kinds of rhetoric and their rules. Shakespeare knew and used them all. Here are some examples from the first half of the book:
•  Alliteration: ‘The barge she sat in like a burnished throne burned on the water.’ (Forsyth doesn’t even mention Love’s Labour’s Lost).
• Polyptoton: ‘Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.’
• Aposiopesis: ‘That all the world shall…I will do such things…’
• Hyperbation: ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’.
• Anadiplosis: ‘The love of wicked men converts to fear; that fear to hate, and hate turns one or both to worthy danger and deserved death’.
• In the film Cactus Flower from 1969 Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau go to the cinema to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
• Bruce Springsteen, in his memoirs Born to Run, writes that his first manager Mike Apel, when they first met, compared him to Dylan, James Joyce and Shakespeare. Later in the book he writes that Clive Davis of Columbia Records did a reading of ‘Blinded by the Light’ ‘like it was Shakespeare.’ 

Further since last time:

• Read aloud with Hal: The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hopefully there will be an analysis next time. 

Posted this month

• This report

  

Shakespeare Calling – the book is promoted by

http://shakespearesallskapet.se/

Read more about my alter ego’s books, in one of which Shakespeare appears live and in person, on:

·       https://themerlinchronicles.wordpress.com/ruby-and-shakespeare/shakespeare-calling-the-book/

·       https://themerlinchronicles.wordpress.com/ruby-and-shakespeare/spoiler-merlin-and-shakespeare/