April 2020

 ‘A plague on both your houses.’ One of the strongest quotes in Shakespeare. Who would have ever believed that ‘both your houses’ was too small? A plague on the world is what we have. I hope you are well and able to deal with this Corona crisis. I am in isolation, no doubt like many of you, but well and healthy and cared for. I wish and hope the same for you.

As always, I start with a promo for the book Shakespeare calling – the book. I do so hope you will help me. Thank you.

The book is available for those of you in Great Britain and parts of 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:

• In the novel The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, the magically gifted protagonist Alex (her real name is Galaxy) also likes Shakespeare. She refers to Ophelia and her flowers, she dresses as Mab for a Halloween party, she prefers her Shakespeare class to Modern British Novels and uses her Shakespeare notebook to write magical formulas, and she has a roommate named Miranda, like in The Tempest.
• In Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance the main character Willa’s mother is in an amateur acting group who always play Shakespeare in the summer. In the same conversation Willa’s fiancé Derek calls her mother Lady Macbeth for serving rabbit stew on Easter.
• Sharon Bolton uses Shakespeare quotes to start each part in her creepy detective novel The Craftsman and one of her characters is in an amateur production of Macbeth.
• In Release by Patrick Ness, young Adam loves young Enzo and reflects that at least ‘they were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet.’
• On Facebook: ‘For the first time in 200 years, Shakespeare is not being performed anywhere in the world.’ Because of Corona. But by now there are a lot of Shakespeare performances being sent via Internet.
• It has been mentioned in several places, including Swedish TV’s Kulturnytt, that Shakespeare wrote Lear and Macbeth while quarantined because of the plague. Kulturnytt also pointed out that Juliet didn’t get Romeo’s message because the friar delivering it was quarantined due to the plague, and went on to remind us to wash our hands.

Films with a Shakespeare connection seen this month:

• Bohemian Rhapsody. Shakespeare connection: Shakespeare connection: Gwilym Lee in The Hollow Crown https://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/bohemian-rhapsody.html
• Contagion: Shakespeare connection: Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love.  Fishburne in Othello. Cotillard in Macbeth. Winslet in Hamlet. https://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/contagion.html
• Destroyer: Shakespeare connection: Kebbell in Macbeth Re-Told http://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/destroyer.html
• Gridlock’d: Shakespeare connection: Roth is Guildenstern, or is it Rosencrantz, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. http://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/gridlockd.html
• 100 Streets: Shakespeare connection: Ken Stott is in Lear. http://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/100-streets.html 

Further since last time:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: Julius Caesar.
• Wrote the text ‘Caesar, Brutus and Greenblatt in Julius Caesar’

Posted this month

• This report
• The above-mentioned text

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/

Caesar, Brutus and Stephen Greenblatt in Julius Caesar

Caesar, Brutus and Stephen Greenblatt

in

Julius Caesar

     Stephen Greenblatt has done it again. In Tyrant – Shakespeare on Politics he has written a brilliant analysis of Shakespeare from still another angle. This time, as the title suggests, on politics but not in the way one would expect. This is, in actuality, a book about Donald Trump the tyrant, without once mentioning Trump’s name. With many quotes from Macbeth, King Lear and other plays Greenblatt shows how tyrants come to power through manipulation and fear, through the support of people who believe they will benefit only to find themselves victims of the tyrant themselves. Reading this book makes one want to read the plays all over again. The first one Hal and I chose to reread was Julius Caesar.

     Greenblatt writes: ‘There is one play in Shakespeare’s whole career that features a systematic, principled attempt to stop tyranny before it starts,’ (page 147)  and goes on to show how some of Rome’s tribunes are angry at Caesar’s willingness, perhaps eagerness, to be made king and destroy the Roman republic.

     Cassius especially is angry, and he convinces Brutus that he is right. Brutus too is convinced but much more troubled by his determination to assassinate Caesar. Greenblatt points out that Brutus’ dilemma is unique in Shakespeare: ‘Brutus invokes “the general” – that is, the common good – as opposed to a “personal cause”, but his long soliloquy undermines any attempt to draw a clean line between abstract political principles and particular individuals, with their psychological peculiarities, their unpredictably, their only partially knowable, opaque inwardness’ (pages 149-150). Don’t you love the way Greenblatt writes? He’s almost as good as Shakespeare himself!

     Greenblatt goes on to analyse the Roman psyche as one that prefers action to thought but that Shakespeare wants to show those behind the scene, ‘troubled, vulnerable, conflicted people uncertain of the right course to take and only half aware of what was driving them to act. The danger was all the greater because they were acting on a world stage, and their obscure private motives had massive, potentially catastrophic consequences’ (page 150).

     Is Brutus then noble but misguided? Greenblatt doesn’t think Shakespeare meant him to seem that way. He points out that Brutus was more noble than the self-serving Marc Antony but what good did that do? ‘…the dream of purity is hopelessly unrealistic and hedged about with irony. And it utterly fails to take into account the volatility of the mass of ordinary Romans,’ Greenblatt tells us (page 154).

     He also tells us that Shakespeare doesn’t offer ‘any solution to the psychological and political dilemmas that [the play] mercilessly probe (when does Shakespeare ever do that?) but instead, ‘an unprecedented representation of political uncertainty, confusion and blindness’ (page 154).

     It’s very easy to believe that if Shakespeare had lived today, he would write a brilliant play about the tyrant Donald Trump. Stephen Greenblatt very successful fills that vacuum with his book Tyrant. Read it.

     And, oh yes, don’t forget to re-read Julius Caesar.

    

    

Greenblatt, Stephen. Tyrant – Shakespeare on politics. 2018. WW Norton, New York.

Shakespeare calling – the book available here and other sites:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Calling-book-Ruby-Jand/dp/9163782626/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1543817692&sr=1-1&keywords=Ruby+Jand