Monday November 10 2014

This morning I finished the rough draft of my text about The Tempest.  I have discovered that I really love this play.  I didn’t so much before. But oh, there is much to be explored in it! But it will probably be another couple of weeks before it’s on the blog. It will take quite a lot of revision, I’m afraid. Inspiration doesn’t necessarily lead to completely coherent writing.  So for now, just this report.

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Plantagenet is the name of the royal family that ruled England from 1154 to 1485, Henry II to Richard III. The name comes, possibly, from a plant that Geoffrey, Duke of Anjou and father of Henry II, liked to wear in his hat.  They didn’t start calling themselves Plantagenets until Richard of York needed something posh to call the family in the War of the Roses.  Shakespeare used the term a bit loosely but he did use it, in all of the history plays.
• Pluto is the Roman name for the Greek god Hades, lord of the underworld. He should not be confused with Plutus, a minor god of riches and agricultural wealth, but Shakespeare often confuses the two, using them in many of the plays.

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel The One Plus One by Jojo Moyes, young Tanzi, mathematical genius, understands the renewal theory and uses the example of monkeys writing Macbeth, given enough time for chance to do it, to show that she understands.
• Dagens Nyheter had in one of its crosswords the clue “Prince on stage.”  
• Malala Yousafzai tells us in her autobiography I Am Malala that she once in school in Pakistan wrote a parody of Romeo and Juliet in which Romeo was a corrupt bureaucrat.  Cheeky kid.

Further since last time:

• Watched with Hal: Julie Taymor’s version of The Tempest.
• Watched four episode of Season Two of the Canadian series Slings and Arrows, received from friends KJG and JG, about a theatre troupe putting on Shakespeare plays. This time they’re doing Macbeth and true to the myth about the Scottish play, things are not going well.
• Finished writing: the rough draft of “Ariel’s Freedom” in The Tempest.

Posted this week:

• This Monday report
• Report on
• Shakespeare and the American Musical by Irene G. Dash
• Shakespeare and Film, a Norton Guide by Samuel Crowl

Shakespeare and Film, a Norton Guide

Shakespeare and Film, a Norton Guide Samuel Crowl. Norton, 2008. Read in May and June 2014.

                      It seems I can never get enough of reading about Shakespeare and film. I have in fact bought and read every book I have found. I’m sure there are more but I’m trying not to look for them.

                      This isn’t so different from the others.  It focuses on the major directors – Olivier, Welles, Branagh, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli. Taymor is mentioned several times but she doesn’t get her own chapter.

                      One chapter is on Shakespeare films on television, another on the 90’s which brought us, Crowl points out, at least twenty Shakespeare films, most notably, perhaps, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet.

The book presents several avant-garde productions, for example two I have been looking for for a long time with no success: Christine Edzard’s  As You Like It and The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. If anyone knows where these might be available, please contact me!

It also deals with camera work, modern technology, opening and closing shots, actors’ interpretations and a myriad of other cinematic aspects of Shakespeare on film.

It’s well worth reading.

Shakespeare and the American Musical

Shakespeare and the American Musical by Irene G Dash. Indiana University Press, 2010. Read in April and May 2014.

                      Since I love musicals this seemed like a must read.  I don’t know quite what I expected – some deep analysis of how Shakespeare has influenced the whole world of musicals maybe. That’s not what I got and I must confess I was a bit disappointed. The book has five chapters about the Shakespeare plays that have been made into musicals: The Comedy of Errors (The Boys from Syracuse), The Taming of the Shrew (Kiss Me Kate), Romeo and Juliet (West Side Story), Twelfth Night (Your Own Thing) and Two Gentlemen from Verona. When I got over my disappointment however I found it a very interesting read.

                      In quite a lot of detail Dash describes the adaption, the stage setting, the music, the humour, the gender roles, the society in which the musicals were first done. The Boys from Syracuse, for example was first done in the late 30’s, Kiss Me Kate in the late 40’s, West Side Story in the 50’s, Your Own Thing in the 60’s and Two Gentlemen from Verona in the 70’s.  This represents an awful lot of changes and shifts in attitudes towards gender, ethnicity, nationalism and many other importance societal questions.

                      Now looking through the book to write this, I realise that it is a very interesting book indeed and I will probably read it again.

Monday November 3 2014

This morning I started writing my text about The Tempest.  I’m quite inspired but also a bit scared. This is, after all, the last play analysis I will do on this Shakespeare marathon.  I want it to be good.  No promises, though, except that as always it will be a torment and a joy to write.  For now, more mundane things:

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Picardy is a province in northern France, a wealthy area known in the Middle Ages for its weaving industry.  Thus is figured hugely in the Hundred Years’ War and in the Henry VI plays.
• Pie Corner is not quite as big as Picardy. In fact it was just a corner, or actually a district, in west Smithfield in London. Its name comes from its bakeries.  There were also butcher shops and leather shops and it is mentioned in Henry IV Part Two in which Shakespeare displays his intimate knowledge of his new home town.

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel MaddAdam by Margaret Atwood, daredevil hero Zeb sometimes realises that discretion is the better part of valour but he doesn’t seem to know that he’s thinking a Shakespeare quote.
• While writing up the cast of the film Transcendence I saw that lead character Evelyn Caster is played by Rebecca Hall, daughter to Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
• Dagens Nyheter has a column today with the title “Macbeth More Important than Graffiti.”  It is part of the ongoing debate about the political importance of culture and the ongoing debate on “highbrow” vs “lowbrow” culture.  The columnist Susanne Birgersson makes some interesting points about why highbrow culture is highbrow – because it focuses on what makes us human, beyond time, class, ethnicity, like Shakespeare.  Shakespeare is still after four hundred and fifty years “red hot” because he presents our relationship with our own selves.  She suggests to Sweden’s new Cultural Minister Alice Bah Kuhnke (Green Party) that instead of financing graffiti workshops she should finance bringing Shakespeare to the concrete suburbs.  I agree. But I don’t see any conflict with having a bit of graffiti in the Shakespeare plays...

Further since last time:

• Watched with Hal: Peter Greenaway’s version of The Tempest – Prospero’s Books.
• Finished reading: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare the Biography.
• Finished watching Season One of the Canadian series Slings and Arrows, received from friends KJG and JG, about a theatre troupe putting on Shakespeare plays. See it!
• Received from friends KJG and JG: a set of Shakespeare finger puppets. Thank you, KJG and JG!
• Started writing: “Ariel’s Freedom” in The Tempest

Posted this week:

• This Monday report
• Report on
• Shakespeare’s Freedom by Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare's Freedom

Shakespeare’s Freedom by Stephen Greenblatt. The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Read in September and October, 2013.

                      How does Stephen Greenblatt do it?  One brilliant book after another.  Shakespeare’s freedom, what a subject. What a book.

                      It’s just over 120 pages long but every page is an enlightenment. He starts by describing the world in which Shakespeare lived, “a culture whose official voices insisted on absolute divine freedom, unbounded divine love, faith alone, prevenient grace, eternal damnation, once-and-for-all salvation. And he heard, in the social and political theories that mirrored religious concepts, comparably extravagant claims for the authority of kings over their subjects, fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, the gentle over the baseborn.  What is striking is that his work, alert to every human fantasy and longing, is allergic to the absolutist strain so prevalent in his world” (page 3, my emphasis.)  Sorry for the long quote but isn’t it brilliant?

                      In play after play, then, Greenblatt shows how Shakespeare “understood his art to be dependent upon a social agreement, but he did not simply submit to the norms of his age.  Rather...he at once embraced those norms and subverted them” (page 15).

                      He deals with the question of how Shakespeare, while not condoning resistance, deals with authority.  Greenblatt points out that “throughout Shakespeare’s work, the ethics of authority are  deeply compromised” (page 79).

                      But old Shakespeare was wily. With all of this subversive subversiveness Greenblatt reminds us the Shakespeare “made a lifelong habit of staying out of prison” (page 121). Clever Shakespeare.

                      Clever Greenblatt. Read this book!