Blood Columns, Sausages, and the Macbeth Who Wouldn't Die
Plus: All Vintage Links!
It’s an all-vintage-links Shakespeare News! Enjoy everything that didn’t fit into recent editions and look out for a shiny new newsletter soon.
Quick Links
Lilian Baylis was the famously eccentric London producer of some of the best Shakespeare of the 20th century.1 She kickstarted the careers of Olivier and Gielgud and literally spent her life in the theater, cooking her meals on a gas ring in the wings during matinees. Imagine the smell of bacon and sausage drifting through the house in Act IV!2
“There are plenty of actors who have metaphorically shot themselves in the foot when playing that most tricky of Shakespearian roles, Antony, but RSC actor Darrell D'Silva is almost certainly the first to shoot himself in the hand.”
I’m a huge fan of the Box Office Bears project for all your “exit pursued by” needs. Soon (well, 2027) to be in book form.
Rita Moreno doing the Player’s speech from Hamlet in a funny voice won her a Broadway role.4
Joe Papp as “a charismatic megafauna” of an artistic director.
Rc-Annie fight drafts for Macbeth, As You Like It, and War of the Roses.
Your annual reminder that Steve Bannon wanted to produce Titus in space.
David Oyelowo on his father seeing him as Henry VI at the RSC.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Hall and Oates. (h/t Matt Bogen)
Do today’s students understand the kind of jealousy that motivates Othello?
I didn’t know The Great Bed of Ware is referenced in multiple plays (not just Twelfth Night.)
Ambereen Dadabhoy on Othello. (“who is he is not as important as what he is.”)
A deep dive on wolfsbane. (as seen in Macbeth and Henry IV Part II)
The Rude Mechanicals “Fixing Shakespeare” series aims to “make William Shakespeare’s least produced works useful again.” So far they’ve done Timon, John, and Troilus.
“She is Richard III with breast implants. She is Iago in a miniskirt.”
Mapping Shakespeare’s “if”s and “but”s in three-dimensions.8
Quotes
"Silence in the face of evil (a subject I'll come back to) equals acquiescence–complicity. This is a particularly important issue for our times; and in the play, I would like to explore this. Many characters in this play are mum. Most of them die."
His production included a blood column:
“…any time anyone is killed, the amount of blood in a human body (10 pints) will be poured down into the base. When I say 'blood column,’ that's what I mean.”
We did the play at Broadmoor [the psychiatric hospital] with a bunch of people in the room who were killers, people who had done horrific things. And when we got to the moment, where Lear asks. “Is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts?” It’s something I’ll never, ever forget as long as I live. There was a young woman in the front row who, we discovered later, had slashed her sister with a knife on the face and nearly garrotted her. She was locked up, and, apparently, she hadn’t spoken until this moment. And when I asked “is there any cause in nature for hard hearts?” she said — I swear to God — she said, “no cause, no cause, no cause”. And for us, all of us on the stage, it was one of the moments when you go, this is the power of theatre.
…that's why actors love doing it so much because on performance 150, you can suddenly hear a line that you thought you knew inside out. You can sort of hear it in a brand-new way. And that's - obviously, that's a thrill and also a bit frustrating 'cause you're going to go, oh, that's how I should have done that.
Last night we went to the [Naval] Observatory…The Presdt, took a look at the moon and Arcturus. I went with him to the Soldier’s Home, and he read Shakespeare to me, the end of Henry the VI and the beginning of Richard III until my heavy eye-lids caught his considerable notice, and he sent me to bed.
Richard II’s (six-year-old) bride wore “a blue velvet dress decorated with gold fleur-de-lis.” Edward IV’s wore “a gown of the richest blue bordered with ermine, paired with a pearl necklace.”
The earliest record of spoken language we can play back at its exact original speed is a French translation of Othello.
S’il faut qu’à ce rival Hédelmone infidèle / Ait remis ce bandeau! Dans leur rage cruelle / Nos lions du désert, sous leur antre brûlant....
She was also notoriously tight fisted. “When actors asked for a raise, she would say: ‘Sorry, dear, God says no.’”
Would work beautifully for Taming, natch. Papers evoke the ghost of Lillian Bayless everytime there is a headline like “Ballet Interrupted by Baked Potato.” (Also, Kenny Leon eat your heart out.)
He sounds insufferable, but Robert Coates was worse.
All of the stories are phenomenal, my favorite is that time Annie *left in the middle of a performance* of Annie to *go to a bar* to *meet Frank Sinatra.* (Also, stagehands taking shots between scene changes is a VERY BAD IDEA. Particularly when the show involves heavy flying sets and children.)
30 feet! A solid Shakespeare trivia question. Bonus points for answering “how deep is mark twain?” (the “twain” there stands for “two fathoms” or 12 feet.)
Also Henry V at the Stratford Festival, where he was Christopher Plummer’s understudy and went on after Plummer had a kidney stone. He forgot his lines in the final scene. Shatner does unfortunately countenance some wild conspiracy theories.
Vint Cerf is an internet *legend* and also a huge fan of Good Tickle Brain. I have personally benefited from his largesse in the form of an *enormous* order he placed for the Folger. (image courtesy of Mya Gosling who packed the entire thing.)
There’s a wonderful 1991 interview on PBS with him.