Bridgerton, Bookclubs, and Banquo on Roller Skates
Plus: Timon Tonight
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and they will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible, however you may still encounter paywalls. There are options. If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and consider pledging a future subscription.
Direct replies to this email have been going into spam. I think I’ve remedied the issue going forward but am still rescuing lost emails from Gmail’s eldritch clutches. If you’ve written in the last month, I should be able to retrieve it and respond, if older than a month, please re-send.
Timon Tonight
Come hear an absurdly talented group of actors hurl “My wounds ache at you” and “I’d thrash you, but I’d infect my hands” at each other. Pay-what-you-can tickets available 30 mins pre-curtain.
Quick Links
Karen Ann Daniels, the artistic director of the Folger is in the hospital, send her good thoughts.
“People tend to frown when Luke Thompson compares “Bridgerton” to Shakespeare.” (archive)
After direct appeals and much teasing the world has finally been graced with the Hamnet Rihanna dance party.
Henry V as a global barometer.
We are living in a world of chaos, instability and fractured alliances. Burgundy’s climactic speech about the devastating impact of war – where even the survivors “grow like savages – as soldiers will / That nothing do but meditate on blood” – has acquired new potency.
Inspired by Station Eleven, FlagShakes is adding a pay-what-you-wish option.
The Actors from the London Stage are getting ready to go on the road.
We’ve found games within the scenes, things to focus our objectives and remind us of what the characters are trying to affect in each other; a game of tag between Phebe, Silvius, ‘Ganymede’, and Orlando was a particular standout, but one-on-one pick-up basketball to work our way through Rosalind and Orlando’s power-flirting definitely gets an honourable mention.
Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu on Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure. via Fergus Morgan
In Shakespeare, poetry has a dramatic function. Chadwick saw that the lyricism of hip-hop and the culture of hip-hop was powerfully dramatic and theatrical, too, and could be put on stage.
Santa Cruz Shakes is doing a virtual bookclub on Much Ado and Macbeth.
Hudson Valley Shakes is getting a new website to match their new theater.
Quintessence contributes Rare Accidents: The Escapades of Prince Hal & Falstaff to the “What the %#$@ do we call this Henry mashup” conversation.
A funky French Tempest with a backflipping harpy and half-masks. via Gemma Allred.
A new film about an English girls’ boarding school, Midsummer, and falling in love with the geography teacher.
“Lowest of the Low Celebrate 35 Years of ‘Shakespeare My Butt...’”2
The afterlife of a 19th c. Shakespearean actor’s New Jersey mansion.3
A 19th c. female scholar’s thoughts on the morality of Shakespeare plus bonus title page snark (archive)
The owner has also added a short quip or summary to the play titles, under Lear writing "Mind your daughters" and [under] Richard the III has written "There was a Damn'd villain Called 'Richard the Third' in the present times has a great many fellows."
More Shakespeare Saved My Life
…being Black and having the skill to do Shakespeare has made me an insider of sorts. But Shakespeare can’t carry the day. It’s opened so many doors in my life, but it’s also a gilded cage. I can’t tell you how many times people have heard me perform Shakespeare and come up and said, ‘You should play ‘Othello’
To me, Lady Macbeth sounded like Tina Turner. She was saying, ‘I want more but the world won’t give me more.’”
Shakespeare does not use language decoratively. That’s a huge misunderstanding about Shakespeare. So if he uses an image, it’s because the image specifies what he’s talking about, not decorates it. When Juliet reaches for… ‘my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.’ She’s expressed something about the nature of love in her language. True love that’s sublime and true, not decorative. She didn’t say it that way in order to be beautiful. It is beautiful because it is true.
More Hamnet thoughts from A.N. Wilson
I could just about believe that Mrs Shakespeare in real life was a sex goddess, like the actress in this film: but I can not believe that William Shakespeare had a really stupid face, as is, unfortunately, the case with Paul Mescal.
And Kate Maltby
Elsewhere, Hamnet is taught Greek; his twin sister Judith is taught his mother’s lore of the forest. When they swap clothes in an attempt to trick their parents, it is this difference in knowledge that gives them away (and the difference is presented as somehow revealing an innate and sexed truth, rather than a learned inequality).
More Leeds Playhouse Midsummer (+ “Robin Goodfellow, erm, Robin Starveling, the Sommelier.”)
“So, the court world of Athens in our production is quite pronounceably patriarchal and physical violence is very present. We were thinking a little bit about the rise of neo-fascism across Europe today and how the mortal world in the play is in conversation with fascistic rule.”
According to Ben Broadribb who actually saw the thing:
“Puck opened the show by sitting on a table for about 2 minutes, eating a banana and saying nothing. The mechanicals did lines of coke during their first rehearsal. And at the end of Pyramus and Thisbe, Theseus shot Bottom and Quince dead.”
Spanish-inflected Shakespeare in Dallas. (more El Rey de Pollo)
Book titles inspired by Shakespeare. (quiz, paywall)
Recommendations
“People pay a lot to learn how to sound like you.” (archive)
Early 20th c. attention tests + gradual asphyxiation machines.
“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never handcuffed an emu before…”
“the once-great engineer…believing himself to be in a romantic relationship with a telepathic bird.”
Like this one.
Robert B. Mantell performed abridged versions of the plays “so hydraulically condensed that he could give ten or a dozen performances a day".