Taylor Swift, Paul Mescal, and Adam Smith
Plus: Juliet isn't dead she's just hibernating (and a bear)
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One year ago: “Malvolias, an aged thespianess, and the Packers fans of theater”
Featured link: On Christmas day in 1929, a woman repeated the sleepwalking scene from “Macbeth” until she passed out.
Quick Links
The first track on Taylor Swift’s new album is called “The Fate of Ophelia” and people are losing their minds.
The Hamnet film will feature Paul Mescal being hot in the woods.
“Did anybody else just get bear sprayed at Shakespeare in the Park?”
Related: (?) “Director Tom Ridgely says there's a route to a powerful but less lethal climax when you make Juliet a bear.”
That allows Juliet, instead of dying, to go into hibernation. So it's still sad. She still doesn't get to play with Romeo for a very, very, very long time.
Irena Makaryk’s Shakespeare in Ukraine includes an exploration of “the defiant production of Hamlet under Nazi occupation in 1943.”
Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Twelfth Night: (photos) (emphasis mine)
“If you're like, ‘Um, I don't -- Shakespeare, no. Not for me,’ you're gonna love this production. It's so joyous. It's so accessible. It's modern. It's an hour and 45 minutes.”
James Shapiro learns why you never applaud during rehearsals.2 (skip to 9:45).
I would love to put a drunk and despondent Enobarbus in this very silly sun hat.
An opportunity for your child to be murdered onstage at the RSC.
Related: “we’re trying to figure out what the good balance of expenses versus revenue is…”
“What has emerged from advertising discussions are simple, ‘less is more’ messages using billboards with phrases like ‘Ditch the screen’ and ‘More than just Shakespeare’…oftentimes, the advertisements that don’t talk about the shows themselves actually do better.”
Alice Scovell's Love's Labour's Won picks up a year after the play’s end.
Stratford Festval season announcement: the King James Bible, The Hobbit, and a mashup of The Way of the World and Crazy Rich Asians. Oh, and some Shakespeare.
“It’s really about building a crew of pirates more than it is building a group of actors.”
“The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has made 29 of its 122 staff redundant.”
the beautiful young actress who played Helena—or perhaps the troupe’s director who instructed her—opted to depict her as hysterical, spiteful, oversexed and puerile almost to the point of mental handicap. She depicted her as such a caricature—part foot-stamping toddler, part succubus…
1930’s musical Twelfth Night looks delightful and watching actors learn how to sew buttons is a reminder of how the deeply necessary the wardrobe team is.
I did not remember that Christopher Urswick is a character in Richard III, but turns out he was a real guy who dealt with some seriously misbehaving monks.
The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare and Company. (Paywall, Option #5 unlocks)
Like Shakespeare’s original, this production begins with a framing device…Crypto bro Christopher Sly, a committed Ryan Winkles, drunkenly stumbles onstage to halt a Samuel Beckett play. He asks why the company can’t do a nice comedy with a happy ending like “Romeo and Juliet,” where Romeo “tames Juliet,” before passing out in a drunken stupor. The cast conspires to give Sly what he wants — a comedy about women submitting — in hopes they can fool him into making a large donation.
Brace Yourselves: The Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series cometh.
Stephen Greenblatt argues that “Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.”
No Bones About It, a new musical “whose lovers, Ronny and Julie, hail from “two smokehouses / Both alike in enmity” that are competing at a barbecue contest.”
Or, “Two establishments, both alike in dignity: Monty’s Tacos and Caps Bar.”
Editorial influence in Othello.
In the quarto, Othello says "She gave me for my pains a world of sighs." That is she had a strong, empathetic response she felt for him, and thus she fell for him. But in the Folio, Othello says something different. He says, "she gave me for my pains a world of kisses". This is a little more specific. She had a strong response and it led to physical intimacy initiated by her.
The Battle of Wakefield may not have been a battle at all. (still a great scene)
The Battle of Shrewsbury however, still definitely a thing. (“One of the wyrste bataylys that ever came to Inglonde”)
William McGonagall refusing to die as Macbeth never gets less funny. (previous)
Macduff, enraged, rapped Macbeth over his knuckles with the flat of the blade, forcing him to drop his own sword. McGonagall was now unarmed but undaunted…The Macduff actor, disgusted at the tomfoolery, tossed his own sword aside, and charged in to tackle McGonagall.
I’ve been re-reading the Wolf Hall books this year with the folks over at Footnotes and Tangents. Last week, George Boleyn put his affairs in order and made sure his company of players were cared for.4
“After your death you were better have a bad epitaph…”
Recommendations
Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.”
“If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.”
A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials.
Poetry exists to put seemingly contradictory ideas into contact.5
Anna Deavere Smith on the power of poetry:
One of his poems was quite brief but, like Beethoven’s “Ode,” it caused a physical reaction. The next morning, all my muscles were sore, as if I’d just done a massive full-body workout or been beat up…I walked right up to the poet and told him that I’d woken up with aching muscles and that I thought his poem was the cause. His face lit up. “That’s because I wrote that poem as a curse against my ex-wife.”
I’m an enormous fan of weird college traditions and Oxford does them awfully well. Presenting: Ivy Day and the Mallard song. via Res Obscura.
Like this one.
F. Murray Abraham will yell at you. I didn’t see his Shylock, but I’ve never seen anyone act more eloquently with a banana.
Yukio Mishima plus Pippin was not on my lifetime bingo card.
Thank you for bringing up the plight of horse elevators!