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.
One year ago: James Earl Jones, Garlic Ophelia, and Auntie Shakespeare.
Featured links: Pepys Hates “Twelfth Night”, Sees it Three Times.
Quick Links
I learned from
this week that Van Gogh was a Shakespeare fan and wrote about him in his letters. He casually quotes As You Like It, discusses “the opposition through perseverance” in Taming, and becomes a Histories stan. (more)I thank you also very cordially for the Shakespeare. It will help me not to forget the little English I know – but above all it’s so beautiful. I’ve begun to read the series I know the least well, which before, being distracted by something else or not having the time it was impossible for me to read, the series of the kings. I’ve already read “Richard II”, “Henry IV” and half of “Henry V.” I read without reflecting on whether the ideas of the people of that time are the same as ours, or what becomes of them when one places them face to face with republican or socialist beliefs &c. But what touches me in it, as in the work of certain novelists of our time, is that the voices of these people, which in Shakespeare’s case reach us from a distance of several centuries, don’t appear unknown to us. It’s so alive that one thinks one knows them and sees it.
Devin Brain is the new producing artistic director of The Acting Company.2
…this company remains as vital to the industry today as when it was in 1972, when the first class from Juilliard Drama was ushered onto a tour bus by Margot Harley and John Houseman.
The University of Central Oklahoma canceled a production of Boy My Greatness, a play about Shakespeare’s boy players. (more)
…the school had concerns about “Boy My Greatness” being in compliance with Title IX…
Katherine Rundell on Tycho Brahe-as-Hamlet.3
Eleven years earlier, Brahe had sent a letter to England, to a friend of a friend of Shakespeare, in which he enclosed copies of an engraving of himself standing beneath the family shields of his great-great-grandparents: Sophie Gyldenstierne and Erik Rosenkrantz.
Meet the NYC lute player serenading the Shakespeare in the Park line since 1976.
I am reasonably convinced that every Macbeth pre-show should have a sheep toss.
More Hamnet reviews, both pro (“its breathless, queasy energy sweeps us along”) and con (“it’s primarily grief porn”).
“The guy with the eyes” as Hamlet. (more)
…the possession idea, while jaw-droppingly bold, is no gimmick. It makes the Act I ghost scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy, often creaky and wan, genuinely surprising and frightening.5
“How Henry V inspired English Kings Killing Foreigners” via
.Melvyn Bragg is stepping away from the wonderful “In Our Time” podcast, revisit past Shakespeare episodes.
Jordan E. Cooper on the African Grove Company’s Richard III.
The women of the Shakespeare Ladies Club lived the dream “to have stories acted for [them] by a company of fellows”:
By the 1730s the convention of the sovereign being a financial spigot for the arts, as during Shakespeare’s time, was long gone…the prestige vacuum was instead filled by members of the aristocracy who would request of playhouses—the word used then was ‘bespeak’—particular works they wanted to see.
I’m curious about this 21st century trend:6
In the text of the play, and in most 20th century productions, Mamillius stays or stayed dead. But contemporary directors have a habit of bringing him back at the end...in Spring Green, Mamillius rushes out of the woods and skips between his father and mother as the trees consume then once again.
“The earliest mention of Robin Goodfellow is in Tyndale’s ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, published in 1528:” via
.The pope is kin to Robin Goodfellow, who sweeps the house, washes the dishes, and purges all by night; but when day comes, there is nothing found clean.
Joan Baez played Titania at school:
Age 13, I did “Midsummer Night's Dream.” I was Titania, and I sang, “Oh my delight in the night of midsummer,” in a voice that was too high to even imagine.
Jeremy O’Harris would like to run the Public, please. (paywall)
In typical Harris fashion, the playwright sees Williamstown as a stepping stone. "A successful festival “would be an amazing argument for me raising my hand for the Public [Theater] one day…”
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf? with Lea Ypi
An eighteenth-century volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It belonged to my grandfather, and it survived the confiscation of all our family property when he was arrested by the Albanian communist government in 1946. At the time, the book had been lent to someone who returned it decades later.
Authentic leadership means nothing more or less than, there should be very little space between who you purport to be and who you actually are.
Lavina Jadhwani died this week. She was a beloved Chicago director, brilliant Shakespeare nerd (via
), and associate director on the History plays at the Guthrie. Read her essays at HowlRound, her plays at NPX, and use her Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Shakespeare: A Field Guide.
Recommendations
We don’t know who owned this ring, but we do know that they were born in the 10th hour on the night of 16/17 August in the year 327.
London-folk: go see Joy Woods sing the $%@# out of “Songs for a New World.”
Like this one.
This is excellent news for The American Theater. Devin is an exceptional director (He did a Macbeth in grad school that still gives me nightmares) and a generous artistic leader. Hire him for all the things.
The really important detail: “[Brahe] kept an elk as a pet, which he sent out as an emissary to entertain noblemen. While visiting a castle, it supposedly drank too much beer, fell down the stairs and died.”
(Please please be better than Lear.) (Let’s just say his “greatest Shakespeare mishap” was *not* in Henry V)
many have…and others must.
I’m strongly on Team “Mamillius Stays Dead”. You broke the world unfixable / you don’t get him back / some things stay broken. (deal with that)
He also quotes a poem I’d never read and now love.
I can so vividly imagine Joan Baez as Titania and now I desperately want to watch a Silent-Running style Midsummer where all the fairies are robots.
Thank you for commemorating Jadhwani. It is unfortunate that the loss of such a brilliant mind, theatre practitioner, and activist, a person who strove to make the world a better place, has been getting lost in the flurry of other news.
In the it's small world camp, I interviewed Devin Brain many years ago because he did a Margaret adaptation when he was in school!