Vampire Hunters, Marlowe Musicals, and Rocks That Look Like Shakespeare
Plus: The Tragedy of Batman, Prince of Denmark
It’s an all-vintage Shakespeare News! An assortment of links trimmed from previous newsletters to avoid the uffish “Your email is too long” alert and mixed together to make a delicious and filling missive of their own.
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 but you may encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive.
Quick Links
The 1981 musical Marlowe featured a singing Shakespeare and was so bad that one critic left at intermission. (h/t Edel Semple)
You can buy a ranch in Lake Tahoe named after a rock that a Reverend’s wife thought looked like Shakespeare in 1862.2 (n.b.: must have 188 million dollars.)
There is a very pretty and never-before-seen 11th c. sword in the Macbeth exhibition at Perth Museum via
.“William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter” (h/t Edel Semple again!)
Greg Doran on Shakespeare-as-magnet:4
Shakespeare “is a magnet that attracts all the iron filings of what is going on in the world. If in production you decide to impose a particular take on those plays, or too specific a setting, or draw too narrow a parallel, you are likely to deny the play’s application to the general, and reduce its wider more universal appeal.”
John Adams on adapting Anthony and Cleopatra for the opera:
“The demands of musical phrasing and harmonic closure occasionally required me to invent a line or two of my own faux-Bard…I hope my confessing this won’t launch a libretto ‘Where’s Waldo?’ among future listeners!”5
Related: How is Antony and Cleopatra like Pelléas et Mélisande?
The “ruggedly handsome” policeman who won $16,000 (in 1955 money!6) for identifying the printers of the First Folio. He was also into poker7 and mnemonics:
A spade ace with four diamonds was matched with a line from Macbeth — “Yet here's a spot. Out damned spot!” A full house of eights and sixes was matched with a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream —“It shall be written in eight and six.” The patrolman ‐ scholar also devised a mnemonic aid for the names of Shakespeare's comedies. It began “Two Gentlemen from Verona met The Merry Wives of Windsor” and ended “All's Well That Ends Well on the Twelfth Night of The Winter's Tale.”
Famous Falstaff and Lincoln correspondent James Hackett used Shakespeare to advertise patent medicine.8
Andrew Carnegie had, “To thine own self be true, thou canst not then be false to anyone” painted on the wall of his personal study which is…almost a Shakespeare quote.9
There’s an Alan Rickman-eque curl to this Friar’s “comfort her.”
Anthony Hopkins as Audrey in 1971 looked like "a Welsh ruby player in drag."10
Recommendations
Thomas Jefferson thought facial disfigurement was totally fine.
Rasputin is responsible for the “Any similarity to actual persons…” disclaimer.
Like this one.
I can’t say I see it but go off. Fair warning: the rock is beautiful but “chossy.” (Obligatory Sketchy Beta link.)
Like most things, this was David Garrick’s fault: “The magazine engraving was part of the Jubilee’s advance publicity campaign.”
On playing Pacorus,“the smallest part in Shakespeare:”
“…we were doing it on a rake, and I had never rehearsed it on a rake and so they brought me on stage, dumped me on stage and like a good dead body I rolled. And I rolled off the front of the stage and into the orchestra pit! And I had to stand up, get back onto the stage and die again.”
I’ve never had a name for it but Shakespearean ‘Where’s Waldo’? is one of my favorite things – a bit of Henry V in Timon or Lear in Richard II. (Of course there’s a Shakespeare version. The Merch Gods are merciless.)
You decide. With Derek Jacobi as Touchstone, Ronald Pickup as Rosalind, Jeremy Brett as Orlando, and Robert Stephens as Jacques.
