Wound Men, Wills, and Puppets
Plus: "Sam Shepard shouted, “F*ck Shakespeare!"
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A Year of Shakespeare News
Netting the bits and bobs of Shakespeare effluvia that flow through the pipes of the internet is this newsletter’s raison d'être. However, I’ve enjoyed writing slightly longer pieces when time/space allow. Some favorites from this first year:
Shakespeare Slightly Less of a Jerk Than Previously Believed (Maybe)
Your Theater is Now Haunted, Or, Please Don’t Use a Real Skull for Yorick
This year also saw my first McSweeney’s piece and magazine article. Thank you to everyone who has read/shared/commented and special thanks to the folks who have pledged their support. Most of the work of Shakespeare News is curating information and writing headlines. The links themselves are freely available which means that anyone can use them. If you’ve found them useful, please link back to where you found them and consider pledging a subscription. This newsletter is free and writing program notes, study guides, blogs, etc. is also a job that you can hire me to do.
One year ago: “Shakespeare may have touched this door, Ian McKellen's fat suit saved him, *was* Antonio a notable pirate?”
Quick Links
Mescal requested a meeting with Zhao, unrelated to Hamnet. “I met with him and right away felt, ‘This person could play Shakespeare,’” Zhao says. She latter chatted up Buckley. “I don’t think we even talked about Hamnet,” Buckley says of their meeting. “I think she was just seeing how much of a witchy spirit I was.”2
Shakespeare’s Granddaughter’s Husband’s Will Found, or Wills in overplus. tl;dr: Thomas Nash tried give Shakespeare’s house away to a cousin on his side of the family and Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her daughter Elizabeth (Nash’s widow) were like, “nuh uh.”
The O’Neill’s unpromising start:
When one panelist mentioned Shakespeare, Sam Shepard shouted, “F*ck Shakespeare! It’s not about him anymore!” and left the conference.
Mattbeth, “a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a road movie on city bikes.”
A Rockaway R&J “where surfboards clash with sabers and the Montagues and Capulets throw down in wetsuits and red leather.”
Bernard Shaw’s last play, “Shakes versus Shav” is now a film featuring Derek Jacobi and and Colm Meaney.3 (h/t Ben Broadribb)
Delivering “All the World’s a Stage” while eating an apple is a “technical accomplishment in itself.”
Twelfth Night review roundup, including Sara Holdren for Vulture.
Toby and Andrew do whippits and snort coke in a hot tub; the irate Malvolio demolishes their stash with a hair dryer — but Conlee’s Toby feels underpowered, and Ferguson’s Aguecheek lacks pathos. “I was adored once too,” says Andrew, in a moment that’s capable of the most devastating kind of silliness, and vice versa. Here, the line floats right by. It’s not Ferguson’s fault — Ali hasn’t laid the groundwork for depth of feeling or breadth of humanity in these characters. It’s no surprise that, when the play’s last act rolls around, he cuts the troubling end of their arc all together. There’s a dance number to get to.4
“I remember watching Paxton Whitehead [as Richard III] and not understanding a single thing that was being said, but fully aware that I was in the presence of something special and magical that I wanted to know more about.”
Casting call for a Midsummer set in “the New York that spills from your mouth when you try and capture it in conversation. Where cross streets melt into concrete mazes and the jazz music spilling from an open basement door merges with the break dancing man accosting passengers on the D train.” (archive)
- reminded me of Good Tickle Brain’s Hamlet version.5
Recommendations
The tagline for Oedipus on Broadway? “Truth is a motherf**ker.”6
Sometimes the woods are Arden or Athens and sometimes they are this.
“When writer Ann Patchett expensed a turtle for sale at an outdoor market in the Amazon, her editor, William Sertl, approved it, saying there was a policy permitting writers to buy any animal “that rhymes with the name of their editor.” via
Like this one.
How witchy?
Buckley introduced Zhao to dream work, and they jointly plumbed the subconscious before the script was even written. The process revealed Buckley anew to Zhao—specifically, the actor’s connection to the role. “There’s a merging of Jessie and this archetypal feminine force that’s deeply rooted in nature but has been really erased from history—and [it’s] having a resurgence right now,” Zhao says. “Jessie Buckley herself is desperate to evoke that inside of herself, which has inevitably been repressed by being born to today’s world. So the journey was also a rebirth for her.”
Your annual reminder that Shaw re-wrote the last act of Cymbeline. He declared the original: “a series of dénouements of crushing tedium, in which the characters lost all their vitality and individuality, and had nothing to do but identify themselves by moles on their necks, or explain why they were not dead.”