British Art, French Witches, and American Shrews

Plus: The Tempest, Now With 100% More Helicopter

The Shakespeare Theatre Association conference was this week so most links are archival. I’ll be back next week with new news.

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Shakespeare in the Art UK database

The recently-relaunched Art UK website makes it even easier to find Shakespeare-related material from museums across the kingdom.

Highlights:

• Antony Sher’s self-portrait as Richard III.¹

• A gossamer-winged Ariel.²

• An operatically colorful Duncan.

• Chagall imagines the Tempest’s island.

• Ada Rehan as Kate is ready to &#%$ your life up.³

• A six-year-old Richard III.⁴

• A rather fetching tennis-playing Malvolio.

• Rosalind and Celia as “friends.”⁵

• Philip Brockbank, Professor of English.⁶

• An “unidentified Shakespearian scene.” (Any guesses?)

Les Fatales!

If you will be in Paris in the next month or two, the Comédie-Française is performing Macbeth. The witches are delightfully referred to as the “Fatal Sisters” (“Les Fatales!”) and their costume design looks spooky as hell.

Quick Links

• Damian Lewis won an acting prize for his Bottom. (He was twelve.)

• Jasmine Bracey is a Shakespearean powerhouse. Listen to her demolish some Worcester, it will make your day.

• “His productions had two problems: first, they were expensive, and second, critics did not like them.”

• Sign up for Shakespeare Birthplace Trust talks on “The Women Who Made Shakespeare.”

• We have Chaucer to thank for “shrew” becoming feminized.

• “Most of the plants mentioned by Ophelia were widely known and used in Elizabethan England to induce abortions and control fertility”

• Playwright Leigh M. Marshall will work on Untitled, or The Rosaline Play at Playwrights Foundation this year. The play explores “how the opioid deaths of 21-year-old trap stars are romanticized like something out of Romeo & Juliet - and then leveraged for success on the Billboard Hot 100.”

• On the origins of “wild goose chase” and Romeo and Juliet.

• The History Hit podcast has recently had a run of Henriad-adjacent episodes including Richard II vs. Henry IV with Helen Castor, Henry V with Dan Jones, and Agincourt with Michael Livingston.

From the Archives

• Kate-Petruchio from William Ball’s Taming at A.C.T.⁷ (1976)

• Our ongoing series of historically terrible NY Times Shakespeare reviews continues with Lee Breuer’s 1981 Tempest:⁸ (I would have liked to see Antonio arrive by helicopter.)

  “Even taking inflation into account, you're likely to find that the free tickets for the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of ''The Tempest'' are overpriced.”

• The role of Mama Rose in Gypsy has been compared to King Lear since at least 1989.

• Marisa Tomei’s yearbook photo notes that she was in a high school production of Midsummer. Also Pippin. (1992)

• Tipton’s Tempest at the Guthrie. (1992)

  “A few nights ago, I dreamed Miranda was pregnant.” Momentarily taken aback, Lupu asked, “Pregnant by whom, Caliban or Ferdinand?” “Ah, no,” Tipton replied, “pregnant with the future.”

• As far as I remember, there is no "Graaaaaaaaa!'' in Julius Caesar. (1998)

• Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks spent a year and a half reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. (2001)

  “When you think of Shakespeare, you don't think of meaning. You think of Richard II: 'Let's sit on the ground and sing sad stories of the death of kings.' Whoa, here's the king sitting on the ground! My heart's breaking! That's the kind of play I want to write.’”

Recommendations

• Twyla Tharp’s motto when creating Movin’ Out was a take off on The Iliad: “Sing to the audience, Billy Joel, of the rage of a generation of American men.”

• The inventor of the corridor.

• A reminder that lighting matters.

• Zibellini (“sable silvered”)

• 18th century green glasses. Also, spyglass fans.

• “Poster promoting treatment for syphilis, showing dinosaurs.”

1. If you’ve never read Year of the King please do so immediately.

2. As opposed to more recent “muscled harpy” and “bloody skeleton” editions.

3. It’s an recurring theme.

4. Who later became a noted manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.

5. Yup. Definitely JUST FRIENDS. Like Parolles and Bertram.

6. Editor of the first book in the “Players of Shakespeare” series.

7. The entire production is available online as is a conversation with the director. William Ball was a notoriously let’s-say-mercurial director who announced his departure from the theater he founded during rehearsals for a medieval mystery play:

“He was rehearsing the crucifixion scene, with Christ on the cross, the whole death, being pierced with the sword, the body taken down from the cross. As the actor came down, Bill said, ‘Well I think we can stop now. I have an announcement.’ It was quite dramatic.”

You can listen to his “Homage to Shakespeare” at the Internet Archive featuring excerpts read by Edith Evans and John Gielgud among others.

8. Walter Kerr on Troilus and Cressida was the latest example.