May 12 - 18, 2024
The which, if you with patient ears attend...
Image of the Week – David Garrick as King Lear
This painting in the Chicago Art Institute was “made after Garrick’s passing and based on prints created from his death mask.”
Don’t Tell Titania
PAULSON You both have described the Emcee as problematic. Do you find yourselves liking him?
GREY I think he’s just trying his best.
REDMAYNE I don’t like him, but I don’t even see him as a real person in my take. I see him almost as a Greek chorus, or as Puck. I’m never normally someone to judge people you play — I’ve played some pretty horrendous characters. But he’s so amorphous that he’s almost impossible to pin down.
“With mine eyes I'll drink the words you send, though ink be made of gall.”
A delightful video from the London Review of Books that starts with printer Nick Hand gathering oak galls by hand and ends with him listening to a record player while printing pages and railing against the kind of printing where, “you're kind of in abeyance to the software, to the machine, to a couple people in California somewhere.”
Minister to a Mind Diseased
Katie Kadue’s review of Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, co-written by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
While Phillips’s retrospective mode is one of stylistic revision, Greenblatt’s is of vague musing about the rupture in his life that led to his own “second chance” …Greenblatt thinks back on the circumstances that led him to leave one prestigious university for another, one coastal city for another, one name (Steve) for another (the rather similar Stephen), one reading audience (scholarly) for another (popular), and one wife for another (a graduate student).
“To what extent was this change of course a matter of chance, arbitrary, accidental, and unearned, and to what extent was I in control?” he asks as blandly as a product manager defending his rollout strategy. “What was I looking to gain, and what were the costs?”
In Shakespeare, a second chance doesn’t usually look much like a job offer from Harvard, and when he offers a character a second life, it doesn’t usually come with a second, younger wife…
Macbeth: The Musical!
The first China-produced original English musical adapted from William Shakespeare's Macbeth
To highlight the ruthlessness of Lady Macbeth, Pronounced designed a silver gown sharply punctuated by metallic shells, which was a last-minute creation to replace an all-black number.
What is it with Lady Macbeth costumes and metallic shells?
Transforming Shakespeare: Julián Mesri and Rebecca Martínez with Amrita Ramanan
“The which, if you with patient ears atten– [hold please]”
First Preview Of Tom Holland’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Canceled Due to “Production Difficulties”
Bolder and still more bold: Behind the scenes of the Guthrie's ambition Shakespeare marathon
A thirty minute radio feature from reporter Jacob Aloi on the Guthrie’s Shakespeare marathon. Includes interviews with costumes (how many pairs of underwear for 3-show days?), props (how to make Richard II’s mirror), casting, dramaturg-extraordinaire Carla Steen and other companies including Utah, APT, and Oregon that do classical rotating rep.
The World’s Oldest (Continually Meeting) Shakespeare Club is in Wagga Wagga, Australia
The title of the world’s oldest club isn’t a self-proclaimed one either. The official Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, founded in 1847, recognised the Wagga-based group as the oldest continuously meeting club in the world, a distinction that is important as most other clubs took a pause during both World Wars.
Men were allowed to join 10 years ago.
Dracula Daily: May 16
I begin to get new lights on certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say:—
"My tablets! quick, my tablets!
'Tis meet that I put it down," etc.,
for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.