34 Anthony White

Hamlet played by Anthony White.
Directed by George Rylands.

In the late 50s and early 1960s, under the auspices of the British Council to increase understanding of Shakespeare abroad, the Marlowe Dramatic Society, a theatre group for Cambridge University students aided by professional actors, set about recording all of Shakespeare’s plays for release by the Argo label initially on vinyl (in mono and stereo!) and later cassette. I first encountered them at school when researching my A-Level at the Central Library in Liverpool, shelves full of records in austere blue boxes with Liverpool City Council emblazoned on them in gold lettering (which I know for sure because when they were sold off years later I managed to buy their copy of Measure for Measure). I have a memory from the 1990s of listening to their production of Cymbeline, copy of a complete works in my lap.  I remember enjoying the language but not really understanding the plot.  Having listened to Cymbeline again in a different version over the summer, I'm not sure my appreciation has much changed.

The Hamlet has a few useful points of interest. The Ghost’s appearance is heralded by a peel of what sounds like trumpets which saps it of any sense of “mystery” but does at least underscore the regality of Hamlet’s father. I’ve not been able to find a complete cast list, but I’m sure it’s Derek Jacobi’s voice which can be heard as Fortinbras’s Captain, which would make sense since he’s an alumni of the Marlowe Society. The female player sounds like Judi Dench and Osric could be Kenneth Williams. Whoever’s playing Polonius interprets the man as the ancient old dodderer who appears in countless illustrations with his lengthy beard, which makes little sense in the context of the moment when he sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Oh and the duel is intercut with the sounds of battle and a peel of trumpets to indicate the encroachment of Fortinbras’s army, a rare audio addition which prefigures the Branagh film.

Unfortunately elsewhere, like so many of these Marlowe productions this is an incredibly dull and often frustrating listen. In between rendering the text with all the earnestness of a 1950s news report, few of the actors tackle their roles as though they’re characters, often treating each of their lines as though they’re unconnected to the others or else any emotional through line spread across an entire speech rarely differentiating changes in thought. A contemporary review argues that the prince “starts weakly, but gathers strength and authority. His sibiliants are aggressive, but his passions magnificent”, which, assuming that the writer’s referring to Anthony White, the actor not his character, is amazingly sympathetic to a performance in which the advice to the players sounds like a training day in a call centre and whose death has all the tragedy of losing a remote control down the back of the sofa.

As I’ve said before, Hamlet or indeed any Shakespeare play isn’t simply a text to be read or more specifically in this case, read out loud. While I understand the need for clarity given one of these production’s primary utilities, that text can become lost in translation if there isn’t a real human emotion behind it, if as is so often the case here, there’s only the vaguest sense that these characters are related to one another or to create an atmosphere. There are individual shining moments, Ophelia’s madness, Claudius’s prayer, the Mousetrap, oddly, though it’s dented slightly by the inclusion of the dumb show which is read in via Shakespeare’s stage directions which only makes dramatic sense if you assume that its being described in the space while the actual mime is occurring. Whoever it is playing Gertrude is really quite good too, but handstung by director George Rylands lack of a particular vision for what the play’s supposed to be about. I simply can’t tell is Hamlet’s supposed to be mad or not.

All of which sounds wildly cruel and having listened to it yourself thanks to that Spotify player, might just consider that its just dated and that I’m simply criticising the mode of acting which was prevalent in that era. That might be true. I wasn’t much of a fan of Gielgud’s audio rendering of the same era. Or Paul Schofield’s which was published at roughly the same time.  Both of them were great actors.  Legends. White too was a stalwart of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (which later became the RSC) so I'm willing to entertain that there's an expectation presentment mismatch.  But I can only provide an opinion on what I've heard and what I've heard are performances in which the passions seem to be engaged in the wrong places and lacking in psychological complexity.  It says much that when EMI re-released these Argos in the 80s, they swapped out this original production for the superior Jacobi Old Vic version (which is why it’s taken so long for me to alight here).

Nevertheless there’s a definite sense in being steeped in a kind of history listening to this recording. It is a rarity and having listened to say many of the other Marlowe Players productions (even if I’ve not enjoyed many of them) it’s good to tick it off that list. The provenance of the recording’s open to question. The album cover on the Spotify version is very home made, dated. The recording itself is directly from a vinyl copy; the clicks and drop outs are all there and the sound becomes distorted as it reaches the end of the each of the sides. There’s also a pretty big mistake. Part 4 is an exact copy of Part 3, which means its missing the fishmonger, the arrival of the players and the initial greeting with R&G. So, yes, this is a review of an incomplete recording. But given that this is the only recording available, it’d be wrong not to add it to this list. Some of these productions are a revelation. Some of them are a box ticking exercise. The joy is, I’m never always sure which it’s going to be.

You can make up your own mind. Here it is on Spotify:



If you're looking at this post in RSS you might have to open the post in order to see the Spotify embed.

The Tragedy of Mariam (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Ramona Wray.

Elizabeth Cary was born in the mid-1590s at Burford Priory in Oxfordshire. She was educated at home, mostly in ancient languages including Hebrew. She was married in 1602 to the soldier John Davies and amid giving birth to ten children and following her husband’s promotion to Ireland, she became highly regarded in the community launching an apprenticeship scheme for poor and orphaned children. She would later return to England but after a short spell of imprisonment due to her conversion to Catholicism, and estrangement from her Protestant husband, poverty overwhelmed her and she died, penniless in 1639.

Ironically given the relative obscurity of her work outside academic circles then and now, our understanding of her life has been enhanced beyond most of her contemporaries because a decade after her birth her daughter Lucy penned a biography. If only one of Shakespeare’s children had been as interested. This work is also a reason why we know that during her already full life, she also became an accomplished scholar, with a strong published history which included historical texts, poetry and drama, including The Tragedy of Mariam, now published by Arden’s Early Modern Drama.

Billed as the first early modern play written by a woman, this dramatises the sixteen year relationship between notorious Herod and his wife Mariam “telescoped” into twenty-four hours retaining the classical unity of drama and synthesising as the cover synopsis describes a decade and half's worth of “family intrigues, missing monarchs and extra-marital liaisions” as well as “madness and martyrdom”. One of a number of plays in the that period working from religious subjects, this is widescreen epic four hundred years before Cecil B De Mille picked up a camera played amongst a cast of few within a private setting.

In contrast to the other texts in the series, Cary’s play is an example of closet drama written either to be read or performed within a private setting perhaps by amateurs (though there's no evidence of Mariam having been acted in her lifetime). As Wray’s blistering introduction indicates, that’s diminished its reputation and stifled academic consideration of the work; she mentions originally having greeted the play at college through a nearly unreadable version photocopied from microform. As I’ve said before, that’s why Arden’s work is so important, and that of New Mermaids too: producing readable copies of otherwise obscure plays, revealing a variety of drama from the period beyond the usual suspects.

But more recent editions have led to reappraisals and as Wray's discussion elucidates, Cary’s writing is as rich as any of her contemporaries with diverse literary allusions and a solid thematic apparatus investigating as sections of the introduction indicate, Jerusalem as a modern city, the tyranny of empires in this case Rome, the role of women in that society exemplified by Mariam treatment at the hands of her husband with her ensuing martyrdom and how beauty and sexuality are codified through her relationship with her sister Salome not to mention the parallels the story has with Cary's own biography.

As is customary, there’s a thorough discussion of the contemporary text, in this case a single Quarto publication in 1613, so there’s little need for the investigation into textual difference seen in other Arden, barring printing errors and sections omitted when the play entered the public realm. There’s also surprisingly a short production history which charts the efforts of colleges and the odd semi-professional theatre company to mount productions of Mariam the general consensus being that its entirely possible to produce an exciting, thoughtful evening with some ingenuity. As Wray suggests, it’s about time a professional theatre company took the work on board and revealed it to the wider public.

The Tragedy of Mariam (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Ramona Wray. Methuen Drama. 2012. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9781904271598. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare For A New World in Manhattan.

Hello, Stuart!

My name is Sarah Eismann and I am the Artistic Director of Manhattan Shakespeare Project - Manhattan’s All-Female Shakespeare Company.

We are currently trying to raise funding and awareness for our latest project: Shakespeare For A New World: The Palestinian Voice. We are sending two teaching artists and a documentary film director to Palestine to work with students and artists in Ramallah on how to use Shakespeare to create lines of communication between culturally diverse communities. Here is the link to our IndieGoGo campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/shakespeare-for-a-new-world

We were hoping you could mention our project on your site and possibly link to it.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me, or visit our website for more details: manhattanshakes.org

Thank you so much for your time and consideration!

Sarah Eismann
Artistic Director - Manhattan Shakespeare Project

Shakespeare at the BBC: Shakespeare Unlocked

Coming up on Friday at 4am in the morning on BBC Two, Shakespeare Unlocked, the twilight education strand will be covering the RSC's Julius Caesar which should act as an excellent companion piece to the BBC/Illumination's recent adaptation.

If previous episodes, filleted into the clips on the website, are an indication, these will be a valuable insight into the rehearsal process with the actors and director talking about their process.  It'll also be interesting to see if they use footage filmed in the theatre or the aforementioned studio version.

Update: The whole programme in the form of clips is now online.

Globe to Globe festival's Hamlet now available at The Space

Now posted to The Space, finally, is Meno Fortas's production of Hamlet, as performed as part of the recent Globe to Globe festival at Shakespeare's Globe.

There's not much more to say than that. Other than I will review it when I have access to a viable web connection and that I previous wrote about it here.

The Liverpool Shakespeare Festival 2012

The Liverpool Shakespeare Festival 2012 begins soon with productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream ...

"Hermia loves Lysander loves Helena loves Demetrius loves Hermia.

A night of magic and music in Liverpool clubland as four friends try to escape the wedding plans that their parents have put in place. Fairies and dreams light up the night as love tries to find its way. But the course of true love never does run smooth and there is mischief to be had."

And the Scottish Play:

"Gang warfare rages on the streets of Liverpool. General Macbeth is elevated to Thane of Cawdor, the right hand man of Duncan, the gang’s undisputed Kingpin. A loyal soldier, Macbeth is set to be leader one day if he bides his time. He can be Kingpin sooner if he listens to his Lady, screws his courage to the sticking place and takes matters into his own hands."

Both featuring the same cast with includes Michael Ryan (Across the Universe / Hollyoaks) and Zoe Lister (Hollyoaks / Doctor Who) and both at the Royal Court Theatre between 21st September and 13th October.  Full details available here.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Prefaces to Shakespeare on Radio 4?

There's been a curious addition to BBC Radio 4's programme database.

During the broadcast period of the BBC Shakespeare series in the late 70s and early eighties, Radio 4 broadcast a series of "Prefaces to Shakespeare" in which well known actors, directors and writers offered introductions to plays.

If that sounds familiar, they were the inspiration for the recent television series, Shakespeare Uncovered, whose original title was to be Prefaces to Shakespeare (and still is on the Amazon listing).

The Hamlet edition of the original radio programme introduced by Derek Jacobi from May 1980 is available to stream at the BBC Archive.

Now, Prefaces to Shakespeare has been added to Radio 4's website, with episode pages added for three of the plays:

Henry V with Robert Hardy (originally broadcast Fri 21 Dec 1979)
King Lear with Tony Church (originally broadcast Sun 19 Sep 1982)
Richard III with Edward Woodward (originally broadcast Sat 22 Jan 1983)

The last one of which has a photograph. Originally I thought that perhaps it was to herald a broadcast on BBC 4 Extra, but there isn't any next on information and only the record of the first and only broadcast.

So either they are soon be broadcast again but the scheduling information hasn't been added yet (which can happen) or this is another occurrence of the BBC website's process of back-filling information from the BBC Genome project (see also the Doctor Who website).

Let's keep our eyes or rather ears peeled ...

02/09/2012  Something definitely is happening.  A 1998/99 series, The Shakespeare Trade has also been added and the Prefaces about Richard III has been assigned a QR code.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Vivat Rex: At a Glance.

Yesterday I completed listening to Vivat Rex and its one of the best drama experiences I've had.  Coincidentally this morning in the post I received the accompanying booklet published in the seventies which has a nice introductions from producer Marin Jenkins and composer Christopher Whelan, a map with notable places, a useful family tree and a synopsis for each of the episodes.

What it doesn't have is a simple list of which plays constitute which episodes so I've produced that list below.

Why is this useful?

The whole of Vivat Rex is available to download on AudioGo at £1.84 an episode.  To buy the whole lot would be £47.84 which is still a bargain but you could understand if someone might want to pick and choose individual plays, especially since as I mentioned the other day, Vivat Rex includes rare dramatisations of Edward II, Edward III, Thomas of Woodstock and Perkin Warbeck albeit in abbreviated versions.

Vivat Rex: At a Glance.

1/26 The King's Favourite
Edward II

2/26 Revenge
Edward II

3/26 Obsession
Edward II / Edward III

4/26 The Black Prince
Edward III / Woodstock

5/26 Treason
Woodstock / Richard II

6/26 King of Snow
Richard II

7/26 Victims
Richard II / Famous Victories of Henry V / Henry IV, pt 1

8/26 Vulgar Company
Henry IV, pt 1

9/26 Rebellion
Henry IV, pt 1 / Henry IV, pt 2

10/26 Corruption
Henry IV, pt 2

11/26 Deception
Henry IV, pt 2

12/26 Tennis Balls
Henry IV, pt 2 / Henry V

13/26 Harfleur
Henry V

14/26 St. Crispin's Day
Henry V

15/26 Joan of Arc
Henry V / Henry VI, pt 1

16/26 The White Rose - And The Red
Henry VI, pt 1

17/26 Witchcraft
Henry VI, pt 1 / Henry VI, pt 2

18/26 Jack Cade
Henry VI, pt 2

19/26 The Paper Crown
Henry VI, pt 2 / Henry VI, pt 3

20/26 Warwick The Kingmaker
Henry VI, pt 3

21/26 The Tower
Henry VI, pt 3 / Richard III

22/26 The Little Princes
Richard III

23/26 Ghosts
Richard III / Perkin Warbeck

24/26 The Pretender
Perkin Warbeck

25/26 Divorce
Henry VIII

26/26 Elizabeth
Henry VIII

Some notes:

The Edward III, Woodstock and Perkin Warbeck are heavily truncated and edited for the elements which reflect most on the Shakespeare/Marlowe portions of the piece.  That said, the Henry VIII though also shorter is coherent in and of itself.  The Famous Victories of Henry V contributes is just one scene.

The episodes are available here.

The above information is on the individual programme pages but I still hope you'll find this at a glance version.

Audio Early Modern Drama: A Proposal.

With some time to spare I'm spending this week listening to Vivat Rex, the twenty-six part BBC Radio series which utilises a range of Early Modern plays, mostly from Shakespeare to offer a chronicle of the English crown from 1307 to 1533, from Edward II to Elizabeth I.

One of its great joys, other than the rather epic cast list, is that it includes within its make up sections of Edward III, Thomas of Woodstock, The Famous Victories of Henry V and John Ford's Perkin Warbeck in what may be their only radio outings, providing useful context to the action within Shakespeare's more famous plays.

Finally we can understand Henry IV's fear that his son Hal, by loafing around with Falstaff is repeating the mistakes of his predecessors Edward II and Richard II (albeit without the homo-erotic subtext of their acolytes) and that Richard's "hollow crown" speech is a near synopsis of the action in Edward III, including the appearance of a "ghost".

Listening to these rarities reminded of a proposal I wrote a few months ago suggesting that an audio or radio company produce a line of full text adaptations of just these kinds of rarely produced early modern dramas so that an interested public might be able to experience the work which was around at the time Shakespeare wrote the dozen or so plays which are constant production.

Disclosure: I did send a version of this to a company but it wasn't something they were really interested in doing which was understandable since its not necessarily a sure fire winner and would need to be planned and executed careful if it's to work as a business proposition.  I wouldn't know where to begin myself even.  It probably needs an existing production infrastructure and some hope.

I know that some people aren't fans of audio but it offers two benefits.  Firstly it's relatively cheap in comparison to video at least in production terms and from an artistic perspective since this would potentially be the only copy of the play available, the idea would be to follow ArkAngel's lead and produce something which emphasises the text.

Anyway, on with the proposal:

Audio Early Modern Drama: A Proposal.

Pitch

Lesser known plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries as audio productions.

Introduction

William Shakespeare is back in focus this year thanks to the Cultural Olympiad with a season of programmes on the BBC and the World Shakespeare Festival across a number of venues. But he’s largely receiving the lone genius treatment even though he was influenced by earlier playwrights, was part of a thriving theatre community collaborating with others and would go on to influence writers within just a few years.

Writers like John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, John Ford, John Webster and George Chapman were once household names, some of them collaborating with Shakespeare and succeeding him during his retirement and although some of their work is produced its not in the same bulk as Shakespeare and treated as something of a novelty by comparison.

Except that’s also true of some of Shakespeare’s own plays too especially in the late period, which ran rather further than the conclusion of The Tempest suggests. Collaborations which thanks to the latest techniques are becoming considered part of the canon, Sir Thomas More, Edward III, Arden of Faversham and Double Falsehood (or Cardenio) are again not accessibly available to watch or listen to outside of the theatre despite their high curiosity factor.

All which became abundantly clear last year when I was reviewing Arden Shakespeare’s own Early Modern Drama series and found myself unable to source recordings of these plays so that I could experience them in performance rather than simply as scripts. All are filled with extraordinary poetry but none of them can truly be understood or enjoyed without an actor’s intent behind the words and a directorial thought process interpreting the story and themes, especially by laypeople like me.

Proposal

That these plays be turned into audios on cd or for download, bringing together actors with the high production values.  Advertised correctly these should draw a curious general audience, one which is already eagerly seeking out what material is available in their local theatre. But of course there would be students and academics wanting to access high quality recordings of these plays especially those for which there is either only a single option or none at all.

Logistics

The scripts are obviously already written. Editorial choices would be in which texts to produce and preparing those scripts. I’m obviously unaware of budgets, but a writer’s fee (since these are four hundred year old plays) could be ploughed into the cost of the pre-recording rehearsal time which must be required

The texts could be those already in circulation through academic publishers, a collaboration which could go as far as branding the releases to tie-in with the books already available allowing for cross promotion, perhaps even utilising the same artwork:

With the plays also being sold through their website and through the audio producers, perhaps even as a set containing cd/download and book.

The trick would be to produce the Shakespearean curiosities along with the other work. An experimental series of four or six to test the market and then on from there. A Shakespeare collaboration, a Marlowe, a Beaumont and Fletcher, perhaps a Webster. A tie-in with Arden for example, would mean these choices are already made.

Competition

Of the complete or near-complete Shakespeare works available only the ArkAngel production of The Two Noble Kinsman is already available, but the others listed above are under produced. Of the others, even the better known playwrights, Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson’s greatest plays, some of them on school curriculums, have no unabridged audio productions available.

There are amateur crowd-sourced productions online if you know where to look, but not professional and not consistent. Shakespeare’s Globe has monthly series of this material called “Read or Dead” but as yet none of it is available outside their library’s archive. Modern productions of this material even on BBC radio is rare (most often the Drama on 3 slot of the kind already downloadable) and usually heavily abridged.

Conclusion

This could become a very exciting series for whichever company accepts the challenge, taking their work into new markets and creating a legacy of material which could have commercial potential for years to come.

Shakespeare references in the Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll #1

Twelfth Knight Bar in Vertigo. Next door to the Empire Hotel.

Shakespeare's Sonnets.

In the early noughties, television producer and writer Daisy Goodwin presented Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With), a series of programmes to coincide with Valentine's Day in which various verses were presented in the form of mini-dramas with a true galaxy of stars (from Christopher Lee to Julie Delpy with Amanda Holden between) characterising them within a cityscape. Shakespeare’s two contributions were Sonnet 129, in which Greg Wise sighed his way through “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” slumped on a couch and the outcast state of Sonnet 29 becoming Matthew Macfadyen’s musician’s inability to get solid work from a demo he’s passing around.

Framed by Goodwin popping up in some biographical locations sometimes with family members, the idea was to make the poems accessible to audience brought up on television who might find their existence on the page somewhat intimidating. While it was entertaining in its own way, the obvious set back was that the scenes were often at odds with the poet's original meaning and the readers and actors themselves had various levels of comfort in relation to how they should be speaking the words, contemporary poetry fairing better than most. The best interpretations were undoubtedly when the actor simply broke the forth wall and addressed the viewer forcing us to interpret the words ourselves.

That’s precisely the methodology at play in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the more linear reproduction of the sonnet recordings created for the iPad app produced by Touch Press in association with Illuminations, Arden and Faber. Select “play all” from the menu screen and after Patrick Stewart reads the original title page and acknowledgements, each of the ensuing sonnets is read in turn directly to the viewer by a similar group of actors as the Goodwin project (from Jemma Redgrave to Dominic West with Stephen Fry between). Sonnet after sonnet, face after face appears and the sheer variety of the text and approaches to interpretation even within these limits becomes obvious, especially when Ben Crystal pops up for his original pronunciation of 141.

Shorn of gimmickry, an intimacy is created between actors and viewer which replicates the brief moments in televised plays when a soliloquy has to be addressed to camera. Some performers have a more actorly approach than others, with the younger players often favouring a straight reading over Fiona Shaw or Noma Dumezweni's attempts at providing an emotional context. RSC director John Barton classically utilised sonnets as exercises to help structure the text within performance and it’s certainly the case that actors who’ve been through Stratford provide the clearest readings. But some of the non-professionals are equally impressive, James Shapiro’s Sonnet 138 underpinned by an academic understanding.

Each of the readings is relatively fascinating in and of itself. They beed filmed in a variety of places, in contributors homes and offices, back and on stage at theatres. I imagine director John Wyver and his crew travelling the length and breadth of the country dropping in on the actors depending on their availability and it’d be interesting to know how they were selected. In the main they’re perfectly chosen, some having even appeared in similar sonnet related projects on audio, David Tennant for Naxos’s From Shakespeare With Love (in which he also read “Shall I compare thee …”), Sian Phillips and Fiona Shaw on EMI’s When Love Speaks (different choices).

Watching these sonnets in a three hour block isn’t the best way to consume them and admittedly I didn’t. They were created as part of the app and outside that context they become “just” Shakespeare’s words well read. Perhaps it’s possible for those of us without an iPad to create a low-fi version with this dvd as the cornerstone. The app includes Katherine Duncan-Jones’s notes from the Arden Shakespeare edition which you might have to hand. Fellow contributor Don Patterson has also produced a book on sonnets (and this lengthy article for The Guardian). There are various facsimiles of the 1609 edition of the sonnets at archive.org.

Apart from added interactivity, about the only element unavailable are the additional interviews with experts and given the dvd is more expensive than the app, it’s a shame room couldn’t have been found for those here. That’s not the only niggle. Each of the actors is given their own biography screen which also lists the sonnets their reading, but there’s no play all for these and after watching one of them the viewer’s kicked back to a list of actors rather than the screen they were working from which means they have to go off and find the actor again to see another of their contributions. There’s a similar problem with the numerical list too, which makes the process of wanting to see a sonnet again quickly less efficient. A subtitle option would have been a useful addition.

Otherwise, the presentation is clear and nicely replicates the design of the app judging by screenshots in the accompany booklet (which also includes the actor profiles from the dvd itself). Once you’re used to navigating the menus there’s a definitely an addictive quality to it, wanting to watch one more sonnet, or the same sonnet again. If nothing else, it’s a way of exploring the less well known poems, most of which are generally ignored the face of the mighty 116, 18, 2 and indeed Goodwin’s choices 129 and 29. Few writers can say that 103, read beautifully here by Kim Cattrall, doesn’t capture the desperation of facing something with near flawless qualities and being infected with an inability to write about it.

Shakespeare's Sonnets is out now.  Review copy supplied.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

Schoolboy Oskar Schell sends himself on a mission to find the lock which fits a key he's found in the closet of his father who's recently died in 9/11. Days turn to weeks and eventually he's bursting to tell someone, that someone ultimately being "the renter", an elderly gentleman who lives with his grandmother. During one of the film's breathless montage sequences, he mentions the school's production of Hamlet:

It's a thematically pertinent choice as both Oskar and the Prince are experiencing the death of a parent in unbelievable circumstances.  The removal of the the skull mask to reveal Oskar's face fits all the relevant iconography into the shot making it entirely recognisable especially since as the novel indicates, he's playing Yorrick rather than the Hamlet.

Hamlet has a much stronger presence in Jonathan Safran Foer's novel.  Throughout Oskar mentions his Hamlet rehearsals and carries a copy of the script about with him on his quest, "so I could memorize my stage directions while I was going from one place to another, because I didn't have any lines to memorize".

In the film, Oskar notes that there are more people alive in the world now than have died in human history and that eventually there won't be enough places in the world to bury them.  In the novel, he says instead "if everyone want to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls."

The book also features a section about the resulting production, "it was actually an abbreviated modern version, because the real Hamlet is too long and confusing, and most of the kids in my class have ADD.  For example, the famous "To be or not to be speech" [...] was cut down so that it was just "To be or not to be, that's the question."

This brief wiki is also worth reading for dialogue and thematic parallels: " Oskar, has a similar issue to the one represented in Hamlet's soliloquy - What is our purpose, what is the point to our life? After his father dies in 9/ll, Oskar struggles with why he should even live his life, What is the point of doing something if you could die tomorrow?"

Shakespeare Uncovered: David Tennant on Hamlet

The story so far: Shakespeare Uncovered is a series of six introductions to plays introduced by leading actors and directors produced in association with the Globe theatre. The highlights have included Joely Richardson magically covered in snow during her first visit to the recreation of Shakespeare’s playhouse and discovering during Trevor Nunn’s exposition on The Tempest that there’s a recreation of Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia. Less appealing is Sir Derek Jacobi’s ten minute detor into authorship madness during an otherwise informative introduction to Richard II and Ethan Hawke subtly damaging a First Folio by stroking his finger across a page and knocking out an existing burn mark leaving a hole, the text on the next page now clearly visible.

Now we reach David Tennant on Hamlet and although I’m biased the best of the episodes. Focusing on Hamlet’s struggle with his mission and his own mortality, David gallops through the story from the ramparts to “the rest is silence” aided by a number of fellow actors, academics and as he wanders about in the bridging cutaways the architecture of Stratford-upon-Avon and the Southbank, struggling with the question of why the play is still considered the pinnacle of English literature, the one secular text which continues to enthral and inform us as much as holy texts if not more so. But again, I would say that, I’m biased. Yet as Ben Whishaw notes for six months after playing Hamlet in 2004 he found himself applying all of life’s big questions and presumably some of the small ones to the play, recalling the text over and over. I do that too.

Utilising a synopsis of the play as a spine for observation is a fairly typical approach (cf, Imagine ... Being Hamlet and Playing the Dane, the inspiration for this blog), questioning the action at key points, with contributors providing their experiences of playing the part or analysing them. Because Hamlet is so thematically rich the producers have had to make similar decisions to a company producing the play so the focus is very much on the domestic elements, with little to nothing on the politics of Elsinore and Denmark, the succession.  Fortinbras is cut. Lost too are Rosencrantz and Guidenstern other than the fact of their existence so nothing on the implications of their murder. “England” is generally glossed over. This is all about Hamlet’s personal j-word and those who’ve chosen to follow him.

All of which is perfectly understandable actually since entire books have been written about all of them, and there’s just an hour to play about with. It’s natural that you’d want to concentrate on the icons, whilst hinting at what lies beyond, the feigned madness, the implications of the willow scene that sort of thing. That’s especially true of the section shot at the Novell Theatre in which Michael Dobson offers a potted history of the closet scene which glanced towards Freud and also explains how Hamlet’s sometimes inappropriate attitude to his mother developed. Some productions almost treat the action in two discrete sections but as David notes there’s something very uneasy about Hamlet being so obsessed with Gertrude’s sex life with Polonius’s cadaver close by.

There are some unexpected inclusions. As with some of the other episodes, David was given the opportunity to see original copies of the text, in this case at the British Library and crucially all three versions including their copy of Q1 (one of only two in the world), comparing and contrasting the different versions of the big speeches and stage directions, discussing with curator of Early British Literature, Tim Pye the source of this earlier version. It’s worth noting that one of the potential weaknesses of the documentary is when David rhetorically asks who created this extraordinary character and where he came, we're not told about the Ur-Hamlet or Saxo Grammaticus but (admittedly touchingly) Shakespeare’s family and the death of Hamnet, which was also an influence on Twelfth Night in a very similar sequence in the Joely Richardson episode, one of the few occasions when the original source of a piece hasn’t been expounded upon.

Indeed, David has an impressively full participation, the episode’s presentation echoing his earlier presenter led episode of Doctor Who Confidential, “Do You Remember the First Time?” in which like this, he shared his affection for a much loved character whilst wearing a brown jacket. Then he visited the hallowed ground of Studio 8 of television centre, here it’s King Edwards Grammar Schoo, Shakespeare's school. Then he interviewed fellow fans like Steven Moffat and here we see him joshing over old reviews with David Warner and comparing approaches to the character with Jude Law.  At least in terms of the language of television, my favourite interview might be with Simon Russell Beale who (like Whishaw) has appeared in nearly all of the episodes in interviews clearly shot all together and so it seems here until David asks a follow up question and camera whip-pans in his direction. Beale himself almost startled to suddenly have his fellow actor sitting there.

Like that Confidential, this features dozens of illustrative clips though interestingly limited to Olivier directing himself, Zeffirelli directing Gibson and understandably Doran directing Tennant. An early trip through the RSC shop with David indicates other versions are available, but these three are interesting choices in that they’re not traditional renderings of the text, Olivier adding some, Zeffirelli deleting practically everything and Doran shuffling the order of the scenes. Odd that we should have the Warner interview but not the clips of his RSC appearance seen elsewhere. As with the other episodes, the emphasis instead is on newly filmed sections performed by the Globe’s cast with Jack Farthing (pictured below) cutting a youthful, lonely figure in a near empty theatre during “To Be Or Not To Be..” and Tom Lawrence later a teary Horatio as his prince dies.



As well as David greeting Andrei Tchaikovsky's skull again (pictured) the most poignant section for me is right at the very end, when he’s pondering what the part means to him and startling it resonates with comments he made when he left Doctor Who. Indeed just for a moment (thanks to a reference to filming), I wondered which role he’s actually talking about:

"In the end, there’s just no other character like him. […] I remember on the last day of filming thinking, “I’m so proud to have done that. I’m so pleased that’s something I got to do. And now I will never go there again.” And there was a huge relief to that. It was like having a weight lifted off your shoulders. And then, where are we now? Three years on… I do find myself, I catch myself, slightly fantasising about doing it again, going back there and seeing what that would feel like. But … that way madness quite literally lies.”

Fiftieth anniversary next year then.

[Assuming I haven't spoiled it too much for you, David Tennant on Hamlet is available on the iPlayer until 26th July.]

The Shakespeare Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Maureen Dalby.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I cry in supermarkets. This shouldn’t surprise regular readers who’ll know my emotion gland can be overwhelmed by the simplest of things. There’s a three-fold complexity to my feelings about supermarkets. Firstly, it’s the rudeness of fellow shoppers with barging tendencies unable to understand those like me with weak decision making skills. Secondly it’s my lack of decision making skills and wanting to taste everything despite there only being three meals in a day and seven of those days between shopping trips.

But thirdly, and primarily it’s what supermarkets represent. Weeping in the cheese aisle amongst the crumbly varieties with county names, the Lancashires, Cheshires, Cheddars. I thought about the history of those cheeses, the heritage and how centuries of tradition now sit wrapped in plastic for our convenience with labels designed to attract us with an idealised version of the history, the heritage, the centuries of tradition. The answer is to purchase such at farmers markets, but supermarkets are convenient, which also make me inadequate.

Unfortunately The Shakespeare Cookbook by historian Andrew Dalby and cook Maureen Dalby goes some way to increasing that inadequacy, since although I’m not necessarily a terrible cook I’m an unpractised one which means there’s little chance of the recipes listed being anything like the mental pictures they conjure (another reason for the supermarket tragedy). Luckily then, it’s much more than that, the authors utilising a number of contemporary sources to offer a taste (sorry) of eating habits and favourite dishes in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

The Shakespeare connection involves ransacking the plays and their sources for food references and extrapolating those out into explanations for the surprisingly large variety of dishes which were available in the period, some of which are now available in supermarkets but many entirely alien to our tastebuds, though it’s almost disappointing Baxters don’t produce a tinned variety of Swan Chauder. As well as quoting from a variety of cookbooks (most of them now available online), the authors also provide contemporary equivalents for modern chefs to try.

For Hamlet, that’s the feast Hamlet refers to when question Horatio on his appearance in Elsinore, “Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The Dalbys aren’t sure if the prince is speaking literally but we’re quickly introduced to the food he’s referring to, “cooked meats” being pies, the pastry cases before filling fittingly, given the themes of the play, called “coffins”. We’re then provided with recipes for hot water crust pastry and shortcrust pastry neither of which seem that complicated even though they undoubtedly are.

Given my culinary inadequacy I’m probably not the best judge of whether this works as a cookbook. Structurally it’s unusually set out, with chapters themed around various plays with a short introduction focusing on various textual victuals, either metaphoric or consumed on stage followed by short pieces explaining these various elements, some more tenuous than others. Would a serious foody want these recipes to be more conventionally clustered around the usual headings, starters, meat dishes, fish dishes, deserts and drinks?

But if the book has a particular strength its that it doesn’t just rely on Shakespeare for illustrative quotes featuring when necessary works by his contemporaries, with Middleton’s The Witches allowing us to see what may have been on the Macbeth’s table during Banquo’s visitation and a rousing speech from Maid Marion in Jonson’s unfinished Robin Hood play The Sad Shepherd providing a glimpse of the Bohemian sheep-shearing feast in A Winter’s Tale. And when that fails they quote from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, which shows an eclectic attention to detail.

Whether any of this will improve or deteriorate further my ability to visit supermarkets without it becoming some great personal tragedy will be hard to tell. Perhaps the trick will be to select a recipe at random, wait a moment, yes, hodgepot, gather the ingredients and make an attempt. The authors replace marigold flowers with saffron so that seems perfectly doable. Perhaps I’ll report back. But until then at least when I see marchpane, or rather marzipan on the shelf, I’ll know it’s always been a convenience food, even in Shakespeare’s day.

The Shakespeare Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Maureen Dalby is out now from the British Museum Press.  RRP £10.99.  ISBN: 978-0714123356.  Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare's Restless World.

Hats! What’s often forgotten about Hamlet is that amongst the psychological introspection and political intrigue, the prince’s headgear is a vital element in broadcasting his madness, feigned or otherwise, and one of the triggers which leads to Polonius’s investigation of his psychological well being. It was not just a tradition but law, from a parliamentary statute of 1571, that all men in society to wear caps and they became an important part of confirming social divisions.

If someone wasn’t wearing their headgear it was a pretty good indication that they weren’t well, so when Ophelia notes to her father “My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, / Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head…” it suggested the privy councillor and us that something is terribly wrong with the young prince. Arguably it could also indicate there’s something terribly wrong with the production if that line’s in there and no one else is behatted in some way.

Broadcast a few months ago on Radio 4 and now out on cd, Shakespeare’s Restless World, one of the epicentres of the BBC’s year long coverage of the bard’s work, seeks to investigate his plays, his life and his world through the objects of the British Museum and further afield. Presented by Neil MacGregor, director of the museum, it’s an audio adjunct to the Shakespeare: staging the world exhibition (part of the cultural Olympiad) in the style of his previous History of the World in 100 Objects.

As with that series, the objects are really enry points into exploring a particular aspect of the Elizabethan and Jacobian world and so a rather anonymous apprentice’s cap inspires a discussion of the class system, social propriety and rioting, feeding into the series other aim of finding parallels with contemporary Britain.  In another episode MacGreggor indicates chillingly it was quite natural then as now for young men to carry knives around ready to defend themselves.

These twenty episodes do cover similar ground to the catalogue which accompanies the British Library’s exhibition but there’s a much greater, perhaps more convincing effort to link the objects to Shakespeare’s plays. When considering The Stratford Chalice in the second programme in relation to the country’s religious strife as a symbol of the new Protestant faith, he explains that the language in the Ghost of Hamlet Snr's speech is of the old religion, of the old ways.

Sometimes the themes and objects have been selected to indicate what isn’t in the plays. In an episode about Plague Proclamations, we’re reminded that even though pestilence was prevalent in the period and a massive influence structurally on Shakespeare’s career, as far as we know no plays were written on the topic and it was barely mention in the canon except for briefly in Romeo and Juliet. Quite a contrast from public executions which were bloodily dramatised.

The list of contributors is smaller than A History of the World, relying on some of the usual academics like Bate and Shapiro along with curators across the country who handle the objects like Jan Graffius, curator of the Stonyhurst collection who hold the Oldcorne Reliquary. In an episode about duelling, Alison de Burgh, Britain's first female theatre fight director entertainingly teaches MacGreggor how to hold his own.  Luckily, has he says "Health and Safety regulations kicked in and stopped her killing me”.

Threaded throughout the episodes are a collection of excepts from the plays brilliantly read by the likes of David Warner, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rory Kinnear. In episode two there’s a brief part of the duel scene in which Don Warrington gives us his Claudio, and we also later hear the aforementioned closet flashback. Frustratingly a cast list isn’t included in the accompanying booklet (or a full list of contributors for that matter) but then that doesn’t include images of all the objects either.

But, other than duration, it's too short, that’s about the only criticism I have of this fascinating release which constantly surprises with its nuggets of tangential information and enthralling stories. The Shakespeare’s Restless World website of course has all the episodes to listen to again, download as podcasts and complete transcripts so you might question what’s to gained from buying the cds. But for collectors of Shakespeareana they’re probably essential.

Shakespeare's Restless World is out now from AudioGo.  Review copy supplied.

David Tennant on Hamlet scheduling update.

Yes, this is an important scheduling reminder/update for the final Shakespeare Uncovered documentary and most important to this parish, David Tennant on Hamlet.  For some ungodly reason, the BBC have decided that far from appearing after The Hollow Crown on Saturday presumably because it doesn't have a thematic connection or in the slot some of the shows had on BBC Four because it's David Tennant on Hamlet, they've seen fit to broadcast it on ...

Tuesday 17th July at 11:20pm after Newsnight

that's ...

Tuesday 17th July at 11:20pm after Newsnight

Exactly why this isn't on after The Hollow Crown is beyond me.  For one thing it's the episode for which you'd think there was a built in audience even after a couple of years and for another the expected timeslot has instead a QI repeat and half a rerun of a TOTP.

For Schools: Hamlet screened the BFI.

On the Sceenplay's blog, John Wyver reports on the BFI screening of For Schools: Hamlet, the 1961 ITV series starring Barry Foster in the title role:

"Jennifer Daniel is a posh Ophelia who fails to convince in the ‘mad’ scene. As Gertrude Patricia Jessel, who had been a regular at the Stratford Memorial Theatre since 1944, has a rather remarkable neck, but she falls short in the ‘closet’ scene. The best of other players is probably Sydney Tafler as Claudius, another criminal role to add to the actor’s tally in British noir films of the previous decade."

This was thought lost for many years until a copy was found in the Library of Congress and returned to the BFI. For all John's reservations, let's hope an accessible edition (streaming perhaps since a home release seems unlikely) is made available soon.

Shakespeare on Spotify: Rare Marlowe Players production of Hamlet with Patrick Wymark.

An amazing rarity has cropped up on Spotify. Based on the various parts of editions I've collected, my understanding has always been that the production of Hamlet included in the Argo imprint was this recording of the Old Vic Company production with Derek Jacobi. That hasn't always sat well with me though, especially since the others were recorded with the Marlowe Society in conjunction with the British Council and it seemed strange that such an arrangement wouldn't also include the greatest play, especially since they also polished off King Lear.

Now the mystery's been solved:

Shakespeare and me in The Observer

Today's Observer has a special section, Shakespeare and Me in which various actors and directors talk about the plays have effected them. There's plenty of Hamlet interest.

Simon Russell Beale: "I think it was the actor Paul Rhys who said to me: "Hamlet will change you", and I didn't believe him. He was right, though – it's the only part you can't hide behind – and you spend most of the time contemplating your death, which is quite hard to do when you're 40, not yet ancient."

Judi Dench: "I made my professional debut as Ophelia in 1957. I didn't know enough to be daunted by it at the time. I learnt an incredible amount from it. My notices were certainly daunting. You learn from them – you learn very soon. You just have to grit your teeth and get on and learn to do it better."

Alan Cumming: "It probably wasn't a great idea to play Hamlet opposite my ex-wife [Hilary Lyon] as Ophelia. We were coming towards the end of our marriage and I pretty much had a full-on breakdown after it. The play also dredged up some awful things with my father, and I realised there were a lot of unresolved issues in my life that I needed to deal with."

Michelle Dockery: "Anyone who's ever played Ophelia should all get together for a big group hug. I played Ophelia with John Simm at Sheffield and I began to suffer terrible insomnia in the same way that Hamlet does. It's such a tough part and Ophelia is a huge leap, especially in the end, when she descends into her madness."

But the whole thing's a pleasure and all available here.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Beyond The Hollow Crown

Tonight sees the start of the BBC's long awaited series of adaptations of the Henriad, beginning with Richard II under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown. The pre-broadcast reviews and trailers suggest this is going to be one of the great televisual events and there's been a suggestion that if the ratings hold up, the BBC might be convinced to produce some more, perhaps the whole lot.

In an entirely presumptuous move, especially since none of this has been broadcast yet, I wondered how the BBC might go about selecting the plays for production and assuming they continued with the entirely sensible umbrella title idea how they might be grouped together. A second series comprising the other Henriad ending with Richard III is most obvious but what about the rest, those plays who's connection is more tenuous?

The Hollow Crown
 Richard II
Henry IV, p1
Henry IV, p2
Henry V

The Hollow Crown II
 Henry VI, p1
Henry VI, p2
Henry VI, p3
Richard III

Italy
 Othello
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet

Deception
 Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
Cardenio
The Winter’s Tale

Sibling Rivalries
 Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Comedy of Errors
The Taming of the Shrew

France
 As You Like It
Edward III
King John
Alls Well That Ends Well

Gloriana
 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry VIII
Sir Thomas More
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Classical World
 Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Pericles
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rome
 Titus AndronicusCymbeline
 Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra

Spirits
 Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet

As you can see I've tried to think with a television scheduler's brain, putting the better known plays at the top and bottom of each series with the wilder material in the middle, including the audacious inclusion of some of the outlying regions of the canon like Sir Thomas More and Edward III neither of which are likely to be filmed in a million years. Or Cardenio, depending on who's version of the text is used (assuming it isn't a new adaptation).

Some of my choices are perfectly obvious, as in these are all plays which have some kind of deception within or these are all set in Italy and France. I've tried to be a bit innovative so "Gloriana" features plays which have some connection to Elizabeth I (reputed to have suggest, her Dad, her Dad, potential allegory) and it's not often these plays featuring spirits are put together in quite this way.

Probably the least appetising from a modern commissioning standpoint is "Classical World" with its three collaborations and opening with a play which few people know much about to begin with.  Logistically Rome's the hardest with its five plays and many locations but there's potential casting connections between JC and A&C.  Please do let me know if you can think of any other ways of grouping the plays together.

Some of the groupings are with an eye to television production. Following The Hollow Crown's lead and boring the pants off Jonathan Miller (who went out of his way not to do this in his BBC Shakespeare's in the 80s) these will all be in period dress so it makes sense to have all the Roman plays together so that props/sets can be reused. Though of course that goes out of the window when it comes to the deception plays.

I'm under no illusions about this. Our luck no matter how well The Hollow Crown does, the BBC'll probably only see it as part of their Olympic celebrations and leave it at that. Plus if they follow this plan, it's a ten year commitment and expensive. But at least I've thought about the logistics and the logic of producing Macbeth, Hamlet and JC so soon after the recent productions and putting them late in the schedule, the best until last.

The Hollow Crown begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.

The Sonnets come to iPad, the web and dvd.

Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

Kenneth Branagh knighted.

The Queen's birthday honours were released at midnight and Hamlet interest includes a knighthood for Ken now Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh.  Also from the cast of his film version of Hamlet, Kate Winslet receives a CBE.

Other Shakespearean actors include Jean Marsh who's now an OBE and Amanda Redman, MBE.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company, outgoing artistic director Michael Boyd is knighted and Victoria Heywood, executive director is granted a CBE.

That's about all I can spot.  The full lists are posted on The Guardian's website.

RSC Julius Caesar's BBC Four broadcast date confirmed.

John Wyver at Illuminations has just confirmed it, but the film version of the RSC's new production of Julius Caesar broadcasts on BBC Four on Sunday 24 June 2012 at 8pm. Here's the synopsis on the relevant programme page:

"Film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 production of Shakespeare's fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence. The setting is a modern African state in which the tyrant Caesar is about to seize power. Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspirators plotting an assassination. Featuring a distinguished cast of black actors, the film is shot on location and in the RSC's theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon."

Really excited and I suppose we can consider it something of an experiment because this is a rare occasion of a version of a theatre production being broadcast during the run initial run of that same theatre production.

One of the reasons often given for theatre not appearing on television or radio is the impact that would have on box office receipts, so it'll be interesting to hear if this does have an impact on the RSC's box office receipts. 

My guess is that it won't.  These are separate entities and the experience of watching each is different, a viewer choosing between the close-ups of television or the electricity of live theatre and people will still flock to the RSC because it's the RSC.  We'll see.

Simon Schama on Shakespeare.

This especially informative article from Simon Schama manages to explain the development of the commercial theatre in Britain in a single paragraph:

"The first owner-manager to convert a tavern yard site into a true theatre was the grocer John Brayne who established one at the Red Lion in the rustic suburb of Whitechapel. Ultimately, the Red Lion was just too far from the punters to make a go of it, but Brayne’s brother-in-law, James Burbage, was a carpenter-joiner as well as an actor, and when they moved the enterprise to the more populous and buzzingly seedy area of Shoreditch, they took over the ruins of a Catholic convent for the new theatre. The symbolism of one kind of spectacle succeeding the other could not have been more eloquent."

Amazing. In all the books I've read on the topic, never have I seen the transition so cleanly and clearly explained.  Schama's Shakespeare series begins on BBC Two on 22nd June.

Romeo and Juliet (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Rene Weis.

Finding new critical approaches to many of Shakespeare’s plays continues to be a challenge, perhaps even more so for academic editions which usually strive for a tone beyond a basic introduction that regurgitate the essentials.  Rene Weis’s interest in this new Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet is to investigate the balance between its main protagonists and suggest that for all the masculine prominence in the billing, the play’s really about the feminine side or rather that the title should more fittingly echo the final line of the play, “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Weis argues that Juliet has a more thorough back story, that more time is spent setting up her extended family even to the point of paralleling her with a child born to the Nurse at the same time as the young Capulet who didn’t live.  Shakespeare investigates far more deeply into the girl’s passage into womanhood and she receives the greater number of speeches capturing the aggressive passion of teenage love.  Romeo’s parents are near ciphers and when Romeo does have narrative agency it’s usually in service of rounding out Juliet’s character rather than the Montague, his only real character development in shifting from platitudes to poetry with his infatuation moves away from Rosalind.

The evidence continues into the section about  how Shakespeare’s utilises time, the play structuring itself carefully across four days.  Glance at the included chronology and we can see just how many of the scenes, especially in the latter half of the play are about Juliet dealing with this secret love, outside the gaze of her parents, of Paris being foisted upon her.  The parallels with A Midsummer Night’s Dream are worthwhile in comparing how a similar situation, which also includes the application of potions is resolved in a resolutely comedic fashion rather than the realistic, chaotic worlds of Verona which ends in tragedy.

From here Weis delves into the dating of the play which, thanks to the play's rich contemporary allusion, the editor puts at late summer to the early autumn 1596, within thirty years of the play’s primary source Brooke’s poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.  Shakespeare’s genius is often brought into question because of these borrowings, but as Weis explains, Shakespeare’s genius was in taking these sometimes mundane works and transforming them into plays which stand the test of time; how many similar poems and stories remain obscure because the playwright wasn’t interested?

With so much to cram in, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the production history isn’t as detailed as in some Ardens, but expresses its worth in concentrating on adaptation over more traditional productions, from Garrick’s interpolations to Berlioz’s symphonie dramatique through Prokofiev’s ballet and Tchaikovsky.  The closest analysis is of the modern film versions, of West Side Story, of Zeferelli’s 1968 film and of Baz Lurhmann’s in 1996 which Weis bravely brands, “the greatest Shakespeare film ever”.  My personal taste would still put Branagh’s Hamlet above it, but it’s difficult to argue with that assessment in terms of popular appeal.

At page ninety-four, such criticism gives way to the text and textual analysis.  Like Hamlet, R+J exists primarily in an oddball first Quarto, more authoritative Q2 and of course F1 and like Hamlet the relationship between them is hotly contested.  R+J’s Q1 is about eight hundred lines shorter than its later sister work, with some sections omitted and others rewritten and the argument has generally shifted away from memorial reconstruction to a players edition produced either by a printer or Shakespeare himself for playing in the sticks.  It was certainly considered useful enough to be glanced at during the type setting of Q2 for textual confirmations.

Arden published Hamlet’s Q1 in a separate volume with F1, properly edited.  For Romeo & Juliet a facsimile of the British Library’s copy has been included as an appendix, some of the margin notes included, slightly abbreviated.  Part of me wishes that this too had instead been a properly edited version, but given the academic timescales and that its already been thirty years since the last Arden edition, it's understandable that Weis should concentrate on the play as it's best known with a few interpolations.  Plus facsimiles allow us to glimpse the text as it was originally seen by the Elizabethan public, without four hundred years of further editorial intervention.

Romeo and Juliet (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Rene Weis. Methuen Drama. 2012. RRP: £8.99. ISBN: 9781903436912. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare's Restless World released on cd and download.

AudioGo have just sent out a press release with details for a cd and download release of Shakespeare's Restless World, which completed its radio broadcast last week:

"‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, especially for William Shakespeare in the reign of Elizabeth I. Hot on the heels of the hugely successful A History of the World in 100 Objects comes Shakespeare’s Restless World in which Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at the world through the eyes of Shakespeare's audience by exploring objects from that turbulent period. Examining different artefacts, Neil discusses how Shakespeare's audiences understood and made sense of the unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived. With old certainties shifting around them, in a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, Neil asks what the plays would have meant to the public when they were first performed.

"He also analyses the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public and helped shape Shakespeare’s works and considers what they can reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England. With contributions from Shakespeare scholars, historians and experts on witchcraft and warfare, fencing and food, luxury trade and many other topics, these programmes are both diverting and enlightening. They discuss the issues these objects raise - everything from exploration and discovery to violence, entertainment and the plague."

My Own Shakespeare.

The BBC's Radio 4 blog as a post about the making of My Own Shakespeare which has now begun on that channel and Radio 3.  Interestingly the same recording session also yielded the play excerpts for Shakespeare's Restless World, including this rendition of To Be or Not To Be from Rory Kinnear:

Helen Mirren's Ophelias.

Philip Ward writes an excellent blog cataloguing and analysing the performances of Helen Mirren and in today's post, as well as nodding towards the bizarre Celestino Coronada film of 1976 mentions her appearance as Ophelia in the 1970 RSC production with Alan Howard as Hamlet:

"Ophelia is so often seen as an absence. She appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes. We know little of what passed between her and Hamlet before the play opens. She doesn’t struggle with moral choices, as he does. ‘I think nothing, my lord,’ she tells him – a line that he chooses to interpret in the bawdy sense – but which the Gentleman echoes without irony when faced with the mad Ophelia, commenting that ‘her speech is nothing’, mere ‘unshaped use’. Mirren’s Ophelia was no shrinking violet. She was not prepared to go quietly."

Sounds enchanting.

The BBC's My Own Shakespeare project released as podcast.

My Own Shakespeare will be a series of short pieces of two or three minutes broadcast across BBC Radios 3 and 4 across the rest of May.

 "What does Shakespeare mean to us today ? Public figures from all walks of life talk about the piece of Shakespeare that inspires them most.The pieces are read by well known actors."

Catching all of these seemed like it was going to be an impossibility, but true to BBC form of late, they're releasing them all as podcasts and with indefinite availability.

The subscription page is here.

Shakespeare at the British Council.

A small archive of short films from the British Council's archive have been posted online including two excepts from Shakespeare plays recorded back in the 1940s "in order to enable those who have no opportunity of attending performances of Shakespearean plays in a theatre to see how the various parts are played by leading English actors and actresses".

"Famous Scenes from Shakespeare No. 1" is Julius Caesar - Act III, Scene 2 - The Forum Scene.  Felix Aylmer as um, Marcus Brutus and Leo Genn as Marcus Antonius, address a multitude of extras in a piece of high production values, filmed with a certain epic quality despite the obviously small shooting space thanks to some excellent production design from Compton Bennet and spacious direction from Henry Cass.

The accompanying trivia notes that Genn and Cass were previously involved in mid-thirties production of Caesar at the Old Vic, and this short piece retains stage theatricality.  It's also filled with the kinds of memorable faces Fellini loved to include in his films, not least of the main actors both of whom are very unlike the kinds of younger performers usually assigned these roles, but both of whom have loads of authority.

"Famous Scenes from Shakespeare No. 2" or Macbeth - Act II, Scene 2, and Act V, Scene 1 - Murder and sleep-walking scenes offer further evidence that these were prestige productions with the casting of Wilfred Lawson (Macbeth), Cathleen Nesbitt (Lady Macbeth) who were the leads in 1944's second biggest film, Fanny By Gaslight. On the evidence, it's a shame they were only given these two short scenes to work with.  A feature film would have been magic.

The lighting is moody.  Noirish.  Lawson and Nesbitt, even with their RP accents are exactly as one might imagine these ancient figures to be.  The starkest image is in the sleep-walking scene as Lady M appears silloetted against the archway before slowly stepping forward in the light, her concentration in holding her lantern despite her blank expression telling us everything we need to know about her state of mind.

Twenty years later, the British Council undertook to record the whole of Shakespeare's canon (as it was then) in conjunction with the Marlowe Society at Cambridge University along with professional actors.  They were released by Argo records.  Here's a review of their Twelfth Night at Gramaphone.  They're fairly orthodox stuff, but still well worth listening to if you're interested in theatrical history.

They're also still very accessible.  I've bought many of them through ebay and in charity shops, but most of them are also available as downloads through Amazon and iTunes and even more impressively to stream through Spotify.  Here is the Twelfth Night production reviewed above featuring Prunella Scales:



Spotify Classical Playlists has prepared a complete playlist, which also includes some other of the service's Shakespearean gems.