Infinite Variety

DiCaprio, Dane, Thompson, Branagh, Romeo, Juliet, Beatrice, Benedick

Every theme under the sun and moon
As a teacher I sometimes challenged students to present a situation to me from a modern TV show or film and 9 times out of 10 I could name the play where the same situation occurs between Shakespearian characters or the same theme is explored in one of the 40-ish plays or in one of his sonnets or poems.

Everything’s there:

Every kind of Love and every kind of Hate

Passion, Compassion, Rage and Destruction

Comedy, Wit, Lunacy, Folly, Insanity and Madness

Jealousy, Ambition, Greed, Hypocrisy and Fear 

Hope, Mercy, Loyalty, Courage and Strength

Parents and Children, Brothers and Sisters 

Husbands and Wives, Friends and Enemies

Neighbours and Strangers, Masters and Servants

Cross-dressing, Gender-bending

Sex and Procreation, Lust and Desire

Violence and Tenderness, Hurt and Comfort

Injury and Healing, Grief and Joy

Art and Nature, Illusion and Reality

Music, Song, Dance and Spectacle

Duels, Fights, Battles, Tricks, Robberies 

Disguises, Surprises, Spoofs and Storms

Shipwrecks, Constructions, Weather, Nature

Fields, Flowers, Moors and Cliffs

Hovels, Houses, Palaces and Castles

Ships, Sea, Islands, Deserts, Forests, Beaches

Venice, Verona, Mantua, Vienna, Messina, Milan, Rome, Florence, Padua

Sicilia, Bohemia, Athens, Ephesus, Troy, Tyre, Navarre, Paris

Britain, Scotland, Cyprus, Illyria, Belmont

Miracles and Magic, Dogs and Bears

Gods and Goddesses

Shepherds and Clowns

The Supernatural and the Down-to-earth

Dreams and Nightmares

Prophecies and Curses

The Subconscious and the Light-hearted

The Rude and the Crude

Elegance and Beauty

Disability and Power

Charisma and Humility

Winning and Losing

Revenge and Forgiveness

Glorious Triumph and Abject Failure

Medicine and Gardening

Education and the Law

Health and Happiness

Problems of Self-government and National Government

Rebellion, Riot and Conformity

Freedom and Slavery

Republicanism, the Monarchy, 

Totalitarianism, Anarchy

The Price of Fame and Cost of Responsibility

The Personal and the Universal

The Silly and the Serious

Birth and Rebirth, Murder and Resurrection

The Sadness of Disease

The Inevitability of Death

Youth and Age, Growth and Decay

The way we live our lives as individuals,

as families, as friends, as lovers, as enemies, 

as citizens under the same sun

And our search for the meaning of life

Kinnear, Lester, Iago, Othello

Happy 450th anniversary of your birth, Shakespeare. It’ll be the 400th anniversary of your death in 2016. Lucky me to have your work as a part of my retirement playground.

Sher, Richard III

1564 and 1960 - an Anniversary and a Birthday

15th October 1960

Presents, cards, breakfast, ingredients for a cake

So it was my birthday on 15th October. I was born in 1960 at 2:30pm in the afternoon in the front room of what was then 122 Linton Road on Eastmoor Estate in Wakefield. The house later became a different number because more houses were built.

And it's a beautiful day....
So I had some prezzies and got some great cards from family and friends – thank you, all – and watched the film Fargo in the afternoon, with the family. (“There’s more to life than a little money, you know? Don’tcha know that? And here ya are. And it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.”)

Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson

Be More Molly and Marge

Some films (Fargo is one of them) contain characters that you never forget, and the final words (quoted in the paragraph above) of Marge Gunderson, played by Frances McDormand, capture a universal human impulse that turns the film into a piece of philosophy. It IS hard to understand why some of the characters behave the way they do when the world is essentially such a kind and wonderful place to be. One of my presents is the box set of the TV series of Fargo which I’ve already seen but which I’m sure I’ll watch plenty more times – and for every Lorne Malvo or Lester Nygaard, there is a Molly Solverson or a Gus Grimly. Molly in the TV series is the moral equivalent of Marge in the film – and as I celebrate my birthday I hope to Be More Molly and Marge – I’m sure it’s what Shakespeare would have wanted.

Alison Tolman as Molly Solverson

450 years ago Shakespeare was born
(23rd April1564 or thereabouts)
Did Shakespeare know his body of work would contain so many themes? Did he think of his work as having a coherent whole? An overarching style and tone? The range of ideas in his work had never accumulated in one person’s work before his writing career and has never been surpassed since, by any writer in any language. Shakespeare deals with just about every theme and aspect of human life known in England at the time, all of which are still relevant. As Ben Jonson predicted in his First Folio epitaph:

He was not of an age, but for all time!

My First Shakespeare

Most prolific movie screenwriter

William Shakespeare’s work, 450 years after his birth, generates a significant amount of income for the nation, yes, even in times of recession – ticket sales and hotel bookings in and around the Globe Theatre in London and at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon have not fallen in recent years. His work also generates significant amounts of income for many other countries on every continent. And as of today (October 2014) there are 1,151 films that carry his name in the writing credits on imdb; there’s no sign that this figure will stop rising; Shakespeare is by far and away the most prolific screenwriter in movie history, an industry that didn’t even exist when he was alive.

Globe Theatre shop on South Bank in London

Ker-ching!

Other artists have been inspired to choreograph ballets, compose operas and create musicals; inspired to paint pictures, craft sculptures, write spin-off stories; less literary companies have manufactured posters, pens, fridge magnets, mugs, t-shirts, soft toys and other merchandise, great and small. The UK tourist board has calculated that the county of Warwickshire owes over half a billion pounds a year to the tourism generated as a result of Shakespeare being born in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford-upon-Avon itself attracts around £335 million.)

When was I first entranced?

On the bookshelf in the front room during my childhood in Wakefield there was:

• a set of encyclopedias
• a family Holy Bible
• Butler’s Lives of the Saints
• and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare

(complete with Fuseli plates.) I would pore over these tomes. I would read sections out loud for fun, even if I didn't entirely understand every word. It passed time (only three TV channels and no computers or smart phones in pre-digital age of course.) 

Fuseli plate of a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream

Tale of Two Teachers

But at school a teacher almost ruined King Lear by reading it bombastically from beginning to end, striding about the classroom, oblivious to whether or not his class was listening. Shakespeare by fruity verbal sledgehammer – the worst kind of teaching! Luckily York Notes gave me the confidence to pass the exam (and another teacher, Ken Payne, happily gave me an excellent introduction to Hamlet with plenty of activities and tasks and active on-your-feet drama, provoking a sense that the play was thrilling, funny, heartbreaking and relevant to a Wakefield teenager in the 1970s.)

 The Comedy of Errors, King Lear and Hamlet

Dromio of Ephesus

But it was at university in a production of The Comedy of Errors by David Phelan that the penny fully and finally dropped. And boy did it drop! I don’t know whether it was the “hair by Vidal Sassoon” (me and the other student playing Dromio of Syracuse were given curly perms) or the 1920's flapper music or the laughter generated by the audience – none of the ephemeral wonderments that are in the First Folio. But something about performing the play that year at that time of my life kindled a spark that has continued flaring. In retirement I will not be able to help myself delving further and deeper into the texts and context of this remarkable writer - "not of an Age, but for All Times." Happy times indeed!

That most "English" of Shakespeare's plays with Falstaff in merry mode

FutureLearning Shakespeare

My First MOOC

And so I've signed myself up to a FutureLearn MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in order to keep my brain and spirit alive as the Autumn sets in. So far I'm impressed and need to stop rewatching each video and reading every single comment, otherwise I’ll never catch up. There are a lot of enthusiastic people signed up from around the world, so I don’t feel too geeky.

A certain gentleman

And in this blog I'm finally going to attempt to begin to articulate what it is about the work, life and times of a certain gentleman that occupies a huge part of my imagination....

The other love of my life

Sally knew when we married that there would always be another man in our life…. complicated by the fact that the man died in 1616. He was born in 1564 and grew up in a Midlands market town before getting regular work in London early in his twenties. He probably revisited his home town a few times a year, sometimes staying for reasonably long periods, keeping in touch with his family and hometown friends and neighbours, doing a bit of wheeler-dealing and eventually buying some property.

Joseph Fiennes in the film of Shakespeare In Love

Big Fat Book

During the seven years after he died two of his work colleagues gathered most of his works together and had them printed in a big fat book. About 750 copies, probably, were printed. And just over 220 still exist. God alone knows what happened to the rest – hidden, lost, burned, used for starting domestic fires, shredded, recycled? I have dreamt – literally dreamt – more than once – about finding and owning one of them.

West End cast of play version of Shakespeare In Love

And his book….?

A Shakespeare First Folio is, eccentrically and wonderfully, in Skipton Town Hall on permanent display.  The First Folio isn’t a simple story, though, with complications created by earlier quartos good and bad, printing errors, collaboration questions, disputed choices by a range of people: Heminges, Condell, the original typesetters, the original printers, possibly even choices made by Anne Shakespeare (or Susannah or John Hall or Judith?)

A fine legacy…. To be continued….

Whatever circumstances surrounded the original printings of the works attributed to Shakespeare, there is no doubt his legacy is a powerful and profound one.