Shakespeare

I’ve found that, rather than the usual anthologies (you’ve seen them, massive hardback triplet collections of his plays as Histories, Tragedies and Comedies), they’re far more readable in individual form. Also, if you find the right editions, they can come with the most beautiful illustrations from the illustrious persons of the day.

As a result, I’ve been buying second-hand copies on Vinted for a couple of pounds each, and slowly making my way through them! I will never forgive the entirety of the English GCSE for ruining this for me, because MY GOD.

I’m not even going to attempt reviews, but I will note down a couple of completely unoriginal thoughts about each one as I go through them.

Also, weirdly, I’m much more affected by them when I read them than by when I watch them? I’ve seen Shakespeare at the Globe, as movie adaptations, and in amateur University productions, but in almost every case they try and modernise them and they’re all the worse for it. I don’t want to see Hamlet in a modern hospital, I want to see it in a dark and flickering castle dammit! The closest I’ve got was a production of Tempest held one summer evening under a tree in a wide and sweeping park by an amateur troupe. As described in Station Eleven, and in Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, the lack of everything except the actors and the atmosphere they create makes it all the more vivid: a cheap robe is transmogrified to a heavy, dark symbol, a prancing Caliban to a pale terrifying presence, and the rustling of branches and a wind machine to an enormous magical storm.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• it’s SO FUNNY my GOD, he does the Tolkienesque thing (Tolkien does the Shakespearean thing; they both use a common and well-used style) of juxtaposing high and low speech, to great effect
• I kept visualising Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania
• Puck is played for laughs mostly, but that undercurrent of hi this is a terrifying arbitrary being with great power and a love for cruelty and mischief really comes through. You can see where Gaiman’s Puck developed. I also for some reason feel like Charles Vess would have been perfect to illustrate him, all angular and sweeping. Something something personification of Nature’s arbitrariness and ambivalence to our wishes juxtaposed with the aloof King and Queen representing relatively eternal features like mountains vs monotheistic God representing a parental figure with a guarantee of happiness in the afterlife but no direct action in life itself

Romeo and Juliet

• it’s…inexorable. It’s that quote about everyone being doomed from the beginning. Their characters predetermine their fate, there was nothing else they could have done
• I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to see or read this unspoiled

Upcoming: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice.