Listening to Greg Doran on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning alerted me to his visiting professorship at Oxford and the Playhouse production. The above Guardian piece by Michael Billington informs on this and other aspects of Doran’s life post-RSC, and takes us inside rehearsals of the diverse student production of one of Shakespeare’s least performed (and ‘problematic’ says Billington) works. A terrific read.
Earlier this year I wrote what I remember to have been a fairly extensive entry relating to the 400th anniversary of the printing of the so-called ‘First Folio’ of Shakespeare’s plays. Looking for it today, I am mortified – radically overly stated perhaps but nevertheless appropriately theatrical in tenor – to discover it has disappeared! I do know that it was written during a period of preoccupation with the Bard (a not uncommon thing) around about the time I read Hamnet and heard about (then later acquired) Greg Doran’sMy Shakespeare – A Director’s Journey through the First Folio.
Of all days – today! There has been of course much ado during this whole year, now all but gone, but the book was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 8 November 1623 so this is a good book end, so to speak.
So it is, and belatedly, that I refer again to the magnificent site, Folio 400: Printing Shakespeare set-up to inform and help navigate through all the celebratory events. An invaluable resource; that it, too, may have a long life! Their mission is self-explanatory:
The First Folio is one of the great wonders of the literary world.
Published in 1623, seven years after the death of its author, it was the first printed edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Without this achievement, we would have lost half of his dramatic work.
This website is dedicated in gratitude to the 400th birthday of this foundational book on the 8th November 2023.
To end, as I began, on a theatrical note. On the BBC site, media editor Katy Razzall talks to David Tennant about what Shakespeare means to him and his upcoming role as Macbeth at the Donmar – sold out, but of course! And, as we lick our wounds, we are left with the special treat of Tennant’s recitation of a Macbeth soliquay (Act 1 Scene 7). (Embedded below.)
Every day is Shakespeare day, but today most especially.
With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!
Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.
I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.
Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.
Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.
And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.
A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.
These could Boris Johnson still not see – or, at least, admit to – as the curtain begins to fall on his chaotic tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Some would relegate Johnston to the role of court jester; one there to amuse, to charm, to garner favor and applause. Too lazy a conclusion, I would suggest, insinuating him to be but a minor performer – hovering in the wings, just the filler during drunken intervals. For, oh how well he used those intervals – to discombobulate, to prevaricate, to slyly maneuver himself to center stage. Good riddance I say.
And A.N. Wilson says it so much better in Oldie Magazine. As always, on those fabled Isles, Shakespeare is there to be turned to for just the right anecdote, just the right personage, to explain (away) the most inexplicable; like the petty frivolities and conceits of Westminster and its players. With Johnson it is as with Falstaff; where the comic ends and the tragic begins rests in the eye of the beholder, at the mercy of a fickle audience and electorate alike. So, let the curtain fall on this 21st century Falstaff. (A drink at the bar may be in order as one awaits, and with trepidation, the next act! Believe me – it ain’t promising!)
