A 17TH-CENTURY MIKE LEIGH

Isabel Lloyd — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:37:42 +0000

~ Posted by Isabel Lloyd, April 27th 2012

Just in time for his birthday, it’s been announced that Shakespeare got some help writing “All’s Well That Ends Well”. The stylistic fingerprints of Thomas Middleton, WS’s younger, hipper contemporary, are all over some sections of the text, researchers say; they go on to paint a picture of early-17th-century theatre as a place of creative cross-fertilisation and collaboration, like “a film studio with teams of writers". Britain’s most feted genius farmed out bits of scripts to underlings? You can almost smell the bile rising in the dress circle.

But at the risk of being pelted with rotten tomatoes, I have a pet theory of my own. At university, studying Shakespeare and with an eye on a career in theatre, I was constantly puzzled by the flatness of some of Shakespeare’s female characters, particularly the young ones. The liveliest young women—Rosalind and Viola—dressed up as young men. Miranda, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia—more often than not, they seemed like ciphers that stuff happened to, simply to further the plot. My instincts rebelled against the thought of playing these girls—all they were was pretty and nice, and a bit irritating sometimes. No meat to them. But I put it down to dodgy 17th-century sexual politics, and trotted off to drama school. read more »

FROM SHAKESPEARE TO HUFFPO

Robert Butler — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:26:10 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 23rd 2012

The birthday tributes to Shakespeare today range from the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival to the publication of a sonnet by Mark Ravenhill, best known as the author of the play "Shopping and Fucking". Ravenhill's sonnet quotes him twice (both times from "The Tempest") and mentions him three times ("Shagsbeer", "Shaxpeer", "Will-full"), but the distinctive Shakespearean argument—the theme, the development of theme, the counter-theme and the reversal—are missing. You wouldn't know from Ravenhill's sonnet that he had read any of Shakespeare's.

Another birthday tribute this morning came from Arianna Huffington who tweeted, "Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare! Whoever you were, there's never been anyone like you." This brought a blunt retort from @brokenbottleboy: "You know that he was paid for his work?" (Not only paid, of course, but a shareholder too.) Nothing marks the 400-year gap between Shakespeare's world and ours more than a website that attracts 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54m comments in a year, and yet its best-known aspect is that it doesn't pay for its content. read more »

After a Journey

Philip Davis — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:52:34 +0000

IT WAS 30 years ago in the bookish front-room of a house off the Chesterton Road in Cambridge, England.

It was the home of Muriel Bradbrook, a Shakespearian scholar, and I was the most junior lunch guest, literally sitting in the corner on a stool, chewing and chewing away on a piece of home-made liver-pate, with muscle. (In the end I found aÂ flower pot, or else I might still be there, chewing and chewing.) I was among some of Cambridge's finest golden-oldies of the literary-critical world.

"I believe it could be said of me that I am a modest man", announcedÂ L.C. Knights,Â Â another Shakespearian. To which Bradbrook, in that squeaky rodent voice of hers, at once responded, "Oh yes, Lionel, indeed you are!"Â I was glad to be occupied with her liver-pate.

I never had much luck with L.C.Knights, who, for all his saying so, was actually a very decent person who had done good and serious work. Two years earlier, I attended some public evening lecture of his. I should have realised that even at this stage he had become a man sick of the sound of his own public voice. It wasn't just modesty. But I was an aggressively unhappy, insecurely awkward and unembarrassably rude young man, willing to take out on anyone my late-adolescent hatred of Cambridge. So when Knights said for the umpteenth time in his career that "King Lear" was "life-affirming", I shouted out from the audience, sticking to my text: "Never, never, never, never, never." I specialised in these kamikaze interventions. What surprised me, however, was that it was not Knights who responded but the large and aged woman sitting next to me.

"What you mean," she said loudly, "is that the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike."

"No, that is not at all what I mean," I replied.

For the next few minutes we sat audibly bickering at each other, while Knights himself looked on, lonely and aghast, from the dais above and in front of us. Later, someone informed me that the lady was his wife.Â Â

"Life-enhancing" was a key Leavisite phrase, F.R.Leavis being one of the founders of the great Cambridge English movement of the 1930s. These were the days when, with I.A. Richards and William Empson, literary criticism over here was at the cutting-edge of new thinking (days long, long since gone of course). But I much admired Leavis when I read him at school, in particular a great essay on Dickens's "Little Dorrit": he made you think that literature mattered greatly. When I got toÂ Cambridge in 1972, I wrote Leavis a desperately unhappy letter, asking him whether I could pay him a visit and ask for advice. By then he was in his late 70s, a visiting professor at York, but still living in Bulstrode Gardens in Cambridge, never having been given a professorship in his own university, and always feeling rejected by the establishment.

He opened the door of his house, with his shirt open almost to his navel. I remember the thick white and grey chest-hair. It was said he kept his shirt open like that, beneath his thick blue jacket, because he had been gassed in the first world war. A conscientious objector, he had nevertheless served as a stretcher-bearer. He told me himself that he had not been able to speak when he got back from the front because of all he had seen there. In fact he seemed to tell me everything about himself, during the half hour he gave me, while he paused from his writing.

Leavis never asked me why I had come to see him or what my problems were.Â Perhaps he had already recognised them. Instead, ourÂ visit ended badly, when he said heÂ was expecting a visitÂ from an Indian academic in connection with the poetry of Montale. He thenÂ said that he didn't normally have to do with Indians, but in this case . . .

I was a 19-year-old idealist and horribly shocked. This was the man who insisted on the moral relation of literature to life. One of the Leavisites to whom I had confided this a year or so later told me not to worry: Leavis was not an anti-Semite. But that, of course, was not the point and hardly a comfort.Â At the time I excused myself.Â Leavis said he must not let his writing go cool and would show me out, butÂ I told him not to bother. As I was leavingÂ his study, I saw he was writing, in large flowing black ink, about Thomas Hardy's poem "After a Journey"--a subject heÂ was revisiting afterÂ some 20 years.Â

Leavis died in 1978. In his last few months, I was told, heÂ ran round Bulstrode Gardens in the nude, like King Lear. I don't believe he was a racist. It was a foolish Cambridge remark made by a man who had stopped listening.Â I've justÂ re-read his essay on "Little Dorrit" and his piece on that Hardy poem, and am still moved by both. "Trust me", writes Hardy to the ghost of his dead wife:

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The bringing me here; nay bring me here again!

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I am just the same as when

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

It is all rather life-affirming, 30 years later.Â Â Â Â

Philip Davis is professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life", and editor of The Reader. read more »