Pah, just missed midnight, and I'm still a post behind if I want to average one a day (there was no post on Wednesday the 29th) but anyway, Act Two of the definitiver Richard II is now uploading, and will be posted below once done. There were ninety minutes of recording to cut down this time, but I'm glad I'm having another run, now I'm clearer what's going on: Richard having no idea actually how hard he's pushing people's buttons is a lot more interesting to play longterm, Bolingbroke feels like someone people might now be genuinely happy to meet, and – upping the Celtic quotient – York's more fun to play now he's not so stiff-jawed and uptight and sounds like Titus Andronicus, another ill-starred old soldier whose loyalty to the state turns him against his own son – that's all in the future though; right now, it's just a more enjoyable voice to complain in. York should bark. Its partly his overestimation of the power of that bark that loses him so many allies. And it's nice to recast a voice. If you're following these videos, I think that's Mark Antony's voice as Mowbray, and possibly Cassius' as Harry Percy, but his part's going to be built up.
That's John Wilkes Booth above left playing Mark Antony, ironically perhaps given he was the Booth who'd actually go on to assassinate someone, and that's his initially more famous brother Edwin as Brutus to his right with their brother Junius Jr. as Cassius. Maybe of all the big roles in Julius Caesar, Antony was just considered the most actor-proof. Has any other single play proved so historically significant? Assassination's played such a disproportionate part in the history of America, a country so influenced by an idea of Rome, that idea so influenced by Julius Caesar. Here's the full story:
And, again according to wikipedia, as early as 1937 Orson Welles was reframing the play as a parable of Fascism, a political phenomenon Shakespeare documents with astonishing acuity given he was writing over three hundred years before it happened, but maybe it all seemed so familiar because in providing us with the warning Shakespeare was also writing the handbook. And what could we do with that warning, anyway? Cassius' contempt in Act One for the people he's proposing to "liberate" seems just as prescient, although not necessarily unjustified given Shakespeare's depiction of the mob. It's almost a trademark of Shakespearean
tragedy that it's always the wrong people who are right.
Here's the whole thing:
And here's "Titus" again, showing just how bad things would get. The opening victory of the chaotic but ruthless tyrant Saturninus over the principled but patronising democrat Bassianus is almost Julius Caesar in microcosm:
And here's "Shrew", doing for the institution of marriage what "Two Gents" did for courtly love:
And here's "Two Gents". We get to call them these now that we're experts:
And finally here's Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year:
So that's over fifteen hours now of me talking out of the side of my mouth, something I had no idea I did until I made these. No, I like it. Shows a lack of training. Adds character. Thanks again to all who've supported me, and this, and here's a rattling cup for anyone who wants to be in that number.
(Titus' sleevelessness seems a bold costume choice, given what's coming.)
I've not much more to say: Shakespeare never stopped having fun with meta-theatrical villains, but Aarons' successors would concentrate more on the mechanics of a convincing performance, rather than just seeing what they could get away with. As indeed would Shakespeare.
Concerning the play's many classical allusions, Natalie Haynes
Stands Up for the Classics – now on its sixth series – is more than just a great show, it's an education, and here's her episode on Ovid, whose Metamorphoses was such a huge influence on not just this play but every character in it. Natalie doesn't mention the story of Philomel – and who can blame her – but she does talk about
Actaeon (whose fate Tamora threatens Bassianus with) thus: "It's a recurring theme in the Metamorphoses that when people lose their power, they lose their voice."
In a reading, losing one's voice can mean complete disappearance; but turning the pages, and writing in the sand, Lavinia gains her voice again, and that's why I thought we should hear it. It's why I also wanted us to hear the rustling of Titus' letters, and why I didn't want Chiron and Demetrius to scream, because they too should vanish as soon as their mouths are stopped. Performing a reading, rather than a staging, one notices far more the absences resulting from violence – such as Lavinia's voice, or Titus'
hand – rather than the resultant gore. So I got lucky there.
When first staged, I think they used real blood, purchased from the butchers, but does
anyone knows how what they did for the scene with Titus' cousins firing arrows up to
Heaven? Elizabethan theatres had open rooves, of course, so maybe the actors
just fired arrows into the air and out into the street. That must have
been fun.
Finally, while shedding tears over Titus' corpse, and
deciding the fates of Aaron and the bodies of Saturninus and Tamora, I don't think anybody in the last scene ever mentions Lavinia, even in passing.
Long before I'd read or seen Titus Andronicus I'd known how it ended because of Brian Cox's Acting in Tragedy, posted above. "One of the myths I'd like to dispel is that tragedy cannot be funny" became a guiding principle for me, and something I felt this play in particular seemed to be leaning into when I finally got round to reading it at university. However, as I said in my introduction on Monday (okay, Tuesday) the tone of Titus isn't much of a mystery, it's Horror, so I tried to give it the full Tobe Hooper, which helped me realise I'll probably need to take a break soon.
Knackering.
But however smudgy some of this week's work might be, at 3:48am on this Saturday morning I can honestly I say I'm really proud of how this turned out. Last Sunday I privately noted down some of the decisions I'd already made (containing spoilers if you haven't already seen the video below):
"The Andronici will probably be Welsh: Titus deep
and exhausted, Marcus level, Lucius bordering on the shrill... Aaron will be a cockerney villain, and cry uncontrollably with laughter recounting his evils in Act 5.... The eating
of the pies will bring Titus no solace at all though, there's no such thing as revenge, and the murder of his daugher will be a
last ditch attempt to find solace in the precedents of mythlogy."
That last decision wasn't necessarily what I ended up playing, which probably comes across as more premeditated, but I knew I had to decide whether or not Lavinia was consenting to her own death, and since in this presentation she'd have no presence because she had no lines, there was no way to signal that consent, so it would have to be without. And since I didn't fancy playing "hey, it's an honour killing, they were different times, potato potarto" – nor did I see anything in the text to suggest I should – the whole story had to be secretly heading towards this moment, a far darker ending than the more famous serving up of Chiron and Demetrius in pasties, so tradition had to be monstered, and especially the folly of Titus' even small-c conservatism. The extensive classical references made more sense here too; people were trying to understand their horrible lives through the stories that mirror them. All of this I realised on Sunday. Here are some things I only realised today:
I probably had to decide in what state Aaron's child was presented in the final scene, as there's no clue in the actual text whether they're alive or dead. I went with Lucius keeping his oath (that's me mewling in the background, you can probably tell) and I really enjoy how it affects Aaron's final line... Aaron's mocking pronunciation of "god" felt like maybe one quirk too many, until I came to Lucius having to say the word immediately afterwards, and then it felt like a good and useful gag, speaking of which... I hadn't been paying nearly enough attention to
Tamora this week. I'd decided she would be Scottish but that was
kind of it (at least I'd decided Bassianus would be boring). So I finally put more work into her today, and that "yeah, maybe reel it in a touch?" glance she gives Chiron was my favourite thing to look back and watch... After editing the video, I realised I'd unconsciously used rain again as a shorthand
for exile. I just thought the scene could do
with some thunder... Having decribed the Emperor as a villian yesterday, I love the intimation that if Titus had actually just come to him with Lavinia's accusations, he would have got justice.
Here's act five, lovelies, and a playlist of all five acts is here.
Has this whole "play every single character in Shakespeare" project just been a cover for me wanting to play Aaron the Moor? It feels a bit like that at the moment. Act Four contains one my favourite scenes in drama.
I've always loved how un-Machiavellian a villain Aaron is, but the Emperor – Aaron's opposite in many ways – is an interesting villain too, and this play really nails how many appalling human traits and weaknesses can become frustrating strengths if you're already at the top. Not positives. Strengths. Like acid blood. Saturninus' paranoia certainly seems a more useful superpower than Tamora's cunning.
And I did toy with providing a voice for the tongueless Lavinia but it just sounded like Chewbacca. Or even worse, when I tried dialling down the distress, like Sammy the Crab.
Anyway I'm off now to sleep and perform extensive checks on my privilege but in the meantime, here's the fourth act of Titus Andronicus, containing racism, rape, and murder, so be warned, and also me trying to do Mark Heap's Jim from Friday Night Dinner. Actually maybe this whole project has been so I could do that.
Features two deaths, a birth, and many people's favourite Shakespearean comeback.
Words by Alan Moore (again) who hates this now. Art by Brian Bolland, who doesn't.
Appropriately, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's thirteenth episode is Titus Andronicus' Act Three, featuring heaps of wailing and gnashing of teeth lightened only by a quick appearance from the most committedly evil character in English literature. There's no way it wasn't going to be knackering but still, I'm sorry my reading's not a bit more lucid, screaming iambic pentameter isn't much fun to watch. "Going mad" is such a staple of literature, and especially horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking it actually happened.* Trauma can make a person feel more removed from reality but that's not the same as "going mad", and to his credit "madness" in Shakespeare was, or at last became, a quite specific idea, a liminal place whose inhabitants – those suddenly hit by trauma or depression – would react as if they've suddenly realised they're characters in a play, physically present in a work of fiction, unrecoverable by reality. So Shakespeare found the stage a useful machine for exploring grief, and even the famous tea-towel-adorning "All the World's A Stage" is spoken by a character called "the melancholy Jacques". In Elizabethan medicine, "melancholy" means "manic". It's no more a celebration than "Born In the USA".
Trigger Warnings: More mutilation, a lot of crying, and the death of a fly.
*UPDATE 19th July 2026: Shows how much I know! I have since learnt – watching Denise Fox's breakdown on EastEnderswith my then flatmate who knew someone who suffered similarly – that trauma-triggered psychosis absolutely happens.
Catching up on the classics, if not on sleep, and still on the subject of sound effects in iMovie, the single cue above is all that came up when I searched for "horns". It is also a peculiarly accurate six-second summary of the entirety of Titus Andronicus' absolutely pitiless Act Two, presented below with some relief but, after unusually little deliberation for me at least, ultimately no comedy horns.
Trigger Warnings: Rape, Murder, Mutilation, Racism, Hunting and Falling Down Holes.
At midnight last night there was a cut of Act One of Titus Andronicus
all finished and ready to be uploaded to youtube, but it had no
"flourishes" – the trumpets and drums repeatedly referenced in the
stage directions. It had no sound design at all in fact, and that was fine, obviously, these were just meant to be readings. But I had really begun to enjoy how much scene-setting, even world-building, could be done with the right effect (as I said here) and ideally, I wanted to give something similar to Titus, especially given how different it was to what had come before, and how much the play's version of Rome bordered
on Fantasy (like all Horror). The thing is though, I'm very indecisive, and
choosing what to add, and whether or not to keep it, takes up at least a third, maybe a half of the total time I'll spend on these videos, and that seems mad. An earlier edit of
Act One (about nine in the evening) was plastered in iMovie's "Suspense" cue in place of the flourishes, a simple electronic chord nothing like a flourish, but an abstraction
which set a mood and didn't sound too ridiculous, yet ultimately had too little going for it beyond just being tolerable (and even that was questionable, given how often I was using it – there's only so many times you can hear a "Suspense" chord before it goes from foreboding to dithering). So I dropped all the cues, uploaded the act without flourishes, went for a night walk, and began to think more and more about the "Vintage News" march that I'd earlier dismissed as too wacky.
Material is limited on a night walk.
I did love how un-alien the march had suddenly made Rome, by
which I don't mean that it stopped Rome seeming weird, but that it made
Rome's weirdness far less easy to write off as alien. It meant I wouldn't be presenting the story as a trip to a faraway, savage time, but as a nightmare just a couple of wrong decisions away, in which duty, tradition, processions, seeking for comfort in precedent, the celebration of war and just the very concept of "victory" were all complicit, and fair targets. And so by the time I'd got back from my walk, sticking an old newsreel march with no inkling of tragedy through a "Cathedral" effect to lose the crackle, and then playing that over a human sacrifice felt like getting a lot off my chest, which seemed a valid feeling to have when presenting Titus Andronicus. So I re-edited the act (there's always tweaks) re-downloaded it in place of the original edit, managed to render only about ten minutes before it crashed my laptop, crashed my laptop trying to fix it, crashed my laptop again, crashed my laptop, went to bed, didn't sleep much, woke, had an idea, thought I'd fixed it, uploaded it onto youtube, found out I'd fixed it but hadn't actually finished the edit before uploading it – huge thanks to @Christelle_C for the head-sup – took it down again and had another tinker, and so that's why it's only going up now. And why it has the tune for Adam and Joe's "Big British Castle" plastered all over it. Sorry. I know I said I'd keep my youtube and blog more separate from now but, guys, really, this is all I have to show right now so Ta – as I say – daaa:
Sorry that this "Saturday's blog" is arriving so late on a Sunday...
When I decided to move from Defoe to Shakespeare, I hadn't considered how big a part silly voices would play in the new undertaking. I just thought it might be fun if one of the outlaws in Two Gentlemen sounded a bit like Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy, and then realised that if he was American maybe all the outlaws should be American, and then that if everyone in Milan was American I'd have considerably more voices to play with, and viewers might actually be able to tell what was going on right down to the who's whose, and that whether or not I could actually do any of these voices accurately wasn't the issue as long as I held my nerve and stuck with whatever sound was coming out. Choosing a voice was like choosing a mask: it didn't just provide the illusion of range, it gave a usefully immediate idea of how a character might behave, allowing me to act genuinely differently without having to do anything as creepy as actually putting on a mask.
Like wearing a mask however, it also presented the risk that a departure from naturalism would mean a loss of detail. Not that a performace couldn't be big. Poetry is big. But it shouldn't be unwieldy. Or it should be unwieldy – wielding something unwieldy is part of the fun of it – but you had to still be the person saying the words. You had to – continuing the sword/mace/hammer metaphor – keep a hold on it. Not just let go and pretend you're still wielding it.
And there were other benefits to using voices whether or not I could actually do them: "regional accents" no longer needed to be the reserve of the non-posh for example, and in a play so concerned with who has the most stuff, associating status with a character's accent seemed an unnecessary distraction. Added to which I find it hard to play convincingly big in my own polite, second-gen Received Pronunciation voice, and I knew I wanted to go into this reading playing it big.
Home continent poster.
Basically, I knew that I wanted to honour the trashiness of this play. I don't just mean how well it's traditionally catered to a kind of Renaissance Fair fetishism (perfectly legitimately – Shakespeare includes a scene in which a woman binds her sister's wrists and beats her, so kinkiness is a signature feature although, crucially, there's no spanking as there would be in Kiss Me Kate – the violence meted out on Shakespeare's Katherine is restricted to restraint, sleep deprivation, and enforced vegetarianism) for I would still be reading in my pyjamas, and you'd never see my legs, so this would be a hard to honour. What I mean is that coming to the play knowing it quite well, and not really liking it (and certainly not having any idea how I'd eventually play Katherine's final speech) I at least knew I couldn't do what I'd seen the weekend before, in Jonathan
Miller's BBC version, which despite the
casting
of John Cleese – or maybe Cleese was instrumental in this – makes every
effort to spare its audience's blushes by presenting as joyless,
uncomfortable, and low energy a Petruccio as possible, maybe in an
attempt to "let the play breathe", but with the same result normally
attending such exercises in "trusting to the text", namely a long,
boring thing doesn't make sense. I felt that if I was going to work out how to like the play, or at least present something likeable, morality would have to go out of the window and I'd have to present a play of forces. You didn't have to like these people, you just had to enjoy them.
And I thought about Kusturica, and how much I'd always enjoyed these dangerous arseholes:
Because Petruccio is Shakespeare's first glamourisation of the human glitch, the
bug that risks sending the system crashing, like Aaron later in Titus Andronicus, or Iago in Othello, or even Hamlet in Hamlet. He's gonzo, in the Fear and Loathing sense, not the muppet sense, and while making him Australian was a very last minute decision (inspired by how much Germaine Greer weirdly sings his praises in The Female Eunuch) I'm very glad I did, because giving him an accent other than mine definitely helped, although it did make his back and forth with the West Country Katherine incredibly fiddly. "Englishness", by which I mean my middle-class-narrator strain of it, carries with it such a sense of existing comfortably within a system, and yet the possibility of comfortably existing within the system is meant to be what's being questioned.
And the European version.
So, yeah, the problem – the problem I didn't know how I was going to
address on Monday – was not Petruccio, but Katherine. Because it's one thing to
denounce the grubbiness of the marriage contract by having a possibly
sociopathic anti-hero boldly state his wife is chattel,
but it's quite another to have his headstrong wife publicly agreeing. But Katherine isn't just headstrong. In her treatment of Bianca she is
legitimately a total fucking nightmare (and attempting to
make the play more "feminist" by portraying Bianca as a duplicitous
b-word deserving of such treatment simply because she's the only woman managing
to single-handedly steer a course through everyone's bullshit seems... well it
doesn't seem very feminist). I was therefore fine setting up Petruccio
against Katherine in a kind of Alien Versus Predator way, and I
wasn't worried about portraying both participants as horrible, because
they were discomforting inhabitants of an order that was also horrible. But what I was worried about was presenting a woman falling in love with the man who "breaks" her as a happy ending.
So... I
played it as well as I could... day by day, act by act... and by the end of Act Four
there was still no sign of Katherine being broken. She submits, but Hortensio's presence here is crucial, because it means she has a witness to Petruccio's misidentifying of the sun, so she's not gaslit, she's just going along with a stupid game because she has no choice, which is definitely progress. Miller's Shrew showed Kate suddenly having the time of her life with this submission, laughing uncontrollably when pretending Vincentio was a woman, but showing Kate actively enjoying this submission didn't seem necessary – or, more crucially, remotely believable. It's just no big deal. By Act Five then, I found Katherine still playable. And she didn't have to be in love to kiss Petruccio in the street. All I had to play was that she goes along with it.
But still. A kiss is a pretty big story beat. Maybe then, it just didn't have to be that big for Katherine, which is how I found myself tolerating what followed. If the kiss floored Petruccio, I thought, some power could be restored to Katherine, and given the play wasn't going to end with the downfall of the patriarchy, maybe great sex could provide a happy ending instead. It didn't seem likely, but thinking along those lines as I continued to read the act, Petruccio certainly seemed goofier now, not remotely furious, and with the rest of the table turning on Katherine, and with Katherine having learnt that pretending wouldn't kill her, her sudden reinvention as the perfect wife now seemed perfectly playable.
But still not a great ending.
Until, reading Katherine's massive speech in the light of a newly soppy Petruccio, I suddenly saw "will" and "kneel" and "smooth" and "parts" and "come", and an exercise in aggressive seduction playfully masquerading as submission, and I saw Katherine playing with her power over Petruccio – and maybe with all the men seated there – and then I saw Petruccio's "Come, Katherine, let's to bed" and thought, yeah, that'll do, that's what the couples getting married at the end of Shakespearean comedies really means. It's never a story of "happily ever after". It's a story of two people working out the happiest way to end up in bed together. And that's hard to convey when you're a middle-aged man in pyjamas reading from a big book (and I really wish I'd held that eyeline for all of "soft and weak, smooth") but anyway, that is what I think happens at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. Just don't worry about the morning after. You can see me perform the whole play here, let me know if you've any questions.
