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.
IS THIS YOUR DOG? The master-servant dynamic I have with my laptop is, now I think of it, not dissimilar to Lance's with Crab, but then, whose isn't?
Here is Act Five of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the playlist of all five acts can be enjoyed/endured here which means, yes, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's maiden production is now a thing that has happened! If I keep this up, all of of Shakespeare will have been done by Christmas and nobody need ever do any again. Sorry for taking down the old Act V, but the one comment that managed to make it in comparing the finale to "gluing the head of a funny dog onto the body of a man" seems about right to me. Is the end rushed, or just bad? It's probably not the last time this question will arise. I think if we're meant to believe Proteus is reformed, we definitely need at least another four acts, but maybe it's meant to be distressing? Shakespeare's work is full of monsters native to a world where women are property and decapitated human heads mark the boundaries of the city, so I didn't want to artificially sweeten the story just to spare the viewer outrage, but also you want some continuity of characterisation, you want to believe what you're showing. It was at 4am the night before recording that I realised, if I played Valentine's immediate forgiveness of Proteus with furious sarcasm rather than with dramatically baffling sincerity, his insistence that Proteus and Julia immediately patch things up and marry would become strategic rather than just conciliatory, and it could be Julia's presence that initiated the men's reconciliation, rather than Valentine's own frankly misplaced do-goodery. In other words interpreting Valentine's lines in bad faith, while dodgy, didn't just let the conclusion be more palatable, it let it be more interesting. The mechanics of a happy ending could serve to illustrate something more tragic, or at least cautionary, for which we wouldn't have to want Julia and Proteus to get together, we'd just have to believe Valentine would want it. Whether any of this is detectable from me shouting across my laptop in pyjamas is of course moot. Either way, it would still have been nice to hear from Sylvia... Rewatching it all I see Valentine predicted Proteus would "prove a fool" for love in the very opening scene, which is one way of putting it. I also notice Sir Eglamour is named as one of Julia's suitors in the next scene, so he's not as chaste as all that.
To answer a couple of questions: While I was reading the Defoe a day's passage in advance I'm much more familiar with the Shakespeare: I've seen every play at least once - I've watched the entire BBC box set for a start, and there are only two plays of which I haven't seen at least one other version: Pericles, and this one - so I think I'm going to rewatch the Beeb versions again each weekend before recording - it's always good to see some kind of decision made on how a character might be played whether or not you go with it - and I'll also read the play. Other than that I'm treating this a little like a radio recording - get the script not much beforehand, choose the voice (big voices aren't just necessary to distinguish the characters, they're freeing... they're new vehicles to take round - and possibly hopefully off - the course... I mean, you can really charge at these lines), read the script, record the script. The main difference is, as the above would suggest, that I'm also going to have to work out what the hell's actualy going on in, which is the biggest work, but also the biggest reason for doing this maybe. As for how this differs to playing opposite other actors, um, if anything I'm finding it easier, but I'm not going to beat myself up too much about that, collaboration's not about making something easier, it's about making something together. And I miss being able to react, but that's a logistical issue, not a creative one. In secondary school, or whatever the posh version I went to was called, one of our English teachers Peter Holmes would arrange "rehearsed readings" of Shakespeare, which were in fact completely unrehearsed, just meetings after school to sit in a circle with the text, stand and move to the middle when it was your cue, then just play it. Like I say, charge at it. Peter was absolutely convinced that this was doable, and he was right, and I've missed that.
In the end though I decided to leave today's song musicless, so the viewer could choose their own accompaniment. I want to say, not really knowing this play, I was absolutely knocked for six by this act. I love it. I love it so much I used a Vonnegut quote for the title. I love it so much I put Yondu in it.
I'd forgotten how intertwined my love of
Shakespeare was with my love of Alan Moore. I fell in love with the both
at about the same time, when I was thirteen, and coming back to the
full works of Shakespeare now, I'm struck again by how many strengths I see hims sharing with Moore's eighties output. Both writers moved from working in slaughter houses to working in a popular medium derided as poisonous trash, both took the plots and themes of contemporaraneous fantasies - chivalric love in Shakespeare's case, super heroes in Moore's - and tested them in a real world populated by knowable characters with often distressing consequences. Neither seemed particularly interested in heroes either, yet both seemed to find it easy to believe in utterly sociopathic villains, to the point where their becoming the most fully rounded characters in any story would be a given.
None of this has anything to do with the fact Moore gave his final comic the same name as Shakespeare's swansong, by the way. I've only just realised that.
Both love words, and both use loads, and equate writing with magic and magic with world domination, producing not just genre-defining but medium-defining works of cosmic ambition, beauty, fun, never forget fun - works full of lines I wanted and still want to say and references I didn't and still don't get, but also ultimately, merciless works, unmistakably angry that fantasy isn't realisable. Angry, and basically frightened. None of this has It still didn't occur to me though, that Shakespeare's first comedy might prove a more disturbing read than Defoe's account of London in the Plague, but that's because I'd forgotten why I loved him so much. Here's today's then, and after that you'll probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Soho takes its name from the hunting cry used here by Lance by the way. And I also love crusts.
Hmm. 23:40 and I've just finished editing today's Shakespeare youtubery. I don't mind if the videos are going to take this
long, I just need to plan it all a bit better, that's all. But while I wait
for that to upload...
... here in a similar vein is a beautifully
developed and tender bit of love at first sight featuring a travelling brush salesman from Million Dollar Legs (W.C.
Fields' first feature, although he didn't write it and he's not in this scene). Red Skelton was also a travelling brush salesman in that Bela Lugosi sketch I remember. It was
definitely a thing. I'll post today's video below once it's uploaded. I've only cut the one blatantly anti-semitic line from it, and I tell
you what that was in the introduction, so this is still the complete
works.
Maybe this will be the worst one I do. Maybe not. I was certainly nervous. It helped that Shakespeare's first play seems to be almost exclusively dialogues, but even so the conversants sound pretty similar... When I was intoduced onstage for the Finnetour last year (John Finnemore's Flying Visit) my character boasted four voices: Normal, Shouting, Sottish and Lady, and I knew this was joke but I wasn't sure why John had chosen those specific four voices, but then sure enough, as soon as I finished today's recording I realised those were exactly the four voices I'd used,a dn so went to get the T-shirt you'll see in the openind. I hadn't intended to use sound effects, by the way, it's just when I came to edit this my opening lines seemed nerve-wrackingly bare I thought some "atmos" might help give the scene some energy, and as soon as I put it on (it being iMovie's "City Night Crowd") I felt, if nothing else, a less alone. Scene Two had no atmos because it's indoors, but I did add some door sounds, still not entirely convinced about the addition of random effects though, but here's why in the end I've decided to keep them in. Working out which scenes to add the street sounds to, something about the world of this play became suddenly clear to me: I was only adding them to the scenes with men in. Women didn't go outdoors.
