Greer Gilman's Blog, page 33

When the hurlyburly's done...

The fuse was not lit in November 1605.  The sky did not rain blood and ashes.  Apocalypse was not yet now.

May this Tuesday be remembered with thanksgivings, and its villains be a mockery of evil, a display of pyrotechnics, this year, next year, and for centuries to come.

Fire, we sing!

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Halloween 1959

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Here comes a candle...

Yes!

If someone wants to hand Emma Rice a warehouse to play in, I wish her well. Now let’s have someone who loves Shakespeare at the Globe.

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Shakespeare among others

Martin Wiggins has studied every play, masque, or interlude performed or published in the British Isles or by British writers, from the first secular dramas to the closing of the theaters.  (What the Reformation gave, it took away.)  All of it.  The whole corpus.  He's cataloged it all in his magisterial British Drama 1533-1642, "an enumerative, descriptive, and analytical catalogue of identifiable dramatic works, both extant and lost, written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors, in all languages, during the 110 years between 1 January 1533 and 31 December 1642."  He's noted their languages (English, Latin, Greek, Welsh, Cornish),  their metrics (from iambic senarius with "one passage of adonics" to skeltonics and poulter's measure), their sources, settings, performances, parts and doubling of parts, known actors, extras ("a group of morris-dancing SHOEMAKERS (sc. 11; speak collectively)"), and every known penny expended, including late-night water taxis.

I admire the hell out of him.

This means that Wiggins can see the whole evolution of early modern drama in the British Isles:  genres unfolding, dramatic rivialries and emulations, fads and false promises.   John Webster's adaptation of John Marston's The Malcontent (written for the Children of Blackfriars in 1602-1603): "was followed by a prodigious run of dark comedies using its central plot devices of disguised dukes, political displacement, and averted murder; these included Middleton's The Phoenix, John Day's Law-Tricks (1604), and of course Measure for Measure."  It's dizzying to see the landscape from the air.

The Oxford University Press is now up to volume six of ten.  I wish they'd hurry up with the online datadase, because whoa.

A lot of recent scholarship has been on Shakespeare among others, a part of a collaborative venture.

Anyway, the BBC has posted Wiggins's useful graph of Who Wrote What in the Shakespeare canon.  Aside from Sir Thomas More (a special case because that's almost certainly his holograph), this doesn't include his occasional play-doctoring:   a scene or two for The Spanish Tragedy, and what not.  What's awesome is that they've got clips of actors doing both Shakespeare's and Fletcher's bits of Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True.  Which twin has the Toni?  Don't peek!

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Holding up the sky

Good heavens!  Le Guin and Shirley Jackson in this week's New Yorker!

And this in 538:





If only...

Just in case, there's always offworld:  "Any human living on Earth can become a citizen of Asgardia.



I wouldn't have called it Asgardia.  Look where that led.

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Groping for a light switch

"There is no story arc for this man, no journey; he can get no better, and we already knew that he could get no worse. So his narrative is broken. He can no longer be the anti-hero of his own film; he can only be the villain in somebody else’s."

A pity we can't hurl the book at the wall:  it's assigned reading.

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It was sad when that great ship got scoffed

A thing of beauty, this hoax.

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"A crooked figure may attest in little place a million..."

"The veracity of the document was also confirmed by Trump’s former accountant, Jack Mitnick, who told the paper he had to manually input the figure in question because tax preparation software did not allow for nine-digit losses."

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This is the dawning of the Age of Ophiuchus

“We didn’t change any zodiac signs, we just did the math.”

NASA recalculates the Zodiac. Panic ensues.

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"...because it hath no bottom..."

The BBC is is about to livestream the last performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the new director at the Globe.

Oh dear. It looks awfully pimped out. She could have done an "exciting" MSND anywhere on the planet. The glory of the Globe has been that it trusts Shakespeare to speak for himself.

We shall see. And hear.

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