A dark lantern and a burning match

In the gathering of the great October storm, I went to see a twenties Macbeth done by the unevenly brilliant Actors' Shakespeare Project.  They began with a silent funeral procession:  mourners with umbrellas walking solemnly behind a baby’s coffin.  (I have given suck.)  Damn.  Works for me.  And of course the three nuns gliding piously in their great swanlike wimples, “All suddenly mount / And scatter wheeling ... Upon their clamorous wings.”  They become the Witches.

Fair is foul.   Nice.  But I wish then they’d cast off their equivocal holiness.  (“Look like the innocent flower / But be the serpent under it.”)  They stayed nuns throughout, engaging in Loudun-like antics.  It was allegory, when it ought to be uncanny.

I liked the Lady in bronze satin, pulling on her long long evening gloves, their shadows serpentining on the scrim.

Allyn Burrows as Macbeth was hacked steel.

I liked the bespectacled cream-faced loon, who'd clearly wandered from a Wodehouse novel into horror, and kept chittering and inching backward with a nervous placatory smile, groping for some lost doorknob, and the way back into Blandings Castle.

Best doubling:  the protean Richard Snee as Duncan/Porter.*

Then I walked home from Medford in the dusk and rising wind, just as the rain began.

It was the perfect atmosphere in which to do the last candlelight-and-shadow touches on my Ben Jonson mystery and send it off.

It’s been a great few weeks for James VI & I.

By good fortune back in May, while visiting with shewhomust and durham_rambler , I caught a part of James Shapiro’s look at Jacobean Shakespeare, The King and the Playwright.  Having just found it online, I’ve now watched all three.

This will be Shapiro's next book, and he's thought long and well on that bruised age.  (His favorite words seem to be “anxiety” and “regime.”)  Of course there was excellent stuff on the Gunpowder Plot, on the trial of Father Henry Garnet and “equivocation” in Macbeth.  But also on James’s deprecation of the old Queen’s tomb (he parked her in a corner with Mary:  take that!  you withered-up and childless queens, you two dead ends), and the exaltation of his mother’s; on Union and enclosure, plague, famine, riot; translation, patronage; harsh winters; alliances, scandals, and the death of an antique Roman prince.  And above all (for me) on Blackfriars:  how moving to a smaller, indoor playing space evolved how Shakespeare wrote.**   Artificial light; a five-act structure, to accommodate the change of candles; offstage fights (one must not run the patrons through or bespatter the toffs with bladders full of pigs’ blood); soft music (we got a lutenist and Ariel); masquing.  Spectacle.  No tongue. All eyes! says Prospero.  Metamorphoses were offstage at the Globe.  Now Hermione is to be seen.

It’s always the small things that catch at me.

When Shakespeare was lodging on Silver Street with that family of  tiremakers—as Charles Nicholl observes—he wrote images of wire and silk:  “the ravell'd sleave of care.”

And now we’re shown a scholar-artist making up a still Hermione.  She holds an oyster shell with powdered pearl in it; she brushes transformation on the lady’s cheek and brow.   She is winding up the magic, stilling time:  when it wakes, the statue will descend and speak.

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*Legendary adlib at an RSC performance of Macbeth:

"...the Porter, swaggering about the stage and ogling the audience, asked in a leering voice, 'Knock, knock!  Who's there?  [pause]  Duncan?  [another pause]  Dunk and disorderly.'"



**Did you know the Globe people were building a Blackfriars?  I didn’t.  Woot!

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