an old George Carlin routine

Books For the past few years I have been fermenting a theory about the porter’s scene in Macbeth. It’s the one moment of levity in what’s otherwise a fairly depressing, bloody play but it’s hampered within our context because it's riddled with contemporary references which render most of it unintelligible to our ears, let alone funny. One of the best productions I’ve seen did away with the Shakespeare's dialogue altogether replacing it with an old George Carlin routine and I think something similar was happening when the play was originally produced and revived during Shakespeare’s lifetime. I think that each time the porter appeared he would comment on a new set of contemporary events, like a Jacobian version of The Now Show and the version that was published in the Folio was the one that the compiler’s considered to be the classic..

All of which is of course, utter rubbish with little evidential prrof and in her appraisal of Macbeth, Kathleen E. McLuskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute in Sratford-Upon-Avon, highlights precisely this kind of abuse, of the play and its writer. She demonstrates that across time from the plays potential first production through to the twentieth century, the essence of Macbeth's text has been stretched and bent to fit the preoccupations of each period, from Davenport’s blanding out and subtly extraction through to the feminist interpretations of the 70s and 80s that apply readings to the text that say more about the theorists themselves than the work as a piece of theatrical drama. It’s not Shakespeare himself doesn’t cast a long shadow; it’s that the nature of his being is also manipulated to fit each new analysis as well.

Arguably the most interesting sections of the book are when McLuskie indulges in her own brand of literary criticism and strips away the play’s theatrical history to return to Macbeth in its purest form, as the text which appears in the 1623 First Folio and tracks a reader’s experience when faced with just words on a page. She demonstrates that with just the verse and stage directions to work with, the reader’s translation, born of a need to concentrate more closely on the evidence and meaning of the text is at some variance with a theatrical experience in which the material is focused through the prism of the director and actor’s interpretation. When a stage direction says that the witches disappear, in our mind’s eye that’s exactly what happens, we don’t require the suspension of disbelief required in the theatre as the three figures sneak off stage.

If nothing else, McLuskie’s book is worth reading for her evisceration of the whole process of attempting to date the play based on the aforementioned porter’s scene and the connection some have made with the gunpowder plot. As she explains, interpreting the porter’s dialogue and translating the references only offers clues for the date when that scene was written. A contemporary account by someone who watched a performance didn’t think the scene important enough to warrant a mention so for all we know it could have been a late addition or a special interpolation that has since become a staple because it was later put down on paper. Similarly the parliamentary destruction connection is probably wishful thinking by those hoping Shakespeare was using a historical situation to comment on contemporary events, Macbeth for James I. But as McLuskie demonstrates the only solid production date we have for Macbeth is the year when it was published.

Macbeth (Writers and their Words) by Kathleen E. McLuskie is published by Northcote House Publisher's Ltd.. £12.99. ISBN: 978-0746308431. Review copy supplied.

Macbeth (Writers and their Work) by Kathleen E. McLuskie.

For the past few years I have been fermenting a theory about the porter’s scene in Macbeth. It’s the one moment of levity in what’s otherwise a fairly depressing, bloody play but it’s hampered within our context because it's riddled with contemporary references which render most of it unintelligible to our ears, let alone funny. One of the best productions I’ve seen did away with the Shakespeare's dialogue altogether replacing it with an old George Carlin routine and I think something similar was happening when the play was originally produced and revived during Shakespeare’s lifetime. I think that each time the porter appeared he would comment on a new set of contemporary events, like a Jacobian version of The Now Show and the version that was published in the Folio was the one that the compiler’s considered to be the classic..

All of which is of course, utter rubbish with little evidential prrof and in her appraisal of Macbeth, Kathleen E. McLuskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute in Sratford-Upon-Avon, highlights precisely this kind of abuse, of the play and its writer. She demonstrates that across time from the plays potential first production through to the twentieth century, the essence of Macbeth's text has been stretched and bent to fit the preoccupations of each period, from Davenport’s blanding out and subtly extraction through to the feminist interpretations of the 70s and 80s that apply readings to the text that say more about the theorists themselves than the work as a piece of theatrical drama. It’s not Shakespeare himself doesn’t cast a long shadow; it’s that the nature of his being is also manipulated to fit each new analysis as well.

Arguably the most interesting sections of the book are when McLuskie indulges in her own brand of literary criticism and strips away the play’s theatrical history to return to Macbeth in its purest form, as the text which appears in the 1623 First Folio and tracks a reader’s experience when faced with just words on a page. She demonstrates that with just the verse and stage directions to work with, the reader’s translation, born of a need to concentrate more closely on the evidence and meaning of the text is at some variance with a theatrical experience in which the material is focused through the prism of the director and actor’s interpretation. When a stage direction says that the witches disappear, in our mind’s eye that’s exactly what happens, we don’t require the suspension of disbelief required in the theatre as the three figures sneak off stage.

If nothing else, McLuskie’s book is worth reading for her evisceration of the whole process of attempting to date the play based on the aforementioned porter’s scene and the connection some have made with the gunpowder plot. As she explains, interpreting the porter’s dialogue and translating the references only offers clues for the date when that scene was written. A contemporary account by someone who watched a performance didn’t think the scene important enough to warrant a mention so for all we know it could have been a late addition or a special interpolation that has since become a staple because it was later put down on paper. Similarly the parliamentary destruction connection is probably wishful thinking by those hoping Shakespeare was using a historical situation to comment on contemporary events, Macbeth for James I. But as McLuskie demonstrates the only solid production date we have for Macbeth is the year when it was published.

Macbeth (Writers and their Work) by Kathleen E. McLuskie is published by Northcote House Publisher's Ltd.. £12.99. ISBN: 978-0746308431. Review copy supplied.

Moffat’s mental desktop theme is switched to sitcom

TV Tom Baker in season eighteen reminds me of a bloke I once worked with who was close to retirement. Like Tom, he’d increasingly seen the latitude he’d built up over his years of long service eroded by a new management team who were intolerant of his work practices and an assistant who’d kept him in check being replaced with youngsters who were either inept, bossy or boring. As the day he was due to leave approached he became grumpier and grumpier until he himself was replaced by much younger chap.

It is Tom’s central performance which makes season eighteen difficult to watch, but there’s no denying that some of the surrealist visions that crop up are the best the franchise has produced, not least in Logopolis, the image of the TARDIS having materialised within its own control room, which then became progressively darker as the Doctor and Adric entered successive blue doors to find a similar scene inside. One of the great missed merchandising opportunities was a set of russian dolls in the shape of TARDII.

This never less than sinister image still had the power to shock in tonight’s Comic Relief story, Space/Time and director Richard Senior played it for all its worth, the dramatic music, the over the shoulder steadicam to reveal, monolith dawn of man approach to its enigmatic form from the Doctor. Not even the single spoilery publicity shot of the Amii flirting in front of it dimmed its inexplicability maintained by the strength of Matt’s performance and that now trademark look in his eye which indicates that the man who’s travelled the universe for an indeterminate length of time is genuinely worried.

With only about eight minutes to play with there was precious little space or time to get out a tape measure and step ladder and start mumbling about entropy so instead, Moffat decided to fill them with a filthy version of Time Crash. We’ve seen the predestination paradox story from Moffat so many times now that to criticise him would be like (as I discovered for the first watching the special Only Connect the other night) slamming Peter Gabriel for his unimaginative approach to album titles or Alfred Hitchcock for torturing so many wrongly accused men.

Like Hitch, who by North By Northwest had purified the elements of his chase plot to such a degree that the significance of the macguffin had reduced the point that it'd become an irrelevant microfilm, Moffat’s so aware of his repetition now that the magical lever that solved the predicament was named after the in-joke which fails to explain everything anyway. Perhaps "the silence" isn’t some malevolent being requiring proper name punctuation, but the collective entropy created by millions of viewers trying to work out were the loop of information begins (“But how would Amy know all of that? Who told the first Amy? Mummy when’s David Tennant back on?”).

But bless Steven for offering something more complex than Ronnie Corbett doing a turn and the stream of innuendo and filth that filled out the rest of script was more than a substitute for the teary nostalgia at the close of Time Crash. Remember when in Curse of the Fatal Death, jokes about the Doctor marrying and Dalek bumps being something like breasts seemed contentious? Way before the watershed, this had what seemed for all the world like a masturbation gag, an attack of the porno reactions for Rory and what my friend Karie described as an endorsement for femslash.

And I loved it. As Tom understood, Doctor Who is at its most engaging when its being funny and even a bit naughty, which is why season eighteen is often so depressing.  Because it is for Comic Relief, for Space/Time, Moffat’s mental desktop theme is switched to sitcom not least in referencing a leary driving examiner (a staple of the genre).  In these few minutes his ability to mix poetry and punchline is on full display, “unexpected house” having the same clever linguistic rhythm as “decorative vegetable”. The performances captured the mood perfectly, especially Arthur who’s pre-slap gape probably mirrored a fair few men in the audience.

And trust Moffat to still leave us with a few questions and not just about whether a wobbly lever exists (the most obvious answer being probably not, as least not in some teen bedrooms tonight). What exactly was Amy’s question?  I can't believe that Moffat would leave a thing like that dangling (sorry).  This can't be just a feed line.  It has to be part of the ongoing story arc, dammit.  If The Impossible Astronaut doesn't begin with a cut away to the Doctor in roughly same position and the question "So what was it you wanted to ask me?" I'm giving up chocolate.  Which I really should anyway.  I think the sugar's beginning to effect my sense of perspective.

But more importantly (for some of us) was the "conceptual space" they’d entered, presumably in an attempt to explain the unexplainable to viewers with a keen ear,  the same area of space the Celestis (or Celestial Intervention Agency) slipped into in order to avoid the War in Heaven, first mentioned in the novel Alien Bodies which is laced with Logopolis references and how did Lawrence Miles, the book's author feel about a central piece of his mythology finally being referenced as part of nu-Who but during a bawdy Comic Relief skit?

Either way, the BBC have uploaded both episodes to YouTube. It would be remiss of me not to also offer this link to the donation page.

Hamlet in "Hamlet" (Mr. H. B. Irving)

From a 1906 Complete Works which includes "an essay on Shakespeare and Bacon by Sir Henry Irving, and a biographical introduction".  He played Hamlet for well over two hundred performances.  A selection of his correspondence on the subject can be found here.  Doesn't he look like a young Wilfred Hyde-White?

To Be Or Not To Be... And Everything Else You Should Know From Shakespeare by Liz Evers.

Sometimes, just sometimes, just hearing snatches of Shakespeare’s verse or language makes me emotional. Could be because I’m subliminally remembering a good performance or just simply the implication of the words, but two lines, if I’ve the courage to type them are “The readiness is all” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”. There are plenty of other and most of them are included in the index of famous lines at the back of To Be Or Not To Be... Oh, um, there’s another one. Hold on while I get a hankie.

As Liz Evers explains in her introduction, Shakespeare’s influence on our language is incalculable but also often subliminal and her book is an attempt to bring these old phrases to new light. With chapters listing every day words whose existence we owe to Shakespeare and correcting common misquotes, Evers succeeds in demonstrating that much of modern English balances on a scaffold constructed by one man, an endeavour she carries out, refreshingly in a field which tends to be depressingly sober, with plenty of wit and bags of wisdom.

Having for years understood it be simple reference, it transpires the Porter’s scene in The Scottish Play was the actual source of the Knock, Knock joke. Who says Shakespeare isn’t funny? But Evers herself turns this revelation into a very amusing joke (I won’t spoil) which itself really is a demonstration of the clever tone the writer sets throughout these pages, mixing reverence and naughtiness. It’s the first time I’ve seen anyone list the words which haven’t gained currency. Hello, bubukles.

Which isn’t to say Evers’s book doesn’t contain much of what you’d expect from a miscellany or companion. There’s a gossipy biographical note that is as interested in the details of Shakespare marriage and love life as whether he even wrote the plays. An entertaining section details the sonnets and demonstrates Evers’s thorough research as she acknowledges Jonathan Bate’s theory about the dedication. A glossary of the major characters manages to usefully reduce the story arc of a figure like Macbeth into four lines.

A large proportion of the book offers lively synopses of the plays which while keeping well within orthodoxy does at least acknowledge the apocrypha. Some of these are longer than others and are never plodding and probably give as much information as is required (the whole of Timon of Athens is reasonably expounded in just three paragraphs). These are augmented with interesting introductions and box-outs pointing to useful background information, mostly trivia, but well chosen.

To Be Or Not Be... is another great example of the gift books published by Michael O'Mara Books which I've given on numerous occasions having bumped into them at Blackwells and Past Times. Their title An Apple a Day, which collates proverbs was a big hit at Christmas, and I'd have no hesitation in passing on Evers's book should the occasion arise. Page after page I was introduced to some new piece of trivia. I didn’t previously know that the remedy for saying Macbeth outloud was to quote Hamlet: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us.” I only hope that works as well in type.

To Be Or Not To Be... And Everything Else You Should Know From Shakespeare by Liz Evers is published by Michael O'Mara Books Ltd. £9.99. ISBN: 978-1-84317-462-2. Review copy supplied.

plenty of wit and bags of wisdom

Sometimes, just sometimes, just hearing snatches of Shakespeare’s verse or language makes me emotional. Could be because I’m subliminally remembering a good performance or just simply the implication of the words, but two lines, if I’ve the courage to type them are “The readiness is all” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”. There are plenty of other and most of them are included in the index of famous lines at the back of To Be Or Not To Be... Oh, um, there’s another one. Hold on while I get a hankie.

As Liz Evers explains in her introduction, Shakespeare’s influence on our language is incalculable but also often subliminal and her book is an attempt to bring these old phrases to new light. With chapters listing every day words whose existence we owe to Shakespeare and correcting common misquotes, Evers succeeds in demonstrating that much of modern English balances on a scaffold constructed by one man, an endeavour she carries out, refreshingly in a field which tends to be depressingly sober, with plenty of wit and bags of wisdom.

Having for years understood it be simple reference, it transpires the Porter’s scene in The Scottish Play was the actual source of the Knock, Knock joke. Who says Shakespeare isn’t funny? But Evers herself turns this revelation into a very amusing joke (I won’t spoil) which itself really is a demonstration of the clever tone the writer sets throughout these pages, mixing reverence and naughtiness. It’s the first time I’ve seen anyone list the words which haven’t gained currency. Hello, bubukles.

Which isn’t to say Evers’s book doesn’t contain much of what you’d expect from a miscellany or companion. There’s a gossipy biographical note that is as interested in the details of Shakespare marriage and love life as whether he even wrote the plays. An entertaining section details the sonnets and demonstrates Evers’s thorough research as she acknowledges Jonathan Bate’s theory about the dedication. A glossary of the major characters manages to usefully reduce the story arc of a figure like Macbeth into four lines.

A large proportion of the book offers lively synopses of the plays which while keeping well within orthodoxy does at least acknowledge the apocrypha. Some of these are longer than others and are never plodding and probably give as much information as is required (the whole of Timon of Athens is reasonably expounded in just three paragraphs). These are augmented with interesting introductions and box-outs pointing to useful background information, mostly trivia, but well chosen.

To Be Or Not Be... is another great example of the gift books published by Michael O'Mara Books which I've given on numerous occasions having bumped into them at Blackwells and Past Times. Their title An Apple a Day, which collates proverbs was a big hit at Christmas, and I'd have no hesitation in passing on Evers's book should the occasion arise. Page after page I was introduced to some new piece of trivia. I didn’t previously know that the remedy for saying Macbeth outloud was to quote Hamlet: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us.” I only hope that works as well in type.

To Be Or Not To Be... And Everything Else You Should Know From Shakespeare by Liz Evers is published by Michael O'Mara Books Ltd. £9.99. ISBN: 978-1-84317-462-2. Review copy supplied.

not naming any names

Film As I've discovered when working my way through everything they've produced in their career, one of the problems with some auteurs is their tendency to fade away (not naming any names but I do still have some hopes for You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger). Perhaps because of the creative itch they continue working and working quietly flushing their reputation down the toilet in the process (Topaz).

Which is why, surprisingly, even though he's one of my favourite directors and certainly the most consistent of directors working now, I'm quite pleased that it sounds as though Steven Soderbergh will be going through with his plan to retire from directing. He just doesn't seem to be enjoying it any more:

""When you reach the point where you're, like, 'if I have to get into a van to do another scout I'm just going to shoot myself,' it's time to let somebody else who's still excited about getting in the van, get in the van."

There will be two more films: Liberace starring Damon and Michael Douglas, and Man From U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney, which from a casting point of view seems like a decent sign off. Unfortunately it also means he'll be curtailing his low budget experiments (begun with Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience).  Maybe.  Itch, itch, itch.

Elsewhere I've reviewed an edition of Hamlet on The Hamlet Weblog and contrary to anything else, for purity's sake, what happens in Hamlet stays in The Hamlet Weblog.

Hamlet (Collector's Library).

Who’s There?

The Collector’s Library reprints a canon of the world’s classic books and plays in hard back editions, the Austens, Brontes, Dickenses, Stevensons and Swifts amongst many others, the kind of item you might offer as a gift. Shakespeare is represented by Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo & Juliet and the Sonnets. These are not academic editions but volumes created for a general readership.

The Cover.

The text is illustrated by the line drawings of Sir John Gilbert (1817–1897) originally prepared for the Longfellow edition of poetical works of the late 1850s. For the cover, Collector’s Library have selected the gravedigger scene. Long term readers will remember exactly the same image was employed on the Dover Thrift Study Edition, albeit not as beautifully painted in pastel shades as it is here by Barbara Frith.

Introduction.

Introductions to general editions of Shakespeare’s play must be an interesting challenge so I entered this with an open mind and indeed Robert Mighall (an expert on gothic horror novels) manages to cover much ground in its eight pages. From usefully explaining the period in Shakespeare’s life that Hamlet was written, to underscoring its reputation (“it is the Mona Lisa of literature” he says), to offering a synopsis that includes an argument that Hamlet’s inaction is his downfall and two long paragraphs on its critical and then cinema screen history.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with Mighall’s approach to the play – in choosing to voice an opinion he gives the reader something more interesting than a basic synopsis and offering a reader that is perhaps new to the play a window into the critical corpus in relation to Hamlet’s dithering and while I might not necessarily agree with it (see this previous review), the writer backs his argument with enough justification for it not to seem as though he’s being pointlessly provocative.

No, he leaves that until the final page where, in the midst of the production history he offers a bizarre ten line critique of Branagh’s film which is both mean spirited and just plain wrong. After punching up the 1948 Olivier (listing its many Oscars) and saying some nice things about Mel Gibson’s performance in the 1990 Zeffirelli, he descends into a diatribe about Branagh’s “hubristic homage to Olivier” (no it isn’t) which ends with the statement “out-Heroding Herod in some of his deliveries, Kenny’s Dane put the ham squarely into Hamlet”. Oh for goodness sake.

The Text.

This edition fails to mention the source for the text, but it's identical to the Dover Edition which indicates it was originally published in Volume VII of the second edition of The Works of William Shakespeare, Macmillan and Co. London from 1892, a conflation of Q1 and F1. So the reader is being confronted with a text which was edited over a century ago which might have given me reservations within an academic context, but seems to fit the Collector’s Library’s intention of producing an edition that’s both contemporary and antiquated.

Glossary.

An alphabetical listing of tricky words and phrases which also includes references to other plays when more than one meaning is involved. Tthese aren’t the excellent notes which appear in the Dover edition however and includes many omissions and words which aren’t even in Hamlet. An online concordance indicates “basilisco-like" only appears once in Shakespeare, in King John. So this must be a general glossary and not one created specifically for the play.

Bibliography.

A short, tasteful selected list that includes AC Bradley, G Wilson Night, J Dover Wilson and Jonathan Bate (The Soul of the Age oddly, not The Genius of Shakespeare, preferring Bill Bryson’s biography instead). The inclusion of the Howard Felperin’s academically challenging Shakespearean Representation: Memesis and Modernity in Elizabethen Tragedy is the only real oddity considering this is supposed to be for a general audience though it’s possible this bibliography is also supposed to represent Mighall’s research for the introduction.

How is it, my lord?

Aesthetically, the Collector’s Library edition of Hamlet is a beautiful thing, a sturdy edition of the play which fits into the palm of the hand and in that sense would work well as a gift. But I do have serious reservations about the overall tone of the introduction which doesn’t seem to have been written with much love for the play and a glossary that doesn’t match the text with which it has been included. So although I’m with Joanna Trollope when she says that it’s “delicious to see guilt edges again” I just wish I’d enjoyed the content more.

Hamlet (Collector's Library) is published by CRW Publishing Limited. £7.99. ISBN: 978 1 905716 80 7. Review copy supplied.

Sir Thomas More (The Arden Shakespeare). Edited by John Jowett.

The Arden Shakespeare’s rattling of the canonical cage continues with this enthralling publication of Sir Thomas More, the collaborative play for which only a few passages have critically been attributed to the bard and because of which, thanks to its extant manuscript at the British Library, we’re apparently able to see Shakespeare’s handwriting. Editor John Jowett offers sound reasoning for the imprint’s inclusion of what was for quite some time considered to be Apocrypha. That thanks to modern textual analysis, consensus seems to be moving towards the idea that sole authorship of most texts was anathema to Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and that of Pericles nestles comfortably in most complete works why should this play be excluded just because Shakespeare’s contribution was considerably smaller?

As with similar Arden editions of collaborative texts, much of the introduction and appendices dedicate themselves to the business of attributing passages to particular authors and explaining the impact that has on the presentation of the included text. This play is unusual because unlike any of Shakespeare’s other works the only contemporaneous text available is the manuscript, which means that the analysis has as much basis in following the handwriting as the content of the words. Said manuscript is also a bit of a mongrel, comprising of an “original text”, a first version of the play written out for submission to Edmund Tilney the master of revels for approval, the Elizabethan BBFC, and then a series of later revisions and additions by a series of other hands including, the critical corpus generally agrees, Shakespeare.

As well as Shakespeare, the primary authors as best can be determined were chiefly anti-Catholic spy-hunter Anthony Munday plus Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood with addition emendations attributable to Edmund Tilney and the mysterious Hand C, an anonymous playwright who prepared the text for performance, if such a performance took place (no evidence exists but circumstantial evidence within the stage directions indicate they must represent a particular staging environment). Jowett offers biographies of varying complexities for them all and its in these passages that we most understand the world within which such a manuscript could be created with various acting groups competing against one another, manuscripts passed about and edited or amended to suite the needs of production.

The process is analogous the rewrite process most major films are subject to and it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare in these circumstances as a kind of William Goldman or Emma Thompson figure, brought into punch up an important speech within the play. As the title suggests, Sir Thomas More dramatises the rise and fall of the Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII and author of Utopia, the philosophical mediation on society. Shakespeare’s contribution is to a scene in which More persuades a group of apprentices unhappy because foreign workers are taking over their trades from taking violent action, a critical moment in the action of the play and development of More’s character in demonstrating his ability to combine intellectual rigour with an ability to communicate with the masses without patronising them.

In preparing the text, Jowett (who is series editor on Arden's new Early Modern Drama series) has followed the lead of previous editors of the Third Edition in employing extensive punctuation marks, diagrammatic components and multiple fonts to indicate the author of the particular section of text we’re reading with footnotes explaining editorial decisions. It is not complete. Words and lines are missing because they’re illegible in the original manuscript thanks to mistreatment and age and some areas have enough gaps that the action almost becomes incomprehensible. But it’s to Jowett’s credit that though in some cases he’s attempted some educated guesses of a few words (and indicated as such) he has left them blank to demonstrate that this is an organic document that more than any of Shakespeare’s plays needs the eye of a director and the capabilities of actors to make it comprehensible to audiences.

The production and editorial histories of the play are closely intertwined, with the former only really becoming viable when editorial copies of the plays first became available at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1956 BBC Radio presented the play as part of a series called ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ with Michael Horden in the title role and in general, despite prominent productions with Sir Ian McKellan, firstly in a 1964 Nottingham Playhouse production and twenty years later for BBC Radio, that’s generally how its been viewed both on stage and in print. There have been serious attempts recently to rehabilitate the play both at the RSC and the Globe however and this brilliant Arden edition will definitely help. It’ll be interesting to see if plays with even fringier claims to canonicity, like Arden of Faversham, will be championed in the future.

Sir Thomas More (The Arden Shakespeare) edited by John Jowett is published by Methuen Drama. £65.00 hardback, £16.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-1904271482. Review copy supplied.

Almost Doctor Who:Happy Accidents

Film Barely seen by anyone on initial release a decade ago but recently gifted a dvd release (and good lord is now watchable perfectly leagally on Netflix) Brad Anderson's film Happy Accidents is an urban Starman-like romance. Marisa Tormei’s serial dating failure Ruby meets Vincent D’Onofrio’s hipster Sam in the park and although he’s kind of eccentric, he’s no worse than most of the mouth breathers she’s previously had to deal with and they begin dating.

At which point he decides to dump a mass of exposition on her about his past, that he’s a time traveller, from the future, that he’s been searching for her because of photograph he found in a junk shop and to describe any more would be to spoil the rest of what is an entertaining piece of Sundance indie which is worth seeing even if you're not entirely convinced by anything else I'm about to write. Just don't look at anything else I've seen online. It all gives the game away.

The most immediate similarity is with the tv movie and the moment when the newly regenerated Eighth Doctor is also babbling about Gallifrey and the Master, Tormei’s blasé reaction mirroring Grace’s acceptance that her world is changing so she’d best just go with it. Arguably Rose too, through in the first couple of episodes of nu-Who the Doctor is rather more reticent about his past thanks to Russell T Davies only writing in enough to gain a new audience's attention.

At first this seems like coincidence; these are the kinds of relationship tropes or emotional beats that are typical to this kind of story and the central question of whether Sam’s lying or not reflect’s similar posers in everything from K-Pax, to The Man From Earth to Starman to the surreal Starry Night featuring a man who looks like and thinks he may well be Vincent Van Gogh.

Then about an hour in to Happy Accidents, there’s a line of dialogue which literally made me spill tea on my lap because it was in my mouth when I started laughing. It’s in one of the long expositional scenes when Sam’s attempting to convince Ruby of his sincerity and she’s looking at him as though he’s as nuts as she’s slowly becoming convinced he is.

He’s describing the kinds of time travel which are possible and says that “Blinovitch's Second Law of Temporal Inertia – blah blah blah”. The blahs are were I was looking for a towel to mop up the beverage. On rewinding and listening again, though he doesn’t use “limitation effect”, he’s making up new Blinovitch laws about what is and isn’t possible which someone has helpful jotted down on the (oh yes) wikipedia page:

"Blinovitch's Second Law of Temporal Inertia" apparently states that is impossible to time travel in your own lifetime. One can only time travel to the distant past, and only small changes in history are possible, which will "dampen out" by the time they reach the relative present.

"Blinovitch's Fifth Law of Causal Determination" resolves (in an unspecified manner) all paradoxes involved with time travel.

In the midst of this most American of indie sci-fi adventures, Vincent D’Onofrio uses one of the stone cold canonical names from Doctor Who and in such a way that for a brief moment (well not that brief probably), I wondered if I’d been oblivious to something all these years and it was an actual scientific law. I even headed straight to Google to check, hence knowing that a wikipedia page exists on the subject, which proved very handy come the Christmas special and the malarchy surrounding the finale.

Originally created by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts to explain why Day of the Daleks doesn’t make any sense it is pure fiction and writer/director Anderson is simply tipping his hat to one of his inspirations, which suggeststhe similarities with the tv movie might not be so coincidental. But by the end of the film, since there’s nothing else in the story that Lance Parkin could pinch his nose over, I pretty much decided I was watching something set in the Doctor Who universe. The dvd now sits on the same shelf as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

failed my A-Level in English Literature

Books In her introduction to The Shakespeare Quiz and Puzzle Book, author Maggie Lane (who's created similar volumes about Jane Austen and The Bronte Sisters) says that she’s “concentrated on the passages we are all familiar with in the belief that it is always a pleasure to come upon what is known and loved” but that at the same time she’s made sure that our knowledge is still being challenged. That this quiz and puzzle book has an introduction anyway shows how much thought Lane is putting into the exercise and she’s certainly succeeded in her aims.

Unlike the Pocket Posh, which I reviewed previously, Lane’s book is aimed squarely at Shakespeare fans and scholars. The clues for crosswords and most of the quizzes consist of quotations with missing words the reader must fill in and the name games ask for biographical details about a list of characters – occupations or family relationships. Only in the word searches does Lane assume no prior knowledge, though it might be a help given the unfamiliarity spellings.

In other words, my mettle has been thoroughly tested and I was simultaneously proud and exasperated. In theory having seen the play over thirty times in different forms, the Hamlet crossword shouldn’t be a problem but I discovered there were still gaps in my knowledge – though of course not all of the productions have been from complete texts and so I have heard some passages more often than others. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself as I skipped to the next clue hoping to fill in some useful letters.

Elsewhere – well let’s just say I don’t know some of these plays as well as I thought I did. Lane’s posers are well chosen since often the clue to the missing word is elsewhere in the quotation taking full advantage of Shakespeare’s poetry, for example, when the character is making a point by mixing thematic antonyms. But what I’ve mainly discovered is that in watching the plays I may have spent moare time following the story and enjoying the performances than absorbing the poetry. Nothing much has changed since I failed my A-Level in English Literature.

The book is illustrated with drawings by H.C. Selous taken from a famous complete works commissioned by Charles Cowden Clarke in the late 1860s and reprinted dozens of times since. They’re entertaining examples of pantomime Victoriana, all grand emotional gestures, bowed heads and pointing and give the book, despite its original publication date in 1984, a sense of timelessness. Now I’m off to sharpen my pencil. “If sack and … be a fault, God help the wicked.” Um.

The Shakespeare Quiz and Puzzle Book by Maggie Lane is published by Abson Books. £4.95. ISBN: 9780902920569. Review copy supplied.

The Shakespeare Quiz and Puzzle Book by Maggie Lane.

In her introduction to The Shakespeare Quiz and Puzzle Book, author Maggie Lane (who's created similar volumes about Jane Austen and The Bronte Sisters) says that she’s “concentrated on the passages we are all familiar with in the belief that it is always a pleasure to come upon what is known and loved” but that at the same time she’s made sure that our knowledge is still being challenged. That this quiz and puzzle book has an introduction anyway shows how much thought Lane is putting into the exercise and she’s certainly succeeded in her aims.

Unlike the Pocket Posh, which I reviewed previously, Lane’s book is aimed squarely at Shakespeare fans and scholars. The clues for crosswords and most of the quizzes consist of quotations with missing words the reader must fill in and the name games ask for biographical details about a list of characters – occupations or family relationships. Only in the word searches does Lane assume no prior knowledge, though it might be a help given the unfamiliarity spellings.

In other words, my mettle has been thoroughly tested and I was simultaneously proud and exasperated. In theory having seen the play over thirty times in different forms, the Hamlet crossword shouldn’t be a problem but I discovered there were still gaps in my knowledge – though of course not all of the productions have been from complete texts and so I have heard some passages more often than others. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself as I skipped to the next clue hoping to fill in some useful letters.

Elsewhere – well let’s just say I don’t know some of these plays as well as I thought I did. Lane’s posers are well chosen since often the clue to the missing word is elsewhere in the quotation taking full advantage of Shakespeare’s poetry, for example, when the character is making a point by mixing thematic antonyms. But what I’ve mainly discovered is that in watching the plays I may have spent moare time following the story and enjoying the performances than absorbing the poetry. Nothing much has changed since I failed my A-Level in English Literature.

The book is illustrated with drawings by H.C. Selous taken from a famous complete works commissioned by Charles Cowden Clarke in the late 1860s and reprinted dozens of times since. They’re entertaining examples of pantomime Victoriana, all grand emotional gestures, bowed heads and pointing and give the book, despite its original publication date in 1984, a sense of timelessness. Now I’m off to sharpen my pencil. “If sack and … be a fault, God help the wicked.” Um.

The Shakespeare Quiz and Puzzle Book by Maggie Lane is published by Abson Books. £4.95. ISBN: 9780902920569. Review copy supplied.

Artifacts:Liverpool Daily Post promotional eraser with the old logo on it.

a broad enough eye and heart

At first glance, The Shakespeare Encyclopedia is an impressive volume. Open up to any double page spread at random and the eye is greeted by a feast of colour from classical paintings illustrating the plays or well chosen photographs from a range of productions, broadly from the past decade underscoring that these aren’t dead plays, but stories and characters that continue to breath to this day. Visually it has everything you’d want from a coffee table book and even without reading the text you’re left with an overwhelming sense of the variety of the man’s work and how it has influenced culture across the decades and centuries.

Which isn’t to say the text itself is a disappointment, it just depends what you’re picking up this kind of book for. Eschewing the expected alphabetical list of entries from perhaps Aaron to York, the content is more akin to tomes with handbook or guide in the title, opening with biographical and contextual information, followed by individual entries for the plays and poetry in genre groupings. Which puts it in direct competition with the likes of the Rough Guide To Shakespeare, offering an overview of a vast subject for people who don’t want to have to wade into an Arden and just find a synopsis of the story and a brief outline of the themes.

What sets it apart, is the decision to employ multiple authors, twenty-odd academics from across the world and not straight-jacket them too much in how they structure their entries. There is a synopsis, a dramatis personae and relationships table but beyond that it is left to the author to emphasise what they believe are of most interest or importance be they sources, themes or production history rather than including all three by rote. This makes the book a more alert and vital read without the slight element of repetition that can creep in when a single author is attempting to bring the same level of interest to Timon of Athens as The Tempest.

That leaves the reader’s expectations continually flouted. The introduction seems like a fairly standard run through but two whole pages are dedicated to the apocrypha and whilst the content itself isn’t that detailed, it’s still surprising to Fair Em even mentioned. The first pop culture reference in the book is to Doctor Who on a page that also photographically highlights The Maori Merchant of Venice. The chief consultant A.D. Cousins isn’t quite as unorthodox as to gift Edward III a full entry (unlike Dorling Kindersley’s Essential Shakespeare Handbook) but the section on the sonnets and narrative poems is the longest and best illustrated I’ve seen.

In her Hamlet entry, Jane Kingsley-Smith, Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University offers a persuasive argument that far from its reputation as a model revenge tragedy, the play is most interested in rewriting the conventions set out by earlier works by injecting elements of Catholic guilt and a heavy burden of a title character conflicted by twin duties to his late father and the state. Adorned with photos of arguably the primary screen Hamlets, Olivier, Branagh, Smoktunovsky and Tennant (thanks to the blu-ray) Kingsley-Smith’s entry itself surprises by concentrating on the adaptation history of the play giving lip-service to both The Lion King and Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius.

Readers seeking a more structured analytical approach to the plays may feel alienated and also dissatisfied that pagination must to have been selected based on the popularity of the plays, with Lear gifted ten sides and The Two Noble Kinsmen just two, barely enough time to scratch the surface of what is a deceptively complex play. Picture captions are also a bit of a mixed bag. With such a glorious selection of production shots, I would have liked to have seen more clearer labelling of dates, venue and director, or in the case of paintings and sculpture their ownership and display, especially since this may be the only occasion when many of them are reproduced.

Which is what really makes this a very special volume. Similar guides contain these kinds of shots, but rarely this number, and most often in smudgy monochrome. But page after page is filled with scenes brought to life with a broad enough eye and heart to include both Patrick Stewart in the Chichester Festival Theatre and the straight to dvd production with Helena Baxendale as Lady Macbeth. Previously, my main impression of Timon of Athens is the cheap set and static staging of the BBC Shakespeare (which is notable by its absence here) but the action shot fro the Globe of Simon Pasiley Day hurling gold in the air with the Banditti scrabbling for it is enough to make me consider looking at the play in a new light.

The Shakespeare Encyclopedia: The Complete Guide to the Man and His Works. Chief Consultant A.D. Cousins. Published by Apple Press. £20.00. ISBN: 9781845433390. Review copy supplied.

The Shakespeare Encyclopedia: The Complete Guide to the Man and His Works. Chief Consultant A.D. Cousins.

At first glance, The Shakespeare Encyclopedia is an impressive volume. Open up to any double page spread at random and the eye is greeted by a feast of colour from classical paintings illustrating the plays or well chosen photographs from a range of productions, broadly from the past decade underscoring that these aren’t dead plays, but stories and characters that continue to breath to this day. Visually it has everything you’d want from a coffee table book and even without reading the text you’re left with an overwhelming sense of the variety of the man’s work and how it has influenced culture across the decades and centuries.

Which isn’t to say the text itself is a disappointment, it just depends what you’re picking up this kind of book for. Eschewing the expected alphabetical list of entries from perhaps Aaron to York, the content is more akin to tomes with handbook or guide in the title, opening with biographical and contextual information, followed by individual entries for the plays and poetry in genre groupings. Which puts it in direct competition with the likes of the Rough Guide To Shakespeare, offering an overview of a vast subject for people who don’t want to have to wade into an Arden and just find a synopsis of the story and a brief outline of the themes.

What sets it apart, is the decision to employ multiple authors, twenty-odd academics from across the world and not straight-jacket them too much in how they structure their entries. There is a synopsis, a dramatis personae and relationships table but beyond that it is left to the author to emphasise what they believe are of most interest or importance be they sources, themes or production history rather than including all three by rote. This makes the book a more alert and vital read without the slight element of repetition that can creep in when a single author is attempting to bring the same level of interest to Timon of Athens as The Tempest.

That leaves the reader’s expectations continually flouted. The introduction seems like a fairly standard run through but two whole pages are dedicated to the apocrypha and whilst the content itself isn’t that detailed, it’s still surprising to Fair Em even mentioned. The first pop culture reference in the book is to Doctor Who on a page that also photographically highlights The Maori Merchant of Venice. The chief consultant A.D. Cousins isn’t quite as unorthodox as to gift Edward III a full entry (unlike Dorling Kindersley’s Essential Shakespeare Handbook) but the section on the sonnets and narrative poems is the longest and best illustrated I’ve seen.

In her Hamlet entry, Jane Kingsley-Smith, Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University offers a persuasive argument that far from its reputation as a model revenge tragedy, the play is most interested in rewriting the conventions set out by earlier works by injecting elements of Catholic guilt and a heavy burden of a title character conflicted by twin duties to his late father and the state. Adorned with photos of arguably the primary screen Hamlets, Olivier, Branagh, Smoktunovsky and Tennant (thanks to the blu-ray) Kingsley-Smith’s entry itself surprises by concentrating on the adaptation history of the play giving lip-service to both The Lion King and Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius.

Readers seeking a more structured analytical approach to the plays may feel alienated and also dissatisfied that pagination must to have been selected based on the popularity of the plays, with Lear gifted ten sides and The Two Noble Kinsmen just two, barely enough time to scratch the surface of what is a deceptively complex play. Picture captions are also a bit of a mixed bag. With such a glorious selection of production shots, I would have liked to have seen more clearer labelling of dates, venue and director, or in the case of paintings and sculpture their ownership and display, especially since this may be the only occasion when many of them are reproduced.

Which is what really makes this a very special volume. Similar guides contain these kinds of shots, but rarely this number, and most often in smudgy monochrome. But page after page is filled with scenes brought to life with a broad enough eye and heart to include both Patrick Stewart in the Chichester Festival Theatre and the straight to dvd production with Helena Baxendale as Lady Macbeth. Previously, my main impression of Timon of Athens is the cheap set and static staging of the BBC Shakespeare (which is notable by its absence here) but the action shot fro the Globe of Simon Pasiley Day hurling gold in the air with the Banditti scrabbling for it is enough to make me consider looking at the play in a new light.

The Shakespeare Encyclopedia: The Complete Guide to the Man and His Works. Chief Consultant A.D. Cousins. Published by Apple Press. £20.00. ISBN: 9781845433390. Review copy supplied.

it turned into an ambush

TV Author Keris Stainton recently wrote a short column about her Twitter addiction as result of which she was invited to a recording The Vanessa Show she thought to expand on the points made in the column, as an expert on the subject. But as she explains on her blog, it turned into an ambush with Keris effectively held up as a freak:

"The actually interview is pretty much a blur, but I know she started by saying something about how she was amazed that I’d agreed to join them in the real world, something about “isn’t it true that you never even talk on the phone anymore!” and that my husband gets annoyed that I’m online all the time! And that I’m on Twitter when I’m with my kids!"

"I was completely wrong-footed. I remember thinking, “Wow. You bitch.” But at the same time I felt a sort of grudging admiration. She’s a pro. And I was naive. And I knew I was screwed. It’s The Vanessa Show, after all."

Well, yes, but it depends on how the show characterised what Keris's participation was going to be. Plus, because it was recorded and not going out live there probably also wasn't much room to ambush Feltz back by pointing out that all this was only based on her leading questions in the make-up room since that could be censored.

Derby Shakespeare Theatre Company Production at the Derby Theatre.15 March until 19 March 2011.

The pitch:

"Derby Shakespeare Theatre Company is proud to return to Derby Theatre with a ghostly tale of revenge and passion. This exciting new production will make full use of the Derby Theatre stage to bring this dark supernatural story to life.

Derby Shakespeare Theatre Company are delighted to bring possibly Shakespeare’s finest, and certainly one of his most challenging plays to Derby audiences."

Tickets, timings and telephone numbers.

isn't just about football and The Beatles

Liverpool Life You've probably read it everywhere else first but it is still worth mentioning. The Museum of Liverpool opens Tuesday 19 July 2011, which as Sam notes on the National Museums Liverpool blog "is a significant date as it is exactly 100 years after the museum's iconic neighbour the Royal Liver Building opened its doors."

Needless to say I'm very excited about this. I adored the smaller Liverpool Life museum but knew that the city could do with a larger building that properly captured the history of the city with enough space to display the objects that tell our story, objects which otherwise were strewn across the many sites or in the museum stores.

Now we will have an architectural statement that should act as the epicentre for both our tourism and for younger generations to learn about the place in which they live, that isn't just about football and The Beatles, but something far deeper and more complex.  My heart beats with pride.

the other danger with Shakespearean trivia

Books Even for the seasoned Shakespearean the idea of a quiz or puzzle book dedicated to the canon is a fairly intimidating prospect (fairly?).  Most of us probably know some of the plays very well, the tragedies and comedies most often produced and everything else as a vague recollection. How do you produce something which is accessible enough to be enjoyable for a general audience and distracting enough for scholars?

Apart from some straight quizzes, the Pocket Posh® William Shakespeare’s main approach is to present a series of puzzles that can mostly be completed without an extensive knowledge of the plays. The crosswords have a series of shaded boxes that will spell out a play or character once the grid is completed. Word searches, kriss krosses and code crackers list Shakespeare related words to be fitted in or found.

I went straight to the quizzes, which were indeed quite tricky, some questions asking for events in specific years which I think scholars are still arguing about. But I managed an (in my head) respectable 16/25 which included a guess for one of the posers on page one hundred and twenty-four the basis for which looks factually incorrect to me or at least is open to greater discussion than presented in the totality of the answer.

Which is the other danger with Shakespearean trivia – even the very language of the plays is hotly contested especially if there’s more than text being worked from. So it probably is just as well that behind the attractive wrap around cover, the bulk of the other clues in the book – for the crosswords – are far less ambiguous mostly consisting of straight general knowledge questions that we all have a shot at answering.

Pocket Posh® William Shakespeare: 100 Puzzles and Quizzes' by The Puzzle Society is published by Andrews McMeel. £5.99. ISBN: 9781449401252. Review copy supplied.