BITS AND PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: SHAKESPEARE

for Mark Curley

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS VISITS STRATFORD-ON-AVON

“At Stratford I felt as I had not before that one 
of the most charming things in Shakespeare, a man 
so variously charming that his contemporaries each 
might love him for a different thing, was his fondness 
for his native town.”

William Dean Howells in The Seen and unseen at 
Stratford-on-Avon: a Fantasy (Harper& Brothers 
Publishers, MCMXIV)

THE 1955 MOVIE JOE MACBETH

“We’re doing Macbeth on a sex basis. I’m playing 
a slut(Lady Macbeth) , Joe Macbeth (Paul Douglas)
 is a gangster who turns yellow and leaves the 
killing up to  Lily. I’ll do it with a revolver.
 We thought a knife would be too bloody"

RUTH ROMAN, quoted in TIME (April 4, 1955)
**
IMPROVING KING LEAR:  NAHUM TATE IN 1681

          “He produced a happy-ending Lear that held 
the stage from the late seventeenth until the early 
nineteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson found 
Shakespeare’s ending almost unendurable (though
 he retained Shakespeare’s  text for his own edition 
of the plays).In the Tate revision, the story ends 
in a way that justice, and especially poetic justice,
 seems to require: Lear gets his kingdom back and 
then resigns, and Cordelia marries Edgar, Glouster’s 
good son . (JAMES)   Shapiro read us some of the 
fustian Tate: “My Edgar, Oh!” –“Truth and Vertue 
shall at last succeed,.” Everyone laughed.

David Denby. Great Books (New York: Simon and 
Schuster, 2005)
**

ORSON WELLES ON FALSTAFF

“He is the character in whom I  believe the  most
 entirely good man in all drama. His faults are 
trivial, and he makes the most enormous jokes from 
them. His goodness is like bread, like wine. That 
is why I  lost the comic side of his character a 
little; the more I played him, the more I felt 
that he represented goodness, purity.”

From an interview in Cahiers du Cinema, quoted
by Charles Higham in ORSON WELLES (NY: St.Martin’s 
Press, 1985)

**
FROM MACBETH TO JOE MACBETH IN ONE EASY JUMP

“Shakespeare wrote so much and his plays are,
 by modern standards , so long that on one level, 
it’s simple to select from the basic text a script 
which will fit almost any current thought or superstition. Hamlet can be a queer or the prototype of Oedipal 
confusion, the key to Lady Macbeth can be, as one
 method actress pointed out, the phrase, ‘unsex me here.’’

      John Elson in London Magazine (Oct. 1969)
**

ON De QUINCY AND THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE IN MACBETH

“When Macbeth and his wife  do their dreadful deeds, 
ordinary, healthy life ceases , but we were not aware
 of that suspension because we were spending our time in
Macbeth’s mind, through his soliloquies . The knocking is
what De Quincy calls ‘the pulse of life beginning to beat again’;  ‘and the re-establishment of the goings-on of
 the world to which we live, first makes us profoundly 
sensible of the of the awful parenthesis that had  
suspended them.”

James Wood. The Nearest Thing to Life (Waltham, Ma.
Brandeis University, 2022)

**
WHY SHOULD I REPINE?

Shakespeare was not accounted great
When good Queen Bess ruled England’s state,
So why should I today repine
Because the laurel is not mine?

John Kendrick Bangs

**

CANON DIXON,  A CLASSMATE OF WILLIAM MORRIS, 
REMEMBERS READING SHAKESPEARE

“About this time, 1854-5, we started weekly Shakespearean readings in one another’s rooms. Fulford, Burne-Jones, and Morris were all fine readers: so was Crom Price who had 
come up three or four terms after us, to Brasenose.  We 
used to draw lots for the parts. I remember Morris’s 
Macbeth, and his Touchstone particurly; but most of 
all his Claudio, in the scene withIsabel. He suddenly 
raised his voice to a loud and horrified cry at the words ‘Isabel,’ and declared the awful following speech, ‘Aye, 
but to die, and go we know not where ‘ in the same pitch.
 I never heard anything more overpowering.’”

J.W. Mackail. The Life of William Morris , 1968.

**
WAS OTHELLO BLACK?

“The Moors are a white race, tanned a trifle by 
the sun, of course, but most certainly white, 
so that Othello could not have been black, or,
 if he was, he was not a Moor.”

C.E. Clark. More Mistakes We Make.

I say if Shakespeare says Othello is a black Moor 
then he is a black Moor.
**
STAND IN or THE NIGHT I KISSED MIRANDA

As stand-in
I read all the parts,
Actors, actresses, & props

Came down with colds
Or called

In sick. No sooner did the news
Arrive but I flew

Down the aisle, prompt-book
In hand & took

My place upon the stage,
1st as savage

Caliban, or Ferdinand
Or Ariel, filling in &

Playing every role in turn,
Clowns, lords, kerns

& gallowglasses were all one
To me. High flown

Rhetoric brooded in the wings,
One scene a king

Mismatched, unbuckled
As lighting men called

Out their cues, then next
Some princess vexed

With love or overeating.
Couplets on my tongue

Timed the scenery into place,
The list of characters passed

Through my lips. I was them all.
If anyone were ill,

I was well, danced & capered,
Cut a jig, kissed & read

For empty seats, an empty
House –“Oh Lord, flee

To Agincourt before it is
Too late.” Alas, alas,

Hero & heroine were cursed,
Yet stood self-assured

Within the light & I
Rode home. Stand-in, fie
Upon it. Oh fie…..


Louis Phillips