BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE AND WILD GEESE

"I, also, want to use one of the Fool's lines as a title for something -- 'Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way.' Can't think how to shorten it.
   "Is there any connection between wild geese and Lady Wildgoose? Lady W and her sister Lady Sandy tried, in 1603, to get their old father Brian Annesley registered as insane. They were frustrated by their cordell. Shakespeare must have heard gossip about it."

   Alec Guinness. My Name Escapes Me

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MARLON BRANDO AS MARK ANTHONY

"Although he was an avid reader and memorizer of Shakespeare, his performing experience had been confined to an acting-school production of “Twelfth Night” and, more recently, to taunting Vivien Leigh—then Mrs. Laurence Olivier—with a nastily precise imitation of Olivier’s Agincourt speech from “Henry V.” The director of “Julius Caesar,” Joseph Mankiewicz, came upon his star studying tapes of speeches by Olivier, John Barrymore, and Maurice Evans, and complained that the genteel result made him sound more like June Allyson. Brando later explained that the most daunting aspect of playing Shakespeare was relying on the written text, since he had learned to search around and under words—in pauses, in gestures, in grunts and mumbles, even in silence—for a sense of truth."


 Claudia Roth Pierpont. " Method Man:the greatest American actor lost his way" in THE NEW YORKER (October 20, 2008)

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SHAKESPEARE'S HEROES & JACK NICHOLSON

"(JEREMY) Larner was angry that the heroes of Drive were not true heroes but in the mock-heroic vein. He cited an example from Shakespeare. Nicholoson
batted it away. 'Hey, Jer,' Jack sneered. 'Shakespeare, what Shakespeare? 'We're reaching  more people than Shakespeare ever dreamed of.'"

**

From light-verse writer BRUCE NEWLING


"Because I was so young when my father died, I have only fragmentary memories of him; and almost all I know of him was derived from accounts provided primarily by my mother but also by a few family members.  Michael Kirke, a first cousin fully a generation older than 1, for example, told me that my father had a fine singing voice and therefore he was often cast as the clown in such Shakespeare plays as "Twelfth Night," singing, as called for, during the course of the play.  My niece Sian (Welsh for Jane) has a framed photograph of my father dressed as the clown or fool in cap and bells, sitting cross-legged and holding a lyre.

Coincidentally, in 1947, as part of the quatercentenary celebrations of the founding of the school I attended, Queen Elizabeth's School in Crediton, Devon, a non-speaking part was created for me in a production of "Twelfth Night." I was cast as the page to Malvolio, the steward to Olivia.  My costume in black was the same as that worn by Malvolio, and we each wore a ruff; I carried a staff, as he did; and my role required that I mimic every gesture of Malvolio, as if I were a living shadow of him, you might say.  I had to strictly confine my attention to Malvolio—no side glances at the audience—and the whole effect was to point up the vanity and insecurity of my master, complementing the cruel practical jokes played on him by Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

The play was performed on an openair stage backed with a tall yew hedge on the grounds of the girls' school next to mine.  Malvolio was played by the town physician, Dr. Jackson, and it was he who proposed that Malvolio should have a page, having seen a London production of the play many years before in which Malvolio had not one page but six.  Sir Toby Belch was played by the physics master Gordon Vasey, who produced all the school plays while I was there; and there might have been one teacher from the girls' high school in the cast. Otherwise, the roles were played by boys and girls from the two schools.  

I have a photograph of the entire cast, 32 in number, standing side by side in a line across the entire width of the stage.  I pose kneeling on one knee, with Malvolio standing behind me.

Orsino, duke of Illyria, was played by a senior boy named Peter Bagi, and his delivery of the lines with which the play opens remains with me still.  "If music be the food of love, play on.  Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die."   And very soon thereafter: "Enough, no more.  'Tis not so sweet now as it was before."  Oh, my.
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MASTER OF THE REVELS

"An officer first appointed in 1494 to serve under the 
Lord Chamberlain , and supervise Court entertainment.
   "The office became extinct in 1734 with the 'Licensing Act,' at which time the Lord Chamberlain's took over Responsibility for the Supervision and 'Censorshiorship of
Plays."

E.K. Chambers. The Elizabethan Stage. Volume 1 (Oxford
University Press, 192
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THOSE THAT PLAY THE CLOWNS

"'Those That Play the Clowns'must pay the piper, and so, after four performances, at the ANTA , the poor players involved, among them Alfred Drake and Joan Greenwood, went to rest. The show had to do with what might have happened to the group of strolling players in Denmark lured by Hamlet to do their bit in his tragedy. It was written by Michael Stewart, and his dialogue was remote from the Globe."

John McCarter. "Theater" in The New Yorker (December 3, 1966)
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"BEESEECH YOU,SIR, BE MERRY"

At the 9th hour
Reckoning from sunrise,
Our lives speak:
Hold now, Fellow. Much,
In spite of dying,
To be merry about.
None too subtle
When out shoots the verve
Of heaven shine.
Light. More light!
Blazed by sun,
The fluted world writhes,
Blisters with flesh,
With mercy.
Gradual lusters
Of heartfelt longings.
I beseech you, Sir,
Bury the dead. Turn
To the loom of the living
Where even wormwood laughs.

Louis Phillips