Christopher Harding has a PhD in English Literature and Language from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis was on "The Influence of Renaissance Drama on the Novels of Sir Walter Scott." Besides teaching at Harvard, Boston College, Tufts and UMass/Boston, he taught "Shakespeare Comes to the Slammer" for over 10 years at the Suffolk County House of Correction. He has performed in productions of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew," "Troilus and Cressida" and "Twelfth Night." He has been teaching Shakespeare appreciation courses at UMass since 2006.
It is rare that an academic read with hundreds of references is also a
"page turner," but "She Hath Been Reading" manages to merit that
distinction. "She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in
America" (SHBR hereafter) by Catherine West Scheil is a historical
analysis of the women's Shakespeare club movement in the United States
which flourished, approximately, from 1880 to 1940. She is
simultaneously analytic, critical (in the literary sense), and
sympathetic to a movement which resulted in over five hundred social
clubs dedicated, to some degree, to reading and explicating the works of
the Bard of Avon.
She tackles head-on the question: Why would
mostly married women across the nation, from Anaheim to Zanesville, from
California to Maine, from Minnesota to Mississippi devote time and
effort to reading, debating, discussing, and critiquing Shakespeare's
works? Her answer? You'll have to read SHBR to find out.
SHBR
consists of introductory materials, four numbered chapters, an appendix
which lists the five-hundred-plus clubs which have been created, and the
references. Each of the numbered chapters considers a different aspect
of the central question: Why Shakespeare clubs? I found Chapter Four
to be the most fascinating of the numbered chapters. In it Scheil
addresses Black women's clubs with a focus on Shakespeare. A factoid
which fascinated me was that in 1893 in Kansas there was a statewide
conference of Black women's clubs which included presentations of
Shakespeare study groups.
SHBR also explains that while the focus
was on the intellectual development of the club members there was also a
strong component of feminist and social activism. For example, SHBR
notes that many public libraries, including the public library of
Dallas, Texas, were founded by Shakespeare clubs within the communities.
Other clubs funded scholarships for women to allow them to be
academics.
In summary, if you are interested in learning about a
quintessential American movement with a feminist component while
experiencing a "good read" I highly recommend "She Hath Been Reading:
Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America" by Catherine West Scheil.
Can't hold a candle to it: lighting the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
From Liberace candelabras to fiery breeches, the theatre's Cumbrian-made candles shed a unique light on its shows
Nobody can hog the
limelight if there isn't any … Hannah McPake and Giles Cooper in The
Knight of the Burning Pestle. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The candles at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse couldn't be more
simple and elegant. Most of them are long, slender and slightly tapered,
like the fingers of fashionable gloves in Jacobean portraits. Their
wicks have been dipped and dipped again in molten Yorkshire beeswax at
Ted Thompson's Moorlands chandlery in Alston,
Cumbria, but if British bees don't increase their productivity soon,
he'll be supplementing domestic output with wax from small beekeepers in
Ethiopia.
The Wanamaker keeps around 2,000 candles in store, but
that's hardly a fortnight's supply. For each comedy or tragedy, opera or
recital, more than 100 are lit in the chandeliers or on the bronze
sconces strapped to pillars. They're the lighting, the setting, the
special effects; they can edit a production into cinematic noir, or
party up an evening into conviviality. Very slowly, their honeyed smell
and invisible smoke pervades the unvarnished oak and pine of the wooden casket that is the Wanamaker. Everything about the Wanamaker is experimental, and the candles are downright edgy.
I
confess: I'm a candle fan. Nobody quite expected there would be real
candles as the Wanamaker was being built – a US mock-up of Shakespeare's
indoor playhouse has electric ones. But Martin White, professor of
theatre at the University of Bristol and a spellbinder on the history of
lighting (you should hear him talk about the smutty fug of mutton
tallow dips), proselytised live flame from the start, in a fiery cabal
with the Globe's artistic director Dominic Dromgoole.
Together, they summoned the architects, the London fire brigade and the
Globe's insurance company and auditioned candles. And they got the
part.
The safety advisers saw how it would work: there's a megafan
above the ceiling that can suck anything out, a smoke detection system
that knows the difference between candle smoke and a problem, and the
ventilation system makes draughts flow up, not across, so the flames
barely even flicker. (Here's the science: a candle is a stick of solid
hydrocarbon. Heat from its flame melts a pool of liquid fuel that
slithers up the wick by capillary action and vaporises. Keep it upright,
and it won't melt gutters in the pool's rim, through which hot wax can
spill, and the wick will keep working to the last stub of wax. Tall
candles emit a calm starriness; shorter, fatter candles glow on faces.)
So
there they all were at the Wanamaker late last year with the first
programme of productions finalised, and everybody was enthralled to the
archaic novelty of candlelight – as are audiences as soon as they enter
the theatre. People come in as the stage managers methodically light the
chandeliers dropped on ropes, the luminescence equal to only a few bare
bulbs. The audience's eyes adjust to the modest illumination by the
time the branches soar upwards to about eight feet above the stage,
their optimum height of operation. (Haul them above that, as Ben Jonson
once specified, and a general darkness comes upon the stage – flame
sheds light more from the side than from above.) The rising brilliance
gets a gasp. But does it have possibilities beyond this?
Gemma Arterton in The Duchess Of Malfi. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Oh yes. Dromgoole, directing the inaugural production, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi,
picked up White's close reading of early works for the new playhouses –
which were in their time dark boxes, almost like cinemas where light
also controls image, mood, framing and narration. Even where there were
windows, shutters were mostly kept down: indoor theatre was meant to be
intimate, appealing to the unconscious as movies do (and with a music
score, too). Some Jacobean scripts had lighting cues, demanding the best
bright-burning wax candles on stage to make the dark denser when they
were extinguished.
"If any of it becomes more important than the
story, you're screwed," said Dromgoole. So the candles for The Duchess
of Malfi were serviced gravely – snuffed, and their wicks trimmed at the
interval to keep them soot-free, and their chandeliers ceremonially
raised and lowered. In northern Europe we have 1,500 years of church
candle culture, and we still read their rituals as reverence.
And
then, lights out! Malfi is the play in which the gothic enters the
English imagination, and gothic can't enchant by day. So the chandeliers
were put out, and characters carried their own lights, which reflected
their true natures. The Duchess was sensuous yet vulnerable, with her
face powdered pearly and lit by a single candle. The period's tall white
collars acted like those parabolic reflectors in movie-making. Her
matching cuffs magnified hand gestures, her rich clothes faded to dark
masses. The ambivalent spy Bosola held his polished sconce high, half
his profile strongly lit, the other indecipherable. The villains entered
with Liberace candelabras in their fists; the mad Ferdinand might well
have been, as he claimed, a werewolf, as flames glittering back from his
eyes.
Light is the ultimate bit of stage business – Rada needs a
candle module and the Wanamaker already has a workshop. Dromgoole had to
teach his actors to share their light, move their candles slowly (or
risk them blowing out) and relax with them. By chandelier shine, the
show's in mid-shot; hand-held candles zoom it into extreme close-up. In
fact, Dromgoole went as far as utter blackness for Malfi, where Webster
only requested gloom. Jacobean revenge plays on the Globe stage pick up
on their horrible comedy, but in the Wanamaker you scream: you just
can't see things coming. And candlelight played straight cuts out the
camp.
As Adele Thomas, the director of the Wanamaker's current production, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,
was told glumly by everybody, nobody laughs in darkness. The first
thing that struck her about the place: "not the oak – but that it was
candlelit, the biggest elephant in the room." But the steady burn of the
chandeliers dissolves the actor-audience fourth wall, just as its
playwright Francis Beaumont wanted. In 1607, the audience "plants" sat
on the stage and leaned in to interrupt the actors with their demands
for an alternative play. In 2014, they bob between pit and stage, which
share the same candle power. Nobody can hog the limelight if there isn't
any.
Dromgoole was wary of the "National Trust carols at
Christmas" nostalgia evoked by candles, but Thomas is going for a
generous party atmosphere. The daftness of the show depends on a warmth
made visible: brilliant light would scare the fun away. She got her
comedy cues by "magpieing" from Droomgoole's Malfi workshop. Whatever he
did with the candles that was solemn, she has perverted, to "take the
piss out of this reverence".
Candles should be pinched or snuffed,
not blown out (which disturbs the fuel pool), so Thomas decided "we
must blow a few out". Malfi's candles were lit as if they were on
altars. "So we have the worst possible lighting technique", she says, as
well as the theatre's first candle joke, where the actors burn their
breeches doing the job. There's also a Jacobean smoke machine: a candle
and bellows. A funereal lowering of the chandeliers is ruined in Burning
Pestle when the corpse sits up in the coffin; as a phoney ghost, he
self-lights absurdly with a candlestick under his chin. The pastel
costumes are sheeny, taking the advice of Francis Bacon and Inigo Jones
that cheap gilt spangles on pink, and white silks show to perfection by
candlelight, whereas fine embroidery looks like nothing.
Eileen Atkins as Ellen Terry. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
These revelations transfer over to the Wanamaker's solo recitals and
masterclass gigs. It's not that candlelight flattered Eileen Atkins in her one-woman show as Ellen Terry;
more that, as Dromgoole said, actors in candlelight become their own,
very flexible, lighting designers. Atkins turned slightly towards the
darkness to speak Lear, then, as Cordelia, looked right into the light,
and mobile flames made her eyes young and bright. The lighting changed
as fast as her voice and identity.
The Wanamaker is an experiment
in progress – where it goes, nobody knows. There's no Shakespeare
scheduled for 2014, although his last plays were written for the
original Blackfriars playhouse: Cymbeline, its dodgy plot points
plausible with the music up and the light down; The Winter's Tale, with
its statue that isn't, animated by living flame or breath; and The
Tempest, a total dream state. Just fantasise the lighting plan:
chandeliers jerked up for storm lightning, the masque processing up on
to stage with torches, Prospero's magic set out on the floor in arcanas
of candles, and Ariel's single taper sparking all over the house. Those
Brit and Ethiopian bees need to step up production right now.
In May 1911, women (and one
dog) of the Wednesday Morning Club of the remote town of Pueblo, Colo.,
decked themselves out as Shakespearean characters.Credit
Scott Rubel
New York has been handed a surplus of Shakespeare
over the last six months. To celebrate the 450th anniversary of his
birth, there were eight Broadway and Off Broadway productions on offer —
enough, surely, for even the most ravenous Shakespearean appetite. But
to a 19th-century American, this stuffed schedule might well look like
slim pickings.
Two
hundred years ago, Shakespeare accounted for one-quarter of all
dramatic productions in cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Philadelphians, between 1800 and 1835, could see 21 of Shakespeare’s 37
plays. In the decade after the Gold Rush, Californians stood in line to
see a raft of them. Some were presented in the palatial Jenny Lind Theater in San Francisco,
where miners, the historian Constance Rourke wrote in “Troupers of the
Gold Coast,” “swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango
houses to see ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ ”
Since colonial times, Americans have made Shakespeare their own.Credit
Associated Press
The
collection, edited by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro, a
professor at Columbia, begins with a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy
written by an anonymous Tory in 1776, responding to the Continental
Congress’s demand in 1774 that all colonists sign on to a boycott of
English goods. It starts: “To sign or not to sign? That is the
question.” The book ends with “Nets,” a 2004 work by the poet and visual
artist Jen Bervin that highlights selected words in the sonnets,
eliciting unexpected meanings and associations.
There
are discoveries and surprises along the way, like Lord Buckley’s
beat-era “Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies,” an extended
riff on Shakespeare’s most famous speeches (“I came here to lay Caesar
out, Not to hip you to him”), and “Shakespeares of 1922,” a vaudeville
sketch by Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind.
But for many readers the real eye opener will be the heated love
affair, richly documented by Professor Shapiro, between ordinary
Americans and the most exalted writer in the English language.
“The
25-year period around the Civil War was the most extraordinary,” he
said in an interview. “You have John Quincy Adams on Desdemona having
sex with Othello, Lincoln reading ‘Macbeth,’ and another president,
Grant, rehearsing the role of Desdemona at a military camp. You couldn’t
make this stuff up. This is how central a preoccupation Shakespeare was
at the time.”
Professor
Shapiro, in his introduction, leads off with Grant’s brief turn on the
boards, which he rightly calls “one of the more memorable episodes in
the history of Shakespeare in America.” The year was 1846, the place was
Corpus Christi, Tex.
To
distract the troops, a theater was hastily constructed and a production
of “Othello” put into motion. James Longstreet, the future Confederate
general, was originally cast as Desdemona, but was judged too tall for
the part. The shorter Grant took his place. “He really rehearsed the
part of Desdemona, but he did not have much sentiment,” Longstreet later
recalled. In the end, Grant was replaced by a professional actress at
the insistence of the officer playing Othello, who, Longstreet wrote,
“could not pump up any sentiment with Grant dressed up as Desdemona.”
It
was not fanciful to think that ordinary soldiers might enjoy a
Shakespeare play. Americans in the 19th century absorbed him whole from
earliest childhood. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not
contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote
in the 1830s. “I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for
the first time in a log cabin.”
Shakespeare’s
words fell on fertile ground, thanks to the American education system,
which stressed public speaking as an essential acquirement in a
democracy and regarded Shakespeare’s works as a gold mine of political
and moral set pieces.
Excerpts featured prominently in elocution books like “The Columbian Orator” and “The National Orator” and in the advanced McGuffey’s readers.
“Both boys and girls gave recitations and performed excerpts from the
plays,” Sandra M. Gustafson, an English professor at University of Notre
Dame, said in an interview. “This was an essential part of education.”
Women
seized on Shakespeare as a way to construct a homemade version of a
college class. In the second half of the 19th century, women’s
Shakespeare clubs began popping up all over the United States, from
Worcester, Mass., to Waxahachie, Tex., some 500 of them in the peak
years from 1880 to 1940.
“They’d
meet once or twice a month,” said Katherine West Scheil, an English
professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of the recently
published “She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America.”
“There was pretty intense study, with quizzes on the plots and the
characters and memorization exercises. They’d read the roll and as each
name was called, a member would recite a Shakespearean text.” Some clubs
took down their minutes in blank verse.
Americans
claimed Shakespeare as their own partly because he spoke to the grand
questions that stirred the nation. “Issues like immigration and race
that couldn’t be dealt with directly could be confronted through
Shakespeare,” Professor Shapiro said. “We didn’t have a language to
express our feelings about these troubling questions. There probably
wasn’t another writer on either side of the Atlantic that allowed
audiences to work through issues and divisions as he did.”
With
the rise of a more robust American literature, the influx of immigrants
outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and the spread of other forms of
mass entertainment, Shakespeare lost his grip on the common reader.
Professor Shapiro’s anthology includes Maurice Evans’s preface to a
cut-down version of “Hamlet” that he presented in 1944 to an audience of
G.I.s in the Pacific with the assumption that most of them had never
seen a Shakespeare play. “We could not presume any on their part any
knowledge of the tragedy or any familiarity with the conventions with
which it is usually associated,” Evans wrote. General Grant must have
spun in his grave
To text or not to text? It wasn't
even a question.
When 24-year-old Edd Joseph
dropped £80 for a PS3 on Gumtree, he never expected
the seller would take his money and run.
As soon as Joseph realized he wasn't
going to be receiving the PS3 he rightfully paid for, he did what any human in
their right mind would do: He texted "Macbeth" in its entirety to the
seller. (via Betabeat.)
“It just occurred to me you can copy
and paste things from the internet and into a text message. It got me thinking,
‘what can I sent [sic] to him’ which turned to ‘what is a really long
book’, which ended with me sending him Macbeth," Joseph told The Telegraph.
Business Insider
"Macbeth" soon led to
"Hamlet," "Othello" and 19 other plays sent entirely
through text message, about 17,424 texts.
“I’m going to keep doing it. If
nothing else I’m sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably
doesn’t have much experience of it,” he told The Telegraph. ”I’m not a
literary student, and I’m not an avid fan of Shakespeare but I’ve got a new appreciation you
could say – especially for the long ones.”
Does the punishment fit the crime?
As Shakespeare would have texted, "fair is foul and foul is fair
