PTS 015/095 1HIV Act III, scene i
When my Dearest Partner of Greatness (DPG) and I were discussing Trilogy Day at The Globe, THIS is the scene that prompted my suggestion she come along to this first play. Curiosity mixed with mischief as I thought about her reaction to an English representation of the national hero, Owain Glyndŵr …
Just how authentic are Shakespeare’s Welsh characters?
‘if you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek’ [1]
Wales is my second home: my girlfriend is Welsh. I lived there for a while, and visit frequently. It’s a place I’ve come to know reasonably well, and to like very much. One of the highlights of each year is watching the England vs Wales rugby union match – you simply haven’t tasted real passion and love of country until you’ve watched it on a big screen in a packed pub in North Wales (avoid wearing white, if you can). They have a national anthem that genuinely moves me every time I hear it: inexplicably visceral and patriotic in a way that ‘God Save The Queen’ can never, ever be. Take 90 seconds out of your life to watch this, below:
All this love doesn’t stop me from massively enjoying any opportunity to ‘mock the leek‘, but in an affectionate way …
Bottoming out THAT relationship …
PTS read-through: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV
Not for the first time in my read-through, the main thing I want to know is: ‘did they, or didn’t they?’
In this I was egged on by Cedric Watts, though I needed little encouragement, in truth. Still, it’s convenient to blame him for my prurience. If my answer is the same as Watts’: ‘of course!’, it begs a second question on which we differ:
‘Does it matter?’
Act III places us at the game table, jostling Shakespeare for a view of the goings-on in that VERY busy wood …
On reflection, it seems odd that as a child experiencing / undergoing / suffering a Catholic education, once a year, on our ‘Saint’s Day’ – St Martin de Porres: 03 November – we were treated to a film in the school hall which was invariably a Ray Harryhausen epic.
Not that I want to complain. I loved them, and still do.
They fostered an appetite for the ancient world – for Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Jason … any number of heroes and their associated monsters. And, like the Book of Genesis, they’ve proved to be invaluable in teaching Literature.
Putting Shakespeare in students’ mouths is often as much fun as feeding a baby – the faces they pull!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act I
Shakespeare’s language lives in the mouth, not the ears or eyes. It needs to be tasted, and one of the advantages of living alone is that I can pace up and down my flat’s lengthy corridor reading tricky lines out loud, or just playing with the inflections of favourites:
I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
I WASTED time and NOW doth time waste me.
I wasted TIME and now doth TIME waste ME.
And so on, like the celebrity skit in the BBC’s Shakespeare400 celebration. You get the picture.
If it needs to be tasted, it also needs, I suppose, to be CHEWED. That’s what we often do in the classroom …
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 