03 May 2010
I read a book over the weekend. Now that’s not exactly world-shattering, but I’m quite pleased with it, as I was thinking lately how little I now read, yet how avid a reader I was as a teenager. Perhaps the simple option of the TV remote is too easily at hand. Perhaps the need to find reading glasses now lazily mitigates against it. Whatever - I want to get back to it, and thoroughly enjoyed reading Shapiro’s ‘1599’ - one year in Shakespeare’s life and the changing world about him that year and how each intersected and interacted. Fascinating and revealing - about both.
I always found his plays impenetrable because of their language, so had taken little interest in them, although I have long enjoyed the theatre - and especially anything by Tom Stoppard. So, having hugely enjoyed his ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, and then later ‘Shakespeare in Love’, which he co-wrote and is full of his usual jokes and allusions, I found myself, against my previous inclinations, becoming interested in the man Shakespeare. When I then read that Hamlet seemed to have references to the contemporary debates about the cosmological alternatives of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Thomas Digges et al., then I knew more was going on than I had realised, and I was finally, officially, interested. It’s a bit like Googling, in a way - one thing leads to another and you reach a destination that was never on your original road map. Oh - and I went to The Globe for the first time last year and suddenly I also ‘got’ the way he included the audience. Of course he wrote for them, but I suddenly realised that he really did write for them: ‘we are all players’ It was their daily Eastenders, block-buster, and comedy programme - and they were a tangible, visible, smell-able, reactive part, not invisible behind stage lights in a blacked-out auditorium.
So I’m on a new voyage. Isn’t it great when you discover a new area to investigate at this age, and know there is just loads to get your teeth into? Why then, the world’s my oyster...
I always found his plays impenetrable because of their language, so had taken little interest in them, although I have long enjoyed the theatre - and especially anything by Tom Stoppard. So, having hugely enjoyed his ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, and then later ‘Shakespeare in Love’, which he co-wrote and is full of his usual jokes and allusions, I found myself, against my previous inclinations, becoming interested in the man Shakespeare. When I then read that Hamlet seemed to have references to the contemporary debates about the cosmological alternatives of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Thomas Digges et al., then I knew more was going on than I had realised, and I was finally, officially, interested. It’s a bit like Googling, in a way - one thing leads to another and you reach a destination that was never on your original road map. Oh - and I went to The Globe for the first time last year and suddenly I also ‘got’ the way he included the audience. Of course he wrote for them, but I suddenly realised that he really did write for them: ‘we are all players’ It was their daily Eastenders, block-buster, and comedy programme - and they were a tangible, visible, smell-able, reactive part, not invisible behind stage lights in a blacked-out auditorium.
So I’m on a new voyage. Isn’t it great when you discover a new area to investigate at this age, and know there is just loads to get your teeth into? Why then, the world’s my oyster...
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