Happy Birthday William Shakespeare

The Folger Library wants you to celebrat with them--virtually of course. The party is here.

Shakespeare in Historical Fiction

I am a fan of Bernard Cornwell's historical fiction and this new book, Fools and Mortals looks like it belongs on my TBR shelf.

Here's the pitch:

New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell makes a dramatic departure with this enthralling, action-packed standalone novel that tells the story of the first production of A Midsummer Night's Dream—as related by William Shakespeare’s estranged younger brother.

Lord, what fools these mortals be . . .

In the heart of Elizabethan England, Richard Shakespeare dreams of a glittering career in one of the London playhouses, a world dominated by his older brother, William. But he is a penniless actor, making ends meet through a combination of a beautiful face, petty theft and a silver tongue. As William’s star rises, Richard’s onetime gratitude is souring and he is sorely tempted to abandon family loyalty.

So when a priceless manuscript goes missing, suspicion falls upon Richard, forcing him onto a perilous path through a bawdy and frequently brutal London. Entangled in a high-stakes game of duplicity and betrayal which threatens not only his career and potential fortune, but also the lives of his fellow players, Richard has to call on all he has now learned from the brightest stages and the darkest alleyways of the city. To avoid the gallows, he must play the part of a lifetime . . . .

Showcasing the superb storytelling skill that has won Bernard Cornwell international renown, Fools and Mortals is a richly portrayed tour de force that brings to life a vivid world of intricate stagecraft, fierce competition, and consuming ambition.

A timely Shakespeare quote

"Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss."  The line comes from one of Shakespeare's lesser plays, Pericles. (Most scholars believe that Shakespeare had a co-author for this one and that he only wrote about half of it. It is commonly lumped in with the :"Jacobean plays.") Whoever wrote it, it's a great line.

From Russia with Love

Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet

Every once in a while I get a huge spike in views of this blog in Russia. While I'd love to think that I've suddenly picked up a lot of fans in Moscow and Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg, the reality is that some Russian bot is probing Kattomic Energy for weak spots. The bots hang out for about a week, sending my view count sky high, and then they slink back to wherever they came from.

I found myself wondering what Shakespeare thought of Russia, if he thought of Russia at all. Shakespeare's life spanned the 16th and 17th centuries and by then, Moscow was a huge cultural center. It was a principality known to the English as "Muscovy." That land pops up a couple of times in Shakespeare's plays, most notably in Act V, Scene III of Love's Labour's Lost when Rosaline asks another character why he looks so  under the weather: 

Why look you pale?
Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy. 

In searching for Shakespeare/Muscovy links, I ran across this article about the way Soviet Russia viewed Ophelia. Poor Ophelia.  Using Grigori Kozintsev's film version of Hamlet as a source, the article deconstructs her "corruption." It's interesting reading.

Shakespeare's balls

19th century lawn tennis

Tennis balls, that is.

One of the best scenes in Shakespeare's Henry V is the one where he receives a gift of tennis balls from the Dauphin. (This actually happened. See the account here.) Henry is not happy with the gift, which is an insult to him and the resulting speech, which begins, "We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us," is a masterpiece. taht scene takes place in the 15th century, and by then, the game was already three centuries old. Think about that as you watch Wimbledon.

Baby it's Cold Outside.

Temperatures hit 24 Celsius in London this weekend, which is a rather balmy 75 Fahrenheit.  That's much cooler than almost anywhere in the United States right now, including the Pacific Northwest where overnight temps are still dipping into the 50s even though daytime temps are in the mid-80s.
June would not have been particularly warm in Shakespeare's time. He was born in 1564, right in the middle of the Little Ice Age and only a decade after major glacial expansion began.  There's a reason why they wore so many layers of clothes back then.

Julius Caesar, then and now

My first encounter with Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar was watching the star-studded 1953 film in my 9th grade English class. James Mason was Brutus, Marlon Brando played Mark Antony, and John Gielgud played Cassius, he of the "lean and hungry look." I have to say, I was not particularly impressed then, and upon looking at Antony's famous "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him" speech (see it here on Youtube), I haven't really changed my mind although looking at the black and white clip, it's eerie how Marlon Brando seems a sculpture come to life, so faded is the whitee of the film. And oddly, too, he reminds me of James Purefoy as Antony in Rome. (If you're interested, you can compare it to Charlton Heston's version from the 1970 adaptation here.)

I never really liked the play. A couple of female characters make cameo appearances, but there's no one like Coriolanus' mother in my favorite of Shakespeare's political plays. Vanessa Redgrave played her in the Ralph Fiennes version, and she was in her full Vanessa glory in a meaty part. For some reason, almost every high school English program uses Julius Caesar to introduce the bard to their students. (Sometimes it's Romeo and Juliet but in four of the five high schools I attended, Julius Caesar was the first play offered. And it's a wonder anyone ever went on to another play.)
That's why I'm so interested in the controversy the Public Theater has generated with their politically charged interpretation depicting Caesar as looking like Donald Trump.

reading road trip...Iowa

January 18, 1988 was a bitterly cold Iowa day.  VICKI MYRON is not a morning person anyway and cold mornings are especially trying for her. As the new director of the Spencer Public Library, however, it’s her duty to open up.  She’s puttering around as the rest of her staff arrives and then her colleague JEAN goes to empty the book-drop box.  There she finds a tiny kitten so cold and filthy that Vicki can’t believe it’s still alive.  
And so begins the story of Dewey, the small town library cat. It's no secret that I am fond of cats, orange cats in particular, but I don't as a rule, read animal stories. I was paid to read this one, however, as possible fodder for a movie, and it absolutely charmed me. Spencer, Iowa was a town that had fallen on tough times and this story of how the town rallied around the cat, how the library became a "third space" for the community, and how a scroungy little orange kitten became a symbol of hope is worth reading. 
 
Another great book set in Iowa is Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, which is a retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. I'm fond of Shakespeare retellings--I'm currently reading Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, her version of Macbeth--and Lear has always seemed to me one of Shakespeare's most timeless plays. (It's kind of hard to relate to Timon of Athens these days.)

 An unnamed town in Iowa is the unlikely setting of Grasshopper Jungle, a dystopian YA novel of survival after an apocalypse. Written by Andrew Smith, the novel won a couple of awards when it came out in 2015, and it is a styish, emotional, sometimes hilarious chronicle of the end of the world and a coming-of-age story. Smith's first novel was the equally well-received Ghost Medicine, another story of adventure and friendship.

God love Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Keep Her Safe

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (aka the Notorious RBG)  is my spirit animal. She's impressive enough now, but check out what she did before she joined the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg is a tiny woman (5'1") but she is the very embodiment of the Shakespeare quote, "Though she be but little, she is fierce."

Shakespeare, Time Travel, Macbeth

The Shakespeare Standard has an interview with Invisible Hand author James Hartley today, and his new "Shakespeare Moon" series sounds intriguing. The plot takes a contemporary kid back to Scotland and entangles him with the events of Macbeth. I think that's a fantastic idea. I never understood why high schools insisted on inflicting Julius Caesar on students as their first introduction to Shakespeare. Yes, yes, it's got "Friends, Romans, and Countrymen, lend me your ears" but it's really not one of the most riveting plays. But Macbeth?  It's got sex. It's got intrigue. It's got WITCHES. Start out with Macbeth and you might just end up with a kid who likes Shakespeare.

Here's the sales pitch:

The Invisible Hand is about a boy, Sam, who has just started life at a boarding school and finds himself able to travel back in time to medieval Scotland. There he meets a girl, Leana, who can travel to the future, and the two of them become wrapped up in events in Macbeth, the Shakespeare play, and in the daily life of the school. The book is the first part of a series called Shakespeare´s Moon. Each book is set in the same boarding school but focuses on a different Shakespeare play.

Poetry inspired by Shakespeare

Destination Shakespeare is a book of 24 poems published by Vancouver-based Misfit Press. You can see an animation of one of the poems here (just click on the book cover). I wish I'd known about this book before Christmas because I know a few people who would have loved to find it in their stocking (including ME).

Romeo & Juliet--Vampire Style

Shakespeare's plays are durable. They can withstand any number of modern adaptations, permutations, and mutations. The whole Underworld movie mythos is based on the vampire/werewolf love story. so I was not surprised to see this book in one of the daily "book dump" newsletters I get.

Author H.T. Night has more than half a million books in print and several are vampire-centric. He has multiple series out there, along with half a dozen standalone novels. He definitely seems like a writer to check out if you like paranormal romance.

This version of the oft-told tale is set in 2099 in a New York now renamed Verona. It has an overall 3.8 star rating in reviews, which is not awesome, but more than half of those who reviewed it gave it five stars and really loved it. I've seen myself how a couple of low-star reviews can REALLY mess up a rating, so I'll definitely see for myself.

Something Different in a Shakespeare Book: The Shakespeare Stealer

This looks like a coming of age story set in Shakespeare's time The hero is a young orphan 9aren't they always?) who can write a symbol language. His cruel master orders him to steal Hamlet or ele, and it goes from there.

Another Cover Reveal!

Over at the Book Cover Designer, they're' going into their last week of a fabulous 20 percent off sale. (A new coupon will generate tonight at midnight PDT.) I've bought a number of covers for upcoming projects  and still have a pretty long "wish list."

I always try to steer my indie author clients toward BCD because they have a wide range of designers who offer covers for as low as $20. (They also have a few that are inexplicably in the $300 price range without, IMHO being worth it, but eye of the beholder and so forth.)

Later this year I have a whole series of novelettes coming out that are basically retellings of Shakespeare tales with a romantic/gothic gloss. Island of Magic (Tempest meets Beauty and the Beast), Cry, Little Sister (Hamlet), and two as-yet-untitled stories based on Othello and Macbeth.

This is the cover for Cry, Little Sister, my retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's point of view. I liked the cover because I haven't seen the model, who is lovely, all over the stock photo libraries. The cover was designed by Serena Daphn.

Shakespeare Sunday quote

I've said before that the Taming of the Shrew is not my favorite Shakespeare play. And I was not much of a huge fan of the Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles version (10 Things I Hate About You) either. But I started thinking about it and realized that in many ways, the character of Petruchio was an outlier, a template for any number of "alpha-hole" romance novel heroes who are just nasty to the women who eventually come to love them. Sigh.  It's all Will's fault!

Here's a Sunday quote from the play.

Shakespeare and Politics

A surprising number of Shakespeare's plays are about politics. The history plays, of course, and Julius Caesar, the first play every kid in high school has to read, thus turning them off to Shakespeare for the rest of their lives. Coriolanus is a play that has a lot to say about today's political climate. But the polotical play everyone forgets about is Antony and Cleopatra. This is what Antony has to say when Cleopatra brings up his wife back in Rome:  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the rang'd empire fall! 

We've all encountered politicians like that, politicians who are ready to throw everything under the bus in order to follow their own hearts. It did not end well for Cleopatra and Antony.

Where are the Mer?

Bigstock

“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note, to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.” --William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors

I have a fondness for mermaids.  I've written a couple of mermaid stories and I would love to do a series of epic fantasies set in a fabulous underwater kingdom. (The Dark Mer series.)  Everyone I know is telling me not to do it.  (The smart money right now is on Gargoyles being the next big paranormal "creature" and that's fine. I think there are a lot of possibilities in gargoyles. And also, if it means an end to the endless procession of "shifter" stories, I'm there. But mermaids...There need to be more mermaid stories. Chinese filmmaker Stephen Chow (whose hilarious The God of Cookery is must-viewing for any foodie) wrote and directed made half a billion dollars with his movie The Mermaid. there's also a lovely movie about a mermaid and France's Sun King that's stuck in development hell. I read it for a film market a few years ago and there was even a star attached, but it seems to have fallen off the grid. Maybe it's time to reboot Splash!

 

Shakespeare in the Raw!

For a May 2016 staging of The Tempest in Central Park, according to production notes: The production uses semi- and full-nudity to celebrate body freedom and free expression and to dramatize the conflict between the visitors to Prospero's island and its inhabitants. 
You can read more about the production and see the pictures here. 
I just hope it was a warm night! 

Shakespeare Earrings

The last time I browsed Cafe Press it was all about the clothing--t-shirts and hats and tote bags and such. Also mugs. I didn't realize they'd gotten into Etsy territory with hand-made jewelry items until I saw these earrings for sale. You can buy them here, but be warned, they come with a warning that the earrings are not for sale to, or use by, anyone under 12.  I'm not sure why that is. I can see they'd be a choking hazard for very young children but surely kids grow out of that phase by the time they start going to school?

Feminist Friday and Shakespeare

Over at the Conversation, a website that celebrates "Academic rigor and journalistic flair," there's an essay on how Shakespeare helped writer Germaine Greer shape her feminist masterpiece, The Female Eunuch. It's a long-ish piece and if you're someone who tags blog posts with TLDR, then you'll want to skip down past the photo of Greer speaking at Sydney University in 2005 for the good stuff. My favorite takeaway from the article was this quote: "Greer cites Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, as an example of the fullest expression of the ideal of love “as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe'."

I don't even remember that poem--my knowledge of Shakespeare's poetry is mostly limited to a few of his well-known sonnets. So I looked it up. Wikipedia, bless their hearts, has an entry on the allegorical poem.  they call it one of Shakespeare's "most obscure works" (making me feel better for not having remembered it), and one that is open to multiple interpretations. The one thing I do remember is that the "turtle" of the title is the "turtledove," not the reptile everyone used to have as a pet before fears of salmonella made ownership of turtles a health risk.

The "Phoenix" portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Some scholars have identified "the Phoenix" as Queen Elizabeth 1 and the turtle as John Salisbury, who was a married courtier from a powerful Welsh family.

The language of the poem is gorgeous:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence

but you'll need footnotes all along the way. The Conversation essay makes a persuasive case for a Shakespearean influence on Greer's work, and it's just one more example of how Shakespeare's work continues to resonate almost half a millennium later.