the Play Shakespeare Never Wrote

Shakespearean actor Geraint Wyn Davies as King Arthur

Or did he?
I always wondered why Shakespeare never wrote his version of the King Arthur legend. It has all the elements he loved--a tragic love, ambitious men (Mordred is Iago's ntural son!)m a flawed hero.
the Bard borrowed from all kinds of sources but never wrote his version of England's national myth. And that seems a shame.
But as it turns out, there is a significant community of scholars who think he DID tackle the subject. I found this interesting articleon Tyler Tichelaar's "Children of Arthur" blog  about a play called The Birth of Merlin that may very well be a "lost" play, one of almost 40 plays with disputed authorship.
Wikipedia calls the play "Jacobean" and attributes it to one William Rowley.  If you're saying, "Who?" you're not alone. I looked Rowley up and according (agani) to Wikipedia, Rowley was mostly known for plays he wrote in collaboration with other, more successful authors.
According to the synopsis, the play was full of magic, 17th century special effects (devils!!) and and was a fast-paced crowd pleaser.
It seems to me that the Arthurian story cries out for an epic play that is serious and important. I sometimes find myself impatient with the rough humor of Shakespeare's comedies (and I purely hate Falstaff), so the notion that The Birth of Merlin is kind of wacky is a bit disappointing.
If you're curious (I am), you can download the play's text here.

Coriolanus...Hiddleston versus Fiennes

Coriolanus is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and I didn't come to appreciate it until long after I was out of school.  (My introductory Shakespeare class was taught by a noted Shakespeare scholar who was hands down, the most boring teacher I ever had.) In a way, the title character, a Roman general who hates the plebian rabble, is a hero for the one percent. In one of the play's most famous lines, he compares the idea of plebians controlling patricians  as crows pecking on eagles. Caius Martius sees himself as an eagle and his inability to deal with the "crows," much less respect them leads to his downfall.

There is currently a very good versions of the play available on dvd. Tthe 2011 version directed by and starring Rafe Fiennes as the title character is terrific. It costars Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, one of the great middle-aged female characters in the Shakespeare canon and Gerard Butler as the enemy who becomes an unlikely ally. (He's good too.) Fiennes is terrific. I don't think he's been this good since Schindler's List. It's a ferociously masculine peformance and his rage at the rabble is mesmerizing.

there's also another version of the play currently making the rounds of the specialty movie circuit, a filmed play version from England's National Theatre starring Tom Hiddleston. I missed it when it played locally, and I can only hope that it'll be available for home viewing soon. I would have said Hiddleston was a bit too young to play the character, but as you can see from the trailer below, he inhabits the character like he was born to it. (Anyone who saw him in The Hollow Crown already knows what a strong Shakespearean actor he is, and his Coriolanus looks like a treat.) Cojpare the two trailers and you decide.

Return of Summer of the Shakespeare...

It's going to be an amazing summer for Shakespeare geeks and I have decided the way to celebrate it is to embark on the long-delayed stories I've wanted to write for my "Shakespeare Noir" collection. Over the course of the summer I'll publish the stories here and tie them together with various and sundry posts about what's going on in the Shakespeare-verse. Yes, it will be all Shakespeare, all the time. At least for the summer.  And you know Shakespeare is still relevant when he has his own "Hey Girl" posters.

A Picture Launches a Series!

Photographed by NejroN

I spend a lot of time looking at images. I'm a fan of Pinterest (which was a total surprise to me) and I also like to browse the stock photo banks like Dreamstime and Big Stock. Because I've got a couple of books coming out soon and they need covers, I activated a month's subscription over at Big Stock and have been happily downloading images for the past week. And that's how I cam across this image. It's one of maybe a dozen using the same models in a variety of poses and (in the woman's case) vintage dresses.
I took one look at those photos and I saw a series about stylish vampire lovers (Think The Thin Man meets The Hunger). His name is Theo. Hers is Miranda. Or maybe she is Thea and he is James. Perhaps she was Russian in a former life,.
Perhaps he was a Robber Baron.
They've been together ... a long time.
I could find out their real names, but that would feel like I was stalking them. To me they are Miranda/Thea and James/Theo and they have inspired me to write a new series of books.  Thank you!

Starry Starry Night--A fantastic picture of the Milky Way

I'm a city girl and in the city, the sky hardly ever gets dark enough to see the whole blanket of stars out there. But a few years ago my best friend and I went to New Mexico and there I saw the Milky Way for the first time. it was awe-inspiring in the old, mythic meaning of awe. When you see the Milky Way, especially for the first time, you understand why ancient people made it a part of their myths. I saw this photograph on cnn.com this morning. It's like something out of a fairy tale.  You can see a whole gallery of such images here.

May Flowers...Black-Eyed Susan by Thomas Pluck

Thomas Pluck is a great writer.  If you haven't read his story "Black-Eyed Susan," you're in luck. It's one of the stories featured in his collection, Steel Heart: 10 Tales of Crime and Suspense, which you can buy right now on Amazon for 98 cents. You have 99 cents in your sofa cushions right now, so don't wait another minute. Go get the book. "Black-Eyed Susan" isn't the first story in the collection (it's "Gumbo Weather") but turn right to "Black-Eyed Susan" for a story that will hit you like a punch to the solar-plexus, knocking the breath right out of you. Thomas Pluck is a great writer.

May Flowers...Lauren Willig's The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

In Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a lovelorn American historian stumbles across a series of letters that unmask a historical mystery and tell another love story.

ELOISE KELLY is a Harvard-trained historian spending a year in England researching her dissertation.  It has a bland title that got it past the committee (something to do with aristocratic espionage during the 19^th century) but what she really wants to do is unmask the identity of a spy known as THE PINK CARNATION. Unlike the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian (two other aristocrats who saved others during the French Revolution), the Pink Carnation’s identity has never been revealed. 

Desperate for information, Eloise has resorted to sending out letters to the descendants of the Pimpernel and the Gentian, in hopes that the families might have some information for her.  She sent out almost two dozen letters but received only three replies.  One was a form letter with the times the Scarlet Pimpernel’s home is open to the public.  One was a letter from Mr. COLIN SELWICK clearly discouraging her interest in his family.  And one was a letter from MRS. ARABELLA SELWICK-ADDERLY inviting her to tea.

The dual time-frame story that unfolds from there manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of most such stories (an unbalanced narrative where the past story is more engaging than the contemporary one as it was in both THE FRIENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN and POSSESSION) but the story that takes place in the past really is a romp.

That section of the novel reads like a regency romance, with a dash of old fashioned books like THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO thrown in.  (One of the conventions of this book is that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a real person and that his masquerade inspired imitators like the Purple Gentian and the Pink Carnation.)  There’s also a strong dash of Jane Austen here, and the writer seems to be having a great time.

The double sets of lovers—Colin and Eloise in the present; Richard and Amy in the past—are types we’ve seen many times but Willig makes the obstacles to their relationships engaging and entertaining. We like Eloise and are curious to know how her story turns out. Amy (the Elizabeth Bennet character) is headstrong and spoiled but she’s also smart and brave and resourceful.  She and Richard are a perfect match and we know that the moment we see them together. (We also suspect that Richard’s formidable mother will approve of Amy.)

There’s talk of this book being turned into a graphic novel, and that could be a lot of fun too.