Guest Post: Sarah Vernon writing about Ellen Terry

Image © Sarah Vernon

Starting with an old theatrical photograph in her possession, Sarah Vernon penetrates the world of last century's professional actresses, their dedication to truthful interpretation of character and to stage-craft, and also their friendships with one another, that linked generations. Sarah has always believed in the importance of passing on the lessons of past actors and actresses' performances. This extract from her post quotes from Ellen Terry's memoirs, containing invaluable insights into playing Volumnia and deploring the non-existent or, at best, underwritten mother-daughter relationships in Shakespeare:

'"The critics who wrote their notices at the dress-rehearsal, and complained of my playing pranks with the text, were a little previous. Oh, how bad it makes one feel to find that they all think my Volumnia ‘sweet’, and I thought I was fierce, contemptuous, overbearing. Worse, I felt as if I must be appearing like a cabman rating his Drury Lane wife!” By 20 April, however, she feels she is “beginning to play Volumnia a little better.”

The actress later comments on parents in Shakespeare’s plays: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little stock he seems to take of mothers! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia, Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione, Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of fathers, but of their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess Roussillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they are poor examples, like Juliet’s mother and Mrs. Page.”

READ SARAH VERNON'S FULL POST

Reblogged from First Night Design with many thanks to Sarah Vernon

The Faery Prince and Winged Time

A Jacobean Tragedy

 Jacobean fantasy and hope for the future cut off before fruition:
Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), armoured and hatted, rides on horseback, 
with winged Time walking beside him.  Oil painting by Robert Peake the Elder, c.1606-08. Peake (born c.1551) was the prince's official painter, producing iconography in the Elizabethan tradition, at odds with the bravura realism of contemporary European baroque art, already old-fashioned in England at the time of his appointment, and soon officially superseded by Isaac Oliver (of refugee Huguenot parentage) and Dutch and Flemish-born portraitists, but providing a transitional allegorical vision of royal mystique. This image is made poignant by our knowledge that death overtook the prince in the flower of youth.  Image source: Wikipedia

On January 13th, 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman, two of the authors of Eastward Ho!, were arrested and imprisoned on charges of sedition after a performance of the play at the Blackfriars Theatre. The third playwright involved, John Marston, fled London to avoid arrest. The new King, James I, had only been in power for two years and the government was particularly sensitive to criticism of the court; it was the same year as the Gunpowder Plot. Jacobean political censorship was motivated by immediate propaganda needs, trying to second-guess the reactions of domestic factions and foreign powers, rather than by a programme of ideological oppression. The king, a published author, who regarded himself as a benevolent intellectual patriarch, believed in the power of disseminating words to convince minds, and his queen, Anne of Denmark, passionately loved theatre and performance...

Blogger's Block/Commemorative Post 2

JANUARY 13TH

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block. For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events in the hope of spinning a Universal Truth makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

Engraving by George Glover for the title-page to Robert Farley, 'Kalendarium humanae vitae, The Kalendar of Mans Life' (London, William Hope, 1638) 
 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

But take at random some news headlines for January 13th, and perhaps you will boggle that they are not from 2013. The details, the names of people and places, have changed, but not humanity, either for good or bad....

A year's blogging later, Twelfth Night or They Never Give Up

Undeterred by everything I've told them, the bear cubs are still dancing on the frozen lake, 

and the young angel is still climbing the starlit sky.

Blogger's block or Dido's Lament

The Death of Dido, marble by Claude-Augustin Cayot, 1711. Musée du Louvre. 

Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block.

For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

But, any excuse for a celebration is justified these austere January days, and who knows what happy coincidences we'll bump into if we start playing this game of almanac trivia, and see by how many Degrees of Separation we are brought back to this blog....