On the outskirts of Stratford Ontario lies the hamlet of
Shakespeare. Between Shakespeare and Stratford, lies this
mail box, and in Stratford itself, in addition to the Festival, this Book:
From Monika Dickens’s prologue to Michael Joseph, Master of Words:
Michael’s guidance was not editorial, but from one author to another. When I got bogged down in beautiful formal phrases, as new writers do, he gave me a superb piece of advice, which I’ve passed on to many new young writers. "Don’t try so hard," he said. "Just imagine you’re bursting into a room full of people you know quite well, and you’re saying, "Listen to what happened to me!."
Collector, bibliographer, and typographer Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library and a recognized authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian period. A graduate of Connecticut College, he is the author or co-author of among other works, The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale Press, 2008), A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (Rivendale Press, 1999), The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998), A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, 1995), and England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head ( Georgetown U Press, 1990). His articles and notes have appeared in the Book Collector, Browning Institute Studies, Notes and Queries, and other journals. He has organized or co-curated exhibitions across the United States.
I met recently with Mark in St. Petersburg, Florida to discuss the history of The Bodley Head and how one might best go about collecting work produced by this publisher. Please listen here:
Subscribe to the Biblio File Podcast here
Copyright © 2010 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com
This interview is part of our Book Publisher Series which focuses on the histories of important British, American and Canadian publishing houses, and how to go about collecting their works.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Given that God’s existence can’t, according to Pascal, be proven by reason, a person should, he said, wager that He exists. What is there to lose? Hence, during the coming weeks, I’ll be praying for Christopher Hitchens. Wishing him good health as he undergoes treatment for cancer of the esophagus. Apt this praying, I’d say, in light of what Paul Horowitz writes here about Hitchens:
It is not only incompatible ideas and comrades that Hitchens comfortably embraces, but modes of being. He is both a political renegade and keeper of the flame, a ferocious partisan and practiced ironist, a postmodern skeptic and romantic nostalgist, a passionate moralist and calculating operator, a hard-headed critic and dewy-eyed sentimentalist, a serious thinker and attention grabber, irreverent contrarian and serenader of the choir, one-dimensional polemicist and literary polymath, self-styled Man of the People and accomplished social climber, and — most inexplicable — an Oxonian gentleman with conservative manners who is also a master of vitriol and ad hominem.
Throughout this narrative, we are alerted to Hitchens’s pursuit of “the Janus-faced mode of life.” As the Roman god of temple doorways, Janus looked both ways and is depicted with two faces in the statuary honoring him. Grabbing the horns of his own enigma, Hitchens observes that the doors of the temple were open in time of war, and war “is a time when the ideas of contradiction and conflict are most naturally regnant,” and that the most intense wars are civil, and the most rending conflicts internal. “What I hope to do now,” he says of the text before us, “is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.”
Once you’ve had a man with no legs, Eddie Murphy tells us memorably in the movie Trading Places, you never go back. The same might be said of novels by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or of Shakespeare on the London stage. Nothing compares to it.
I was lucky enough to see Robert Stephens as Falstaff in the early nineties, and more recently Simon McBurney’s encore production of Measure for Measure. I wont bore you with superlatives; suffice it to say that I left the theatre exhilarated, grateful for the experience, filled with the life and energy of Shakespeare’s genius. Problem is, such knowledge – that theatre can be this good – makes one, like Eddie’s ex-girlfriends, very hard to please.
Des McAnuff’s isn’t. Which is not to say that the production is not satisfying, or that it doesn’t please. Christopher Plummer’s is a capable, natural, at times, moving performance. Others’ are very funny, some are unquestionably competent. What keeps Plummer from greatness here however is this uniformity business. His effort is hampered by those around him. It only takes a few. Trish Lindström’s Miranda, for instance, seems unnaturally awestruck by her father – perhaps by Plummer himself – this stilts their rapport, makes it overly formal. Lindström’s monotoned intensity makes it difficult to accept a bond that is supposed to be close, loving, touching, comfortable. She needs to relax in order to deliver Shakespeare’s lines as they were intended; to bring a varied playfulness to them, to speak her words as if they originate from the mind and mouth of the enchanting character she inhabits.
Delivery is what flaws this and so many other Shakespearean productions: lines spoken without emotional range. Anger, for example, appears to be the only feeling Timothy D. Stickney’s Sebastian is capable of expressing. Despite undeniable presence, his performance is uni-dimensional and over-acted. His is not the lead character. Ariel, despite a radiant, contagious smile, appears overly childlike, her lines sound read, memorized, instead of true. She looks too much like a sprite just sprung from a Circe du Soleil stage cannon. This heralds another concern: the clash, on stage, of incongruous cultures, spartan traditionalism versus sparkling Andrew Lloyd Weberism.
One must, I suppose, consider the wishes of the tourist; and the show does, with its musical song-and-dance numbers and sumptuous, skin-tight scaly costumery. A noisy start sounds more like something out of Titanic [the engine room], than any 17th Century sailing rig. Thunderous waves drowned out much of the early dialogue.
And yet, despite these flaws and incongruities, this play, this production, is worth seeing. - Stephano’s tartan stockings particularly – are ‘worth the price of admission’ and the Spirits’s gowns are seriously sensuous. Fools Stephano and Trinculo are both good for many laughs, respectively drunk and effeminate. Prospero’s brother Antonio is well played by John Vickery. Plummer’s sure handed gentleness and Ariel’s beaming innocence stick in the mind.
In all: a decent production, albeit a bit leggy.
Writer/broadcaster/bibliophile
Owner/publisher Literarytourist.com
Host of The Biblio File Radio Show
Email
