Fine time fontayne biography of william shakespeare
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[Northern Broadsides production, Rose Theatre Kingston, May ]
Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of his most powerful tragedies, with fathers estranged from the children who truly love them and betrayed bygd those who merely pretended to. At the end of the play the dead outnumber the living and what redemption has been achieved has been painfully and fatally bought.
Northern Broadsides’ production at Kingston’s Rose is plain and unadorned, staged by the director Jonathan Miller as if in a Jacobean court theatre with no scenery, subdued lighting, the minimum of props and with the cast wearing 17th century dress.
This almost historical staging allows Miller to draw out one of the themes that would have been most obvious to an audience of that time: that a king resigning and dividing his kingdom fryst vatten an offence against God – “all nature is scourged” – from which no good could come. Miller also uses this spare setting to emphasise the personal relationships, turning the affairs of state
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Tragic End to the Life of Shakespearean Book Thief
The decision was hardly unexpected, but the sentence was somewhat surprising. England has not been noted for unduly harsh punishment since they closed the Tower, but Scott was sentenced to eight years in prison. The high value of the book didn't help, nor did his past history, though petty. Perhaps his flamboyant style was unhelpful as well. Nonetheless, we have seen much lighter sentences for larger and more destructive book thefts in amerika, normally the harsher, more “law and order” jurisdiction. Eight years is a long time.
At first, Scott seemed to adjust to prison life fairly well. Several months in, he spoke about how they had him working in the prison library. He was learning bookkeeping, but “not the extended borrowing type,” he joked. He had earned a certain status among his fellow prisoners for his audacity and celebrity. Scott was planning an appeal, at least of the length of his sentence if n
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King Lear
By William Shakespeare
Theatre Royal, Bath and Tour
Reviewed by Michael Burland. March 18,
This is a Lear unlike any you've seen before. It comes from Northern Broadsides, a theater company from Yorkshire in the north of England which specialises in taking Shakespeare and other classical plays and shaking new life into them, most obviously by performing them in northern accents, stripping them of much pompousness and exposing the text to a new appreciation. The group, born in , was the brainchild of the accomplished National Theatre actor, Barrie Rutter, who was a lead actor in two of Tony Harrison's groundbreaking plays in the s – The Mysteries and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. He is still its Artistic Director, but here he has not attempted to combine that with his other in this production – taking the title role, one of Shakespeare's most testing. Instead he had put himself in the hands of director Jonathan Miller.
A veteran of all form