Hot Shakespeare Summer, Act I
June 22, 2022
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. [...]
Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1
Summer is beginning with the winter of our discontent, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Richard III is the first work I read and listened to in preparation for seeing a few plays over the next couple of months. In her popular podcast "Approaching Shakespeare," Oxford's Emma Smith points out that Richard is an enormous role, having 32% of all the lines in the play. He appears in 14 of 22 scenes, and he is Shakespeare's only character who opens his own play with a soliloquy.
The last time I saw Richard was in a show by Ireland's Druid Theatre in New York a few years ago, and I can't wait to catch up with him again. Aaron Monaghan had the title role back then; this time around, for Shakespeare in the Park, it goes to the actress Danai Gurira. "We are not going to re-gender the role, but what that means exactly we won’t know until we’re doing run-throughs,” Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, told the New York Times.
Emma Smith says that Elizabethans would have thought of Shakespeare as a poet first, then a dramatist. The poem "Venus and Adonis" was his most popular overall work in print, with Richard III the most popular play in print. I've never read V&A, so I'm adding it to the virtual queue. You can find an audio version (for free, with a library card!) on Hoopla; the same goes for R3 (with Kenneth Branagh as Richard).
***
The Poetry Friday roundup takes place at the blog Reading to the Core on June 24th.
Photo by ST.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.