William Shakespeare – Page 3

Max Reinhardt’s Dream

In which the great German theatre director goes to Hollywood to show America how to stage Shakespeare. Nearly everyone who was anyone in pre-war German cinema passed through Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin so it seemed natural that he’d gravitate eventually to film himself. The 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was directed by William Dieterle but it’s very much a Reinhardt production, especially in the fantastic opening of Act II where the fairies dance into the moonlit sky on paths of mist accompanied by Mendelssohn’s music. With its blend of music, dance and lavish production design Dieterle’s film gives us some idea of the harmonising artistry at work in Reinhardt’s stage productions.

There are other reasons to recommend this version over later adaptations, not least James Cagney’s performance as Bottom. A fifteen-year-old Mickey Rooney played Puck although he’s frequently more annoying than mischevious. Then there’s the mystery of whether that’s the young Kenneth Anger uncredited in the role of The Changeling Prince. Anger has always claimed it was him (he was a child actor for a while), Anger biographer Bill Landis agrees but plenty of other people have disputed the claim in recent years. The best viewing I had of the sequence in which the Changeling appears was on a big screen in a season of Kenneth Anger’s films in 1990. Whether Anger played the part or not, the charm of Dieterle’s film subtly invests The Magick Lantern Cycle, from the glittering surfaces in Eaux D’Artifice and the artificial forest in Rabbit’s Moon, to the appearance of Mickey Rooney’s Puck on a TV screen in Scorpio Rising. Anger’s later works were productions of Puck Films, their motto “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Ideally the magical opening of Act II would be on YouTube but it seems not. This scene, however, gives an idea of the atmosphere, while Doctor Macro has stills and more information.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Midsummer Chronophage
• Another Midsummer Night
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Choise of Valentines, Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo

My little dilldo shall suply their kinde:
A knaue, that moues as light as leaues by winde;
That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,
But stands as stiff as he were made of steele;

A salacious post for chocolate-and-roses day. There’s a degree of confusion around this work and its author, an Elizabethan poet, playwright and pamphleteer. The poem, which was distributed privately, dates from around 1593 and has a variety of titles, while its author is variously credited as Thomas Nashe or Thomas Nash. Despite the bawdy reputation of the Elizabethan era Nash’s contemporaries were sufficiently scandalised by the poem for it to remain unpublished, with the result that it survives imperfectly in a few handwritten copies. It’s a lengthy piece so let’s go to Wikipedia for a précis:

It describes the visit of a young man named “Tomalin” to the brothel where his girlfriend Frances (“Frankie”) is employed. Having paid ten gold pieces for her favours, Tomalin is embarrassed to find that merely lifting her skirts makes him lose his erection. She perseveres in arousing him however and they make love, but to her disappointment he has an orgasm before her. Frankie then decides to take matters into her own hands: hence the informal title by which the poem was known, Nashe’s Dildo.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Nash with the first appearance in English of the word “dildo”, a term “of obscure origin” we’re told, whose usage here predates John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598), Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1611). Nash’s achievement is something of a cheat since his poem wasn’t actually published until 1899, and then in a private edition. As usual the Internet Archive has the book in question, and it’s their version which follows, albeit without the copious footnotes.

The Renaissance English Literature site has more about Thomas Nash (or Nashe), his life and his work.

Continue reading “The Choise of Valentines, Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo”

Weekend links 35

Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside.

• “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don Paterson throws the cat among the pigeons in an examination of the Shakespeare’s sonnets. Related (sort of): Shakespeare and Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel. Also related: Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.

• 100 orbs of light float in the Schuylkill River. Also in Philadelphia: Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet: the Brothers Quay are making a film in the Mütter Museum. Can’t wait to see it.

• More Alan Moore: Fossil Angels, a lengthy essay about magic and the occult, was written in 2002 but hasn’t been given a public airing until now.

• Alberto Manguel is always worth reading:

As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.

• Here Comes Everybody: Wake In Progress is a self-described “foolhardy attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake”. Easier to illustrate than make a film of the book, I’d have thought, and Mary Ellen Bute already attempted the latter.

Psychic Explosion: Adolf Hoffmeister’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of Lautréamont’s Poesies at A Journey Round My Skull.

• Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes can be seen at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, during November.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a book and retrospective exhibition of his art due next year.

• A sneak peek into The Steampunk Bible to which I’m a contributor. And also here.

• “Human or other; depends who comes”: the Ballardian films of Paul Williams.

• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division; Transmission (1995) by Low; Monkey (2010) by Robert Plant.

The Tempest illustrated

“Such stuff as dreams are made on”: Heathcote Williams and Toyah Willcox.

DVD viewing earlier this week was Derek Jarman’s wonderful adaptation of The Tempest which he directed in 1979. This is my favourite of Jarman’s films, partly because the play is my favourite Shakespeare (along with its polar opposite, Macbeth) and also because it’s a film infused with an occult sensibility which comes directly from the director’s own interests, rather than being the usual film or theatre conventions of what magic entails. An example of this is the grimoire which Prospero (Heathcote Williams) is seen leafing through which Jarman reveals in his autobiography, Dancing Ledge, to be his own 17th-century edition of Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. In his account of the filming he also describes his conception of Prospero as being based on Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan occultist who Shakespeare would certainly have known of, and may even have met since the pair both had business with Elizabeth I’s court. The most explicit reference to Dee comes in the shape of Prospero’s magical glass (above), based on Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, and a prop I’d dearly love to own. Dee was also a character in Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), and his Angelic Conversations gave a title to Jarman’s later filming of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Seeing Jarman’s adaptation again had me thinking about the various representations of the characters. Ariel is generally depicted as a fairy type although he’s a lot more powerful than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As for Caliban, like Grendel in Beowulf, he’s an all-purpose monster whose predominant attributes seem to be whatever Ariel isn’t: ugly, earthbound, stupid, treacherous, and so on. I’d be tempted to propose the island’s quartet as representing the four elements—Prospero: water; Miranda: fire; Caliban: earth; Ariel: air—but I’m sure that’s not an original idea given the amount of academic trawling through the Bard’s corpus. Rather than dig for symbolism, what follows is a few pictures found during another trawl of my own through the Internet Archive, where the books aren’t drowned but patiently await their rediscovery.

Continue reading “The Tempest illustrated”

Nirvana and The Conquerors

All Of Us by Nirvana (1968).

Every now and then the web’s great proliferation of images serves a useful purpose by solving some minor artistic conundrum. All Of Us is the second album by UK psychedelic band Nirvana (no relation to Kurt and co.) and the striking cover painting—a long line of emperors and warriors from different ages parading down an avenue of corpses—is annoyingly uncredited. The notes for the 2003 CD reissue inform us that “Patrick had found, in an exhibition of Nazi art (in Bremen, Germany), a still shot from a propaganda film directed by Adolf Hitler’s favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl.” Setting aside the bizarre use of such a picture by one of London’s more effete psychedelic groups, I wasn’t convinced that this was a Nazi-era painting. The style is more like a piece of Neoclassical academic art from the late 19th century, and that’s what it turns out to be.

Les Conquérants (1892) by Pierre Fritel. From this Flickr page.

It was a search for works by French academician George Antoine Rochegrosse that turned up a copy of the painting in Google Images. “Aha, it’s Rochegrosse, then!” thought I, only it wasn’t. The picture is entitled Les Conquérants and the artist responsible is one Pierre Fritel (1853–1942) about whom there’s very little information on the web. There is, however, a discussion here which details the painting’s symbolism:

Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, whose limits are obscured in darkness, advance, hollow-eyed and remorseful, the conquerors of all ages, marching in close ranks between a double row of corpses, stripped and rigid, lying packed close together with their feet toward the procession. In the center of the van rides Julius Caesar, whom Shakespeare has pronounced “the foremost man of all this world.” On his right are the Egyptian called by the Greeks Sesostris, now known to be Rameses II., Attila, “the Scourge of God,” Hannibal the Carthaginian, and Tamerlane the Tartar. On his left march Napoleon, the last world-conqueror, Alexander of Macedon, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, that “head of gold” in the great image seen in his vision as interpreted by the prophet Daniel, and Charlemagne, who restored the fallen Roman Empire.

There’s a follow-up discussion on MetaFilter where a commenter makes the Nirvana connection, and the Internet Archive even has the catalogue for the Salon of 1892 which lists the painting’s first public appearance. See a larger monochrome version here. The only mystery now is the whereabouts of the painting itself. Artnet tells us it was sold in 1988, and they have a poor quality colour photo of the picture (below) which looks a lot less dramatic than the moody monochrome reproductions. If anyone knows the current location of Fritel’s canvas, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Vasili Vereshchagin, 1842–1904