In the 1590s they closed the theatres in London because there were outbreaks of plague. The longest period of closure was from February 1593 for about a year when Philip Henslowe (you saw his character in Shakespeare in Love, played by Geoffrey Rush) was made to close the Rose Theatre.
Theatre people are not strangers to sudden changes in the continuity of work, and yesterday as I’m sure everyone knows by now, all Broadway theatres were ordered closed on the authority of the New York State governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Me on hearing the news
The Broadway community of actors, musicians and other performers, technicians, stage mangers, front-of-house staff, box office, stage door, cleaners; as well as agents, lawyers, designers, directors, choreographers, general managers, producers, publicists, critics, and others; as well as all the local auxiliary businesses – bars, restaurants – physical therapists … it amounts to several hundred thousand people in our immediate community, and of course the ripples will go far beyond that.
And what about the patrons from far and wide and all the $$$ they bring?
So; the usual personal question when a gig comes to a scheduled end, “Will I ever work again?”, when the hiatus –(no one has said it’s the end yet), comes as a shock, although somewhat expected, the question now becomes one for the global collective, “WTF IS GOING ON?!?”
Having said that: Hangmen was in previews, and performances of this truly fascinating play were going brilliantly. Let’s hope we can bounce back. Watch this space for updates.
Shakespeare in Love is a charming tale of a young man and a young woman’s fancy in the context of the language-theatrical explosion that was London in the 1590s.
In some respects the script reads like a trivia compilation:
“And for ten points, which sonnet is referenced in the opening scene? For a bonus quail’s egg, who are the offstage Elizabethan celebrity authors mentioned in the De-Lessops-at-home scene?”
The splendid Whitney Maris Brown. She plays Viola
A frivolous confection, a charming love-letter to the Bard and all who sailed with him. Fights, sex, poetry. In short: something for everyone. This production, fielding 21 actors (who, in regional theatre can do that, these days?) — kudos to Bonnie Monte, an artistic director with the drive, enthusiasm and resources to field this show — opens at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, October 11th and plays thru mid November.
Shakespeare has been on my mind lately as I’m re-reading ‘Shakespeare and the Stars’, an excellent volume of muscular scholarship which reveals the depth and breadth of commonplace astrological understanding in the Elizabethan world-view. As someone with a life-long interest in the mantic art, and as an actor in my fourth decade of work, having appeared in about a dozen productions of Shakespeare’s plays, it is kind of humbling, but I have to admit I have missed this insight, or if I noticed it dimly, I simply did not get the implications.
As with so many things, it’s obvious once you have it pointed out for you. For example The Tempest deals with the 12-year cycle of Jupiter, the many Martial references in the history plays juxtapose with the Venus/Mercury verse of Love’s Labor’s Lost, the insistence on The Moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the almost drug-induced highly Neptunian speech “The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact…” — notwithstanding that was written approximately 260 years before the blue gas giant was discovered. Romeo and Juliet has a Geminian flavor, right from “Two households, both alike in dignity…” onwards, and once you have the key, The Duke’s speech in Act 3 of Measure for Measure; “… reason thus with life … a breath thou art, servile to all the skyey influences that dost this habitation where thou keepst, hourly afflict...”, fairly hits you between the astrological eyebrows.
Of course it is possible to interpret Shakespeare as a Catholic, a Protestant, a humanist, a monarchist, a democrat, an anarchist. As the man says, “The devil himself can cite scripture for his purpose.” Now I know he was also an astrologer.
Simon Callow as Sir Edmund Tilney. BBC Archives
Meanwhile I play Sir Edmund Tilney, my costume cannot be revealed before we open otherwise I’d have posted a picture. Meanwhile, Simon Callow looks quite a bit like me, don’t you agree? Tilney was the Master of the Revels, in the employ of the Lord Chamberlain, a chap who seemed to find pleasure in closing theatres. (This is dramatic license. The historical Tilney was a great supporter of theatre and especially of Shakespeare). In the play he is an early prototype of the more censorious characters who later inhabited the Lord Chamberlain’s offices and redacted all kinds of literature right up to and including, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the early 1960s, until Pluto entered Virgo and finally disrupted that kind of thing.
Ah, the Elizabethan age when women onstage were played by boys and men wore beards. When the eating of fish three times weekly was mandated in law. When a farthing (a quarter of a penny) could buy a pot of ale, and when illiterate people could compute in base duodecimal (twelve pennies to a shilling), and planted their vegetables by phases of the Moon.
