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The strange and surprising thing in “Richard III” is that the hunchback does, in fact, prove to be a weirdly successful suitor. He seduces Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law he has murdered, and more important, perhaps, in his jaunty wickedness and perverse humor, he has seduced more than four centuries of audiences. That seduction accounts for the excitement that the unearthing of the skeleton occasioned, and that skeleton in turn seems to confirm Shakespeare’s intuition that there is a relationship between the shape of a spine and the shape of a life.
Stephen Greenblatt on Richard III’s twisted bones: http://nyr.kr/YAYq5N
Photograph by Dan Kitwood/Getty.
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Shakespeare’s plays are produced constantly, everywhere. Then, there are the adaptations—the films and operas that hew closely to the stories or use them merely as jumping-off points. “The Tempest” has been interpreted in classical ballet, but what would a contemporary-dance version look like? In 2011—exactly four hundred years after the play is thought to have been written—the Vancouver-based choreographer Crystal Pite presented one possibility, with “The Tempest Replica,” which she created for her company, Kidd Pivot. The recent performance of the work at the Joyce showed that the source material is as vital as ever, and in the hands of a creative force like Pite it can lead to an art work of astonishing beauty and thoughtfulness…
Continue reading Andrew Boynton on Crystal Pite’s new work: http://nyr.kr/VzyIAT
Photograph by Jörg Baumann.
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A Saturday morning cartoon by Drew Dernavich: http://nyr.kr/Q6XOhL
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From the Film Set of “Coriolanus”
This week Anthony Lane reviews Ralph Fiennes’s film adaption of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.” The photographer Kalpesh Lathigra took the production as an opportunity to shoot two different projects—although, he admitted, he hadn’t read the play. “Julius Caesar was my Shakespeare,” he told me. The first project, was a more conventional series of production stills. The second was a series of large-format photographs, shot with a 5x4 camera, “where the actors are not the prominent players on stage but merely part of the wider tableaux of the set,” Lathigra said.
- For more of Lathigra’s photographs from the set: -
Shouts & Murmurs: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid named Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and then her own death in a Deptford tavern brawl.
- Eric Idle (Monty Python) puts a definitive end to an age-old question: http://nyr.kr/tEqDOu
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(Source: newyorker.com)
