october shakespeare

this month is two-thirds over. my plans for Henry V on the ninth deteriorated due to lack of planning and lack of vehicle: the show was sold out; my car was being given a few new parts. my back-up Shakespeare was Pericles... but time is running out for me. and due to things like car repairs, money is running out also.

what am I going to do?

there is still a smidgeon of time. I can always hope for some random high school performance to show up on my Shakespeare-radar. I can go hunting for the perfect theatre when I'm in Boise next weekend...

or I could finagle some technically-not-live-theatre substitutions for month number eight of this project, and then see how things look in November.

I recently finished a piece of historical-fiction called The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare. it's an in-depth, exhaustively researched, highly speculative 'autobiography' of the woman who married the greatest English writer of all time. it was a long but very enjoyable story. the lives of these two people are told fascinatingly, and Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, seems to have so much meaning in it. so many subtle tangling ties to the actual people Arliss Ryan has recreated from imagined events behind the scenes, beyond the recorded scraps of history that have survived from four hundred years ago.

so when I'd finished the book, I wanted to see The Tempest. really, really wanted. like last month's Hamlet, it isn't one I've ever seen on stage. I've only read it, heard it quoted, and seen a few cheesy, juvenile adaptations.

unfortunately there are no stage productions of The Tempest scheduled during the next two weeks that happen to be within anything like a reasonable distance of my life here. so I have been forced by these circumstances to scour the local libraries for recorded performances. and now I've got three, sitting happily together on my bookshelf. two are straight Shakespeare (from the BBC and some other less-notable production company), the third a somewhat ridiculous-looking modernization.

I kind of wish I could time-travel and go see this version. it looks pretty fantastic.

anyway. the only question now is how to make time for these five hundred and nineteen minutes of Shakespearean video?

I'm not sure. but I'll try. and that will just have to do.