Counting to a hundred …

I’m fully aware I neglect this web-site. And that inertia has been greatly exacerbated by the inability to operate wordpress through a Safari browser.

Still, I’m seeking a way to fill space and occupy time.

I’m going to emulate, and I hope improve the multitude of webpages which tell us, with one or another level of credibility, the hundred books we all should read. Correction there: there cannot be a canonical list of the books anyone should read. My choice is subjective, the result of sixty years as a reader (and before that it was Biggles and worse). Give anybody a decent library, and turn that individual loose, to choose and reject.

Most of those definitive efforts are wholly vacuous. A dead give-away is listing both Hamlet and the Complete Shakespeare. I’m not convinced I’ve done the second of those — it was only in the last year or so I attended a performance, and then read the text (which was significantly different) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. I’d argue that one is as much John Fletcher as yer ackshul Uncle Bill Shagsper.

But let me get him out of the way to start.

1. Julius Caesar

I give this one priority because it was the first that really ‘got’ to me. 

I’d been fed Midsummer Night’s Dream in a mixed-class at Fakenham Grammar School (now defunct, for good or ill). Perhaps it was all those fairies that were supposed to ‘sell’ this to a captive audience, but it didn’t ‘sell’. Only decades later, when a daughter was doing that play for A-level, did I go back and have another try. That’s when I came across the editorial suggestions that MND is a deep political satire. Which opens a proverbial can-of-worms — but that wasn’t presentable to early adolescents.

Then, for Irish Leaving Cert, we had to do a deep-ish study of Julius Caesar. Which meant learning large chunks of text. This time it all came together. If ever a play was made for all times and all societies, it’s this one. The characters are well-defined. The issues are authoritarianism, ambition, loyalty and opportunism. Assassination is a blood sport that constantly interrupts the flow of history. The structure of the play is impeccable: it fits Freytag’s pyramid precisely:

2. Antony and Cleopatra

I swear if you cut me, I’d bleed A&C. I had to teach it to two groups in two college years. That meant for sixteen hours a week I lived and breathed it. Without realising, I can still place much of the text, even to a particular page of the New Arden edition.

I’d maintain one of the funniest scenes in all Shakespeare is the one on Cleopatra’s tomb (the close rivals for that distinction are the two ‘assisted suicides’ in J.C.) . I could never read those without corpsing.

Judy Dench once reckoned the most difficult speech in all the corpus was Cleopatra’s ‘O!’ — and she does it repeatedly.

For sheer political cynicism there’s always Antony in J.C. and Octavius in A&C.

You may notice I don’t list any of: 

• King Lear, which is based on the most eccentric pretext of a decaying monarch dividing his kingdom, has plenty of gore, includes the (unconscious) hilarity of the cliff-top scene, and comes with a truly gooey ending.
• Hamlet, if only because Omlette is far too complex for my mind (or those of the many critics) to fully comprehend. On top of which the treatment of Ophelia is even more gynophobic than Katerina in Shrew (for which, see below).
• Macbeth, because the play is so incomplete it barely holds together (we clearly have the shortened version, for royal entertainment mainly). I cannot truly engage with any of the characters — each is incomplete, and lacks real depth. The witchery is too crude for words. And I’ve had to teach it to the unwilling far too often.

3. Kiss Me Kate

Fair enough, unlike the above, not really a text.

It is, though, so wonderfully structured it is exemplary.

Kate/Katerina/Lilli is a remarkable part, and demands an equally-remarkable actor. In the original, in 1948-9 on Broadway and then in London, she was [Eileen] Patricia Morison — just one generation out of Belfast, and feisty with it. I saw the 2001 London transfer (after 9/11 did for Broadway) with Marin Mazzie and again the 2012 Chichester transfer, with Hannah Waddington.

To make the thing work, Kate/Lilli has to be in control all the way through — something the Kathryn Grayson/Howard Keel MGM movie doesn’t consistently achieve.

There was a magnificent moment, one worth borrowing, in the 2013 Toby Frow Globe production of Shrew which made the whole farrago make perfect sense. In the first meeting of Katerina and Petruchio they exchange a mutually-knowing look (Beat … Beat …), as if each is recognising a worthy opponent.

And, with Kiss Me Kate, there are always the superb lyrics of Cole Porter.

Now, on with the motley, and some fiction …