An excavation behind a pub in London has unearthed the remains of the Curtain Theatre, at which early Shakespeare plays were probably first performed.
Here’s the link to the news story: http://now.msn.com/now/0607-shakespeare-theater-found.aspx#scptmh
This is an exciting discovery but I couldn’t help grimacing at the comment by the Globe’s artistic director. I am no great advocate of the British Empire or of Victorian England but to dismiss the whole period as “miserable” displays an extraordinarily narrow view of history, reducing whole periods to the bigoted level of the knee-jerk stereotype. Worse was his description of Elizabethan London as “wild, anarchic and joyful”, in which the words wild and anarchic are clearly meant synonymously with “joyful”. At the same time that Shakespeare’s plays were being performed at the Curtain, Catholic priests were being disembowelled and castrated while still alive. This might be wild and anarchic but I doubt that even secular fundamentalists would be comfortable describing it as “joyful”.
There’s been a ton of programmes celebrating Shakespeare on the BBC over here-why? is it some anniversary?
Anyway, not one of them has addressed the Catholic Shakespeare.
What I’ve watched I feel ‘instinctively’ is wrong. They just don’t do it right anymore. They don’t take Hamlet’s advice not to overact. They ‘tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,’ They speak the verse too aggressively. Too ‘actorly’ .
And it all comes down to the wrong interpretation. What Kevin O’Brien said.
Also, Mark Ryland, and Derek Jacobi and a host of others coming out they don’t believe in the Statford Shakespeare.
I have a feeling that it’s filtering down the strong evidence that he was a believing catholic, and they don’t like that. The thought speaking the words of a believing catholic.