Last fall, it was the Dali exhibit, plus, more than anything for me, seeing two particular plays done better than I’ve ever seen them done before. Forewarned is forearmed, I suppose.
We’ve got tickets to Jerry Springer the Opera, Hamlet, and then, at the Shakespare’s Globe, Much Ado, Measure for Measure and the ubiquitous, R&J.
“This is going to be like, a Shakespeare fest or something.”
Arranging last minute details, like Left Bank hotel in Paris for a few days. Not that I like to brag about being a cheap (illegitimate reprobate), but I’m paying $76 for a cheap seat over and back, free lodging in London and Paris, and free ticket to Paris.
“Is’t possible the spells of France should juggle men into such strange mysteries?”
from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (I.i.3)
“How much did you pay for the Globe tickets?”
They weren’t cheap, that’s for sure.
“But my friend said they had cheap tickets. At the new Globe thing.”
5 quid (Five Pounds Sterling) for groundling tickets. Roast in the sun, soak in the rain, exposed to the weather, no seats, stand around on concrete for about three hours? No, I may be cheap, but I want a degree of comfort. Shade, dry, seating. I live a frugal existence, but some things in life are worth the high price.
As I was doing my research, just seeing what Bloom had to say about one play, Measure for Measure, I came across a couple of very intriguing quotes. Some are saved for after the play, but it’s easy to see why this would excite me:
“The forerunners of nineteenth-century European nihilism, of Nietzsche’s prophecies, and Dostoevsky’s obsessives, are Hamlet and Iago, Edmund and MacBeth. But Measure for Measure surpasses the four High Tragedies as the masterpiece of nihilism. Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida, in his scabrous invectives, still relies upon absent values, values that implicitly condemn the moral idiocy of everyone else in the play, but there are no values available in Vincentio’s Vienna, since every stated or implied vision of morality, civil or religious, is either hypocritical or irrelevant. So thoroughgoing is Shakespeare’s comic rebellion against authority that the play’s very audacity was its best shield against censorship or punishment.” (p.363)
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Press, 1998.
“I think the hotel in Paris has Wifi. At least, they say it’s got net access in the rooms.”
So I’m stoked. Sister has other plans, and she patently abhors Elizabethan Theatre, so there is some respite there.
But I do have a plea, a plea for assistance: one thing, one piece in a museum, one sight, one out-of-the-way artifact – be it person, place or thing – that should be on my list. Yeah, I’ll try to get a picture of that building. Other suggestions?
