When a novel, or even just a passage from a novel, just part of the plot? When, in an offhanded manner, just sort of elucidates something about a Shakespeare play? That’s a tiny nugget of goodness. A literary nod. Still learning new stuff about old plays, and now in the most obscure places.
Players playing players.
“This was Shakespeare’s gift. If you said the lines and played the meter and breathed where he told you to breathe and said the words as best you understood them, the breath would lead you and you would feel things.” Page 107.
That is the thing.
There are two, probably more, but two versions of Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale rolling round in my head. One is from a (UT) Winedale performance sometime in the decades past, a more current listing in
2022, but there was also a Hogarth,
The Gap of Time. Both shape some of my thinking about the play, as the script itself was always a bit dry to just read.
The novel itself is shot through and through with heady little Shakespeare references and quotes, I’ve borrowed a few for future employ myself. An uncertain beginning, a journey through the underworld, or the underbelly of old New York?
Although it refers much to acting, and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, I think, ultimately, it’s a retelling of
The Winter’s Tale. I mean, sort of, and as stand alone novel, remarkable in itself.
#shakespeare
If only someone had tips about this?
