words, words, words ...
As the monkey said to the typewriter.
Alice says that's illogical rubbish, and we should put "as Hamlet said to Polonius" in the fishmonger scene (Act II, scene 2.) Which just proves my point! Anyway, what on earth has it has got to do with fish? They certainly can't type.
Yes. Let's get back to the point. Alice has been exceedingly busy with wordiness of late. Click the photo to see what I mean.Eventually, after much muttering to herself and scribbling - not to mention late nights (I told her she should go to bed earlier, but did she take any notice?) - she was ready for leading the Book Group discussion on Earthly Powers. [See previous post here.] In the event, everyone had read it to the very end, and it all went very well. Of course, they were fortified in advance by the tea and delicious cake provided the group's hostess.
Alice says the meeting for the Shakespeare Group "followed hard upon". She's insisted on a quotation (again!) from her favourite play - but you'll have to look it up, I can't explain everything for you. She had to prepare for reading a poet and various messengers and servants in Timon of Athens. No, I'd never heard of it either, but it is in the Complete Works. What's more, it seems it's quite topical - all about money and financial disasters. They've even put on a cleverly modernised version at the National Theatre. Alice is superciliously sniffy about any such "messing about" with the Bard. Oh dear, Ivory Towers. It sounds like fun to me. She should go and see it at the cinema when it's beamed out live!
Now, guess what the group did, half way through the afternoon? This tea and cake obsession is clearly another one of those incomprehensible human social rituals. Like talking about the weather, even when it's pouring down all over you. Alice thoroughly enjoys these groups, cakes and all, and she's had some jolly good parts to read - Brutus in Julius Caesar (a noble and eloquent, if murderous Roman); Paulina in Winter's Tale (a faithful servant with a sharp tongue); Hotspur in Henry IV (an impetuous warrior); John of Gaunt in Richard II (an aging partriot who, on his death-bed, tells off the King); and, her favourite so far, Lady MacBeth (a gloriously nasty piece of work). She says she fancies a go at Polonius - doing him serious and slightly sinister, not a parody of a silly old ex-actor and intellectual. I wonder why that is?
