P.S. to words.. words...
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| Edmund Kean as Shylock |
Alice is mightily pre-occupied again, and
way behind with writing up our recent cultural visits. She's about to be Shylock for her Shakespeare reading group. She loves taking on these villains. In the eighteenth century,
Edmund Kean played the moneylender as a frenzied and embittered monster of
evil armed with a butcher knife.
His performance created a sensation. This picture shows a super out and out villain. Hurrah! But Alice is saying I should point out that he's
not one hundred percent a villain, but actually the victim of antisemitic prejudice, who is reflecting back the hatred heaped upon
him by the Venetians. So what! That hardly seems to justify refusing to indulge in the
Quality of Mercy, and insisting on cutting
A Pound of Flesh from the bosom of his debtor, does it?
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| Merchant of Venice 2004 |
For all the prepration Alice is going through, you'd thing she'd been invited to perform at
the Globe! She's watched
two different DVDs of the Bard's
Merchant of Venice - a BBC one from 1980 with
Bergerac [see
NOTE below] in doublet and hose as Bassanio and a heavily accented Shylock; plus a more lavish
film version with Al Pacino doing a splendid turn as "the Jew". She found a weird book called
Shylock Is Shakespeare in the Library and read that too, searching for hints on
interpretation, and now she's looking up all the archaic words...
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| John Nettles as Hamlet |
NOTE: One of Alice's claims to fame (which she just loves to tell people) is that she was at University with
John Nettles; went to the same Philosphy classes as him, and shared a stage with him when he was Hamlet in 1964.
She was only the boy who played the Player Queen, however.
Not Ophelia or anything romantic like that. [
"Spoilsport!" - Alice]
I'll be glad when this reading is over and we can get back to jolly photos of me in interesting places. Sigh.
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