For several years now, YouTuber Nando v Movies has been assembling playlists brining critical analysts together around a designated prompt. Here are my earlier contributions for One Villainous Scene and One Musical Scene. This year he’s wrapping up the game with an appropriately-themed One Last Scene. Naturally, my mind went to Titus Andronicus, the play that tries to out-tragedy all other grotesque and bloody tragedies, with a glorious pile of bodies to cap it off.
Here’s my walkthrough of what you’ll see if you make it through the gorefest all the way to the last scene, and why it works as shared catharsis.
I haven’t been publishing much lately, so I’ll take the small wins where they come. It’s great to see these charming, tiny books existing in the world. They are lightly edited transcripts of the Shakespeare Memorial Lectures given at the University of Sydney over the past three years. I managed to smuggle in some local history in the preface as, by curious happenstance, I am the person who knows everything about the origins of the Shakespeare Society of NSW, which later went on to make the charitable bequest that created the lecture series. We have had them published with the collaboration of local, independent publisher, WestWords. These first instalments are by John Bell, Janine Watson and Kate Gaul. We will continue to add one each year.
You can read them yourself, for free, wherever you are in the world using this link to take you to the WestWords open access publications page.
It’s time again for the annual Shakespeare Memorial Lecture, and this one is especially chosen to suit this year’s 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, that is, Shakespeare’s complete works gathered into one volume and printed in 1623.
The speaker will be Professor Laurie Johnson from the University of Southern Queensland. Laurie is an academic consultant on the development of the Museum of Shakespeare which is currently being constructed on the site of the Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London. This is his outline of what he is planning to share with us: “taking the audience back to that moment when this remarkable book first appeared, to consider what the Folio can tell us about the time before its appearance. After all, Shakespeare had already been seven years in the grave when the Folio became available, so we inevitably view it as a time capsule as much as we see it as the product of his living imagination. Yet we can go further, to find evidence in the Folio of the players and audiences who populated the playhouses of his age. Like a time capsule, the Folio need not be frozen in time but can be used to bring many people’s pasts to life.” I love a bit of book history, so this is going to be a treat.
One really delightful aspect is the venue, as the lecture is taking place in the Photography and the Performative Gallery of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, which has only been open for a couple of years at the University of Sydney, showcasing the University’s various historic collections.
Completely free, 5pm Thursday 7th September, on campus at the University of Sydney.
Over on my YouTube channel I have a few different types of video. They’re mostly intended to be useful for people wanting to deepen their knowledge of Shakespeare, or some of the ways that theatre works, for those who haven’t been involved in the working business of putting on a show. They’re not polished, but I’ve certainly developed a feel for the variety of forms in which you can deliver material.
And yet YouTube remains a mysterious beast. There are all kinds of guides and recommendations, but no one has ever managed to predict what the audience out there will take to. For me, it seems that the thing people like is my one-shot videos. This is where all I do is explain the plot of an Early Modern play very rapidly. The Shakespeare videos take much longer to make, and involve so much more effort. But who am I to judge the will of the people? So I’ve decided to focus on getting back to those, and I’m going to see if I can develop them into a library with enough substance to be useful, if people want to hear a bit more about what was on the stage before that nasty Oliver Cromwell got his way with the public theatres.
All this is to say that if you haven’t been over to my YouTube channel for a while there are some new things: The Witch of Edmonton, Supposes and The Changeling; and now is a good time to subscribe to get notifications, because there are more in the works.
Anna Kamaralli 