E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Norbert Hirschhorn reviews Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. A New Commentary by Don Paterson Okay, cut to the chase: this is a great book, and everything that follows is commentary.   Don Paterson (DP) starts out by warning, “The Sonnets are next-to-impossible to read at one sitting.”   One can say the same for his glosses on each.   Perhaps Adam Mars Jones , the Guardian/Observer ’s puckered-mouth critic, tried to read the book in one go to make a deadline. (1) He didn’t understand that Paterson, the poet, was holding a weekly master class that included a promising student named Bill Shakespeare (BS). Bill has brought a portfolio of 154 sonnets; if three to four sonnets were reviewed each time, and with Christmas week off, they’d have been done in about a year. That DP thinks of himself as conducting a workshop is suggested by his statement at S24, “A contemporary diagnosis – or at least mine, if this were a class I was teaching –might say this poem has lost control of ...

I attended a production of Titus Andronicus Saturday evening, at " Shakespeare's Globe Theatre " - that is to say, the hyper-real simulacrum of the original, dreamed into being by visionary American Sam Wanamaker and built in the late 90s. This had me fooled. The reconstruction, which is artistically and architecturally faithful, is (perhaps in a Disneyland way) exactly how one expects it to be. It was the first balmy night of the London summer, and the bank of the Thames was thronged with drunks and lovers. Sometimes these were the same people. Have I ever had a better time at a Shakespeare play? Maybe once, when I was fourteen, in Ontario, or so, when Brian Bedford played a brilliant Richard II. But I doubt it. The bawdy, ultra-violent production, directed by Lucy Bailey , takes full advantage of the groundlings as a crowd to swell a scene. Also, the use of carts, as used in medieval mystery plays, pulling the players through the audience, in the round, to declaim an...