Dilip Simeon's blog

On this day in 1616, April 23, William Shakespeare died, and Miguel Cervantes was buried. Three hundred and ninety-nine years later, the play connecting them still confounds us. Of course, Shakespeare was also born on this same date 451 years ago. See also :  Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges A play is lost Three years before, in 1613, royal records give evidence of the performance of a play called  Cardeno  by The King's Men, the famous acting company that Shakespeare was associated with, for which they were paid. At the time Shakespeare was collaborating with another writer named John Fletcher – they wrote  Henry VIII  and  The Two Noble Kinsmen  together – for the King's Men. Forty years later, in 1653, leading publisher Humphrey Moseley asserted his right to publish the play, but ultimately never did. The play was lost, and would go on to be one of the most hotly contested lost plays attributed to the Bard. ...

Shakespeare spoke of “the inaudible and noiseless foot of time” – but the revelry will likely be quite audible indeed when the playwright’s 450th birthday arrives in April. A major anniversary is a good excuse (as if we needed one) to celebrate his life and legacy. But we may also wonder: after four and a half centuries, can there possibly be anything left to say about Shakespeare that hasn’t already been said? The genius from Stratford-upon-Avon has worn many hats over the years, with imaginative scholars casting him as a closet Catholic, a mainstream Protestant, an ardent capitalist, a Marxist, a misogynist, a feminist, a homosexual, a legal clerk and a cannabis dealer – yet the words “Shakespeare” and “science” are rarely uttered in the same breath.  A surprise, perhaps, given that he was producing his greatest work just as new ideas about the human body, the Earth and the universe were transforming Western thought. But a re-evaluation is on the horizon. Scholars are exami...

Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe By Chris Laoutaris Reviewed by  Anne Somerset  Out, Damned Nightspot William Shakespeare had good reason to hope that 1596 would prove a prosperous year for him. At great expense the impresario James Burbage had recently acquired and refitted a magnificent theatre where Shakespeare's works could be staged. Unlike the premises at which Shakespeare's theatrical company was then based, the new theatre at Blackfriars was not open to the elements, so plays could be put on even in winter. Large sums had been invested to provide excellent lighting and special-effects technology. Seats would be pricey and Shakespeare would be entitled to a share of the profits. Unfortunately for Shakespeare the venture incurred the disapproval of Elizabeth, Lady Russell, a venerable Blackfriars resident who set about organising a petition against the theatre. She prevailed upon almost all her neighbours to sign it, including he...

I've always thought," says Simon Callow ruminatively, "that Shakespeare was the kind of guy who goes to a party, nurses one glass, says nothing, and goes home with the prettiest girl in the room." I imagine 1,000 biographers keeling over in horror. But Callow isn't joking. His new one-man show, which debuted last year in Edinburgh and is about to open at Trafalgar Studios in London, brings audiences face to face with the middle-class Midlands boy who grew up to be the world's most famous writer. The title is serious enough: it's called Being Shakespeare. There is, however, a rival Bard in town. At the Young Vic, Patrick Stewart is reviving his performance as the playwright in Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo – a revival that one critic praised for its "truly Shakespearian greatness". The Bardic battle is on: if they feel so inclined, Londoners will be able to do a direct compare-and-contrast. Fictional representations of Shakespeare aren'...

Naseeruddin Shah, the actor, once claimed that “The roots may look lost but every big story in the Hindi film industry is from Shakespeare.” It might not be as simple as that but what Shah was pointing out was to the fact that there are many references to Shakespeare’s plays in Hindi film. Not just Hindi but Indian cinema reveals an adaptation and appropriation of the Bard of Avon. There are themes and devices so commonly found in Shakespeare’s plays in Indian films, such as twins separated at birth, cross dressing characters, star-crossed lovers, characters falling in love with messengers, the wise fool, the tamed Shrew and the mousetrap device. Sally Bayley: The Shakespeare tragedy that truly speaks to us now Shakespeare plays have been translated and adapted into many Indian languages. They have been performed in English and in indigenous performative forms like the  jatra, nautanki  and classical dance forms like Kathakali, as well.  His plays have been adapted and ap...

As w e honour the four hundredth anniversaries of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, it may be worth noting that while it’s generally accepted that the two giants died on the same date, 23 April 1616, it actually wasn’t the same day. By 1616 Spain had moved on to using the Gregorian calendar, while England still used the Julian, and was 11 days behind. (England clung to the old ­Julian dating system until 1752, and when the change finally came, there were riots and, it’s said, mobs in the streets shouting, “Give us back our 11 days!”) Both the coincidence of the dates and the difference in the calendars would, one suspects, have delighted the playful, erudite sensibilities of the two fathers of modern literature. We don’t know if they were aware of each other, but they had a good deal in common, beginning right there in the “don’t know” zone, because they are both men of mystery; there are missing years in the record and, even more tellingly, missi...

In 2021, as we approach Shakespeare's putative birthday tomorrow, there are more profound reasons why his character is pertinent. During this difficult year of lockdowns and isolation, Falstaff has emerged in my mind as a potent symbol of dispossession and social misfortune    There may be Shakespeare characters who are more celebrated, or whose tragedies are grander, but perhaps none is as easy to empathise with as John Falstaff, the portly knight of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor.  John Falstaff, that charismatic drunk, who lodges at the Boar's Head Tavern and keeps company with Prince Henry, aka Hal, soon to be Henry V; the chaotic old man who distracts the young prince from his more serious business of becoming king. Happy birthday Shakespeare We feel a certain sympathy for Falstaff because he is a dependent: in need of company, food and fellowship, of social acceptance. He reminds us how in need we all are. As US critic Harold Bloom put it about his own ve...

Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent well-known tales of murder, Dostoevsky's  Crime and Punishment  and Camus's  The Stranger . In  Macbeth  Shakespeare presented the moral phenomena in such a way that those who respond to his art must, in some way or another, become better human beings. In Dostoevsky's and Camus's heroic criminals we see the corruption of moral consciousness characteristic of modern literature.... Lady Macbeth says that Macbeth is not without ambition, but lacks the "illness should attend it." This is the only occurrence in Shakespeare of "illness" to mean "capacity for doing evil." That a capacity for evil is an evil capacity is not what Lady Macbeth intends to convey, but Shakespeare conveys it to us nonetheless. That ambition "should" be attended by release from moral restraint is a thesis much older than Machiavelli. It is explored in the greatest de...

Although Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564, just coming up on a shared four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Shakespeare never wrote a play about his contemporary. (Wise man that he was, Shakespeare never wrote a play about anyone who was alive to protest.) The founder of modern science had to wait three hundred years, but when he got his play it was a good one: Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” which is the most Shakespearean of modern history plays, the most vivid and densely ambivalent. It was produced with Charles Laughton in 1947, during Brecht’s Hollywood exile, and Brecht’s image of the scientist as a worldly sensualist and ironist is hard to beat, or forget. Brecht’s Galileo steals the idea for the telescope from the Dutch, flatters the Medici into giving him a sinecure, creates two new sciences from sheer smarts and gumption—and then, threatened by the Church with torture for holding the wrong views on man’s place in the universe, he collapses, recants, and lives on in a ...

Around 1905 or 1906, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay, unpublished in his lifetime, called “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage.” The essay addressed the question of what we, as spectators, get out of watching people go crazy. Freud’s theory was that we’re fascinated by crazy characters because they help us express our own repressed impulses. Drama, of course, can’t express our fantasies too literally; when that happens, we call it pornography and walk out of the theatre. Instead, a good playwright maneuvers our desires into the light using a mixture of titillation and censure, fantasy and irony, obscenity and euphemism, daring and reproach. A good play, Freud wrote, provokes “not merely an enjoyment of the liberation but a resistance to it as well.” That resistance is key. It lets us enjoy our desires without quite admitting that they’re ours. “Hamlet,” Freud thought, best exemplified the appeal of managed self-expression. Watching “Hamlet,” we think that it’s about revenge—a famili...

  … like Ulysses, I drive myself forward,...  but move, as before, backward  -   Joseph Brodsky, “I am like Ulysses” IT TOOK ODYSSEUS 20 years to return to Ithaca, and James Joyce’s  Ulysses  had to wait 67 years before reaching the Russian reader. In both instances, a war contributed to the delay. In the novel’s case, it was the Cold War, as well as the Soviet establishment’s hostile attitude toward experimental prose. The first full Russian translation of  Ulysses , by Viktor Khinkis and Sergei Khoruzhy, was published in 1989. The first full Russian translation of  Finnegans Wake  did not see the light of day until 2021, just a few months ago. José Vergara : All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature Reviewed by Nataliya Karageorgos To read Joyce in the Soviet Union was indeed to tempt fate. It serves to remember that the novel was also banned for over a decade in the United States after its publication by Shakes...

Anti-Judaism:  The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg Reviewed by R. I Moore Nirenberg’s penetrating analysis of Shakespeare’s Jewish question transcends the hackneyed one of whether play or playwright is anti-Semitic. On the contrary, the crucial argument of this learned and disquieting book is that hostility to Judaism was far too deeply and pervasively woven into the fabric of Western Christianity for the presence of actual Jews to be necessary to arouse anti-Semitism. Long before that, Jews had been perceived (notably in Egypt) as hostile to all other peoples, their laws and their gods—the auxiliaries of successive invaders and the willing instruments of their tyranny—although those perceptions did not amount to a coherent or universal stereotype. But the Christians’ earliest records, the Epistles of Paul, show how much they identified themselves and defined their beliefs in opposition to Judaism. For the followers of Jesus, his death and resurrection meant jettisonin...

In an age in which we urgently need to cooperate, we are educated for individual success in competition with others. Governments tell us that the purpose of education is to get ahead of other people or, collectively, of other nations. The success of universities is measured partly by the starting salaries of their graduates. But nobody wins the human race. What we.. see as economic success ultimately means planetary ruin. Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils form. All this is knowledge as basic as being aware that Shakespeare was a playwright. Yet ignorance of s...

I am in blood, Stepped in so far, that,  should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er : Macbeth I have spent most of my adult life in war. I began in Central America during the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where I spent five years, on to the Middle East, where I spent seven, and ended my career in the besieged city of Sarajevo and finally Kosovo. My life has been marred, let me say deformed, by the organized industrial violence that year after year was an intimate part of my existence. I have looked into the eyes of mothers keening over the mutilated and lifeless bodies of their children on dusty roads in Central America and cobblestone squares in Sarajevo. I have stood in warehouses with rows of corpses, including children, and breathed death into my lungs. I carry within me the ghosts of my comrades now gone. Where do you turn in the midst of a world bent on self-annihilation, a world where lives are snuffed out at random? Whom do you reach for to keep ...

NB:  Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of the greatest writers of our times.  He wrote during a tumultuous historical period.  Deutsches Requiem , posted below, a short story written in 1946, is an imaginary testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal, Otto Dietrich zur Linde. Before getting to the story, I post two paragraphs he wrote in 1944, about Hitler and Nazism. This is from page 211 of the Selected Non-fictions (1999); Section IV, Notes on Germany & the War. Worth reading.   DS Several nights later, I was enlightened by a book and a memory. The book was Shaw's Man and Superman; the passage in question was John Tanner's metaphysical dream, where he affirms that the horror of Hell is its unreality. This conviction can be compared with the doctrine of another Irishman, John Scotus Erigena, who denied the substantive existence of sin and evil, and declared that all creatures, including the Devil, will return to God. The memory was the day that ha...