Month: November 2016

Seafaring men, sir. They say they have letters for you. – HAMLET IV vi

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In pulling out the previous post title (and remembering one from a couple of months ago regarding the same scene), I’m was hit by the notion that the reason scenes like that are often trimmed mercilessly or cut entirely (besides of course the human bladder) is the very reason people love particular episodes of the better episodes of this New Golden Age of Television we’re in.

Ask fans of Game of Thrones or Mad Men or what have you for a favorite or at least a monumental and point-turning episode and they’ll frequently mention “that one where they dropped sixteen of the seventeen plotlines we usually jump around among and focused on just one for the whole hour”. (“The Watchers on the Wall” and “The Suitcase” episodes of the aforementioned are good respective examples. You no doubt have your own favorites.)

But the moment the Burbage Break hits a play like Macbeth, the whining begins. “That’s not our lead actor; that’s not the main story; can’t we get rid of most of that and get back to a star turn speech or a swordfight?

The Burbage Break, for people who don’t do this all the time, is a colloquial term (one of many – I’ve heard it called other things, but I like plain “Burbage” most) for that moment around Act IV when Shakespeare et al. would leave a nice and probably contractually dictated gap in which the inevitably Richard Burbage-portrayed protagonist would be captured by pirates or something and the actor himself could go have a pee or an ale or a shag or just a seat before coming back refocused for the big swordfight that led to his temporary demise, twice Wednesdays.* And the candles would get their wicks trimmed for the indoor shows, and the audience would have to live with other stuff going on.

(In the midst or rehearsals for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, I noticed that even in that play’s Act III version of what happens during Hamlet’s Burbage, Hamlet sleeps through most of it. All that nattering is exhausting. And even during his break, Hamlet won’t butt out – he sends a long letter poor Horatio has to just stand and read on stage. There are other people in your nutshell, Hamlet. Make room.)

All this is hearsay, of course, but the fact remains that these rest spots do exist for the big feather-in-the-cap tragic roles – Shakespeare was a practical man; just look at his grain storage.

And that Other Stuff gets fascinating. You don’t notice Lear disappears for several scenes because of the onstage eye-gouging. Hamlet’s gone? Groovy – let’s watch a woman go stark raving mad. Malcolm & Macduff, though, bless their hearts. I’ve seen their long (long) scene done really well, but there’s a long while between the baby-murdering that distracts us from the start of Macbeth’s teatime and Macduff’s grief about something we knew already as Macbeth finishes his biscuit. And most of that long while is a not-even-argument-exactly purity test given in real time. It’s a staging challenge when compared to blinding a man with one’s thumbs.

So TV producers out there, hear me out: do a four or five hour episodic adaptation of one of the plays (instead of doing four plays in that span coughhollowcrowncough); let your star off for Episode Four and suddenly everyone will be all excited about Malcolm and the lingering visuals of the healing hands of Edward the Confessor and of Rosse’s long ride to England and no one will even notice the big jerk was gone.

…I suspect the lack of break for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern was in the back of my head when I thought of this. They don’t rest. There’s no ale. And I’m blogging when I should be memorizing. Back in a bit.

 

 

*I know, I know, they didn’t do twice Wednesdays then. We barely do it now, relatively. It’s an expression. The internet demands such a lot of preemptive defenses against literality.

The mere despair of surgery, he cures – MACBETH, IV iii

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I add nothing to the current human conversation when I note that much of 2016 was thoroughly rotten, unsettling, cruel, and relentless. I’ve even started a list for myself to keep my memory of it in some sort of balance – the Cubs won; I got a surprise last minute first row chance to see Springsteen again; some of my favorite people on the planet had a healthy baby; our young nieces are memorizing Hamilton and leaping headfirst into DC comics and Agatha Christie; our teen nephews are aging rapidly, settling nicely into their personal freak flags, and asking all the right questions about Dr. Strangelove; my wife and I have played Olivia/Malvolio, Speed/Launce, and started in on a new set of song for our music duo; the Tavern re-opened after an overlong arson-based hiatus.

I save two things for last. I’m not very good at Stillness, and if my body is, my mind ain’t. One or both are always moving. So the time my body forced me to spend recuperating after the glorious surgery in mid-March, after which the innards were dandy but the muscles that usually protect said innards had to spend a lot of time engirded and, yes, still, was necessary but ohgoodgoddifficult. And while I’m anything but a bodybuilder, I was almost constantly weak and quivery in an unpleasant way I hid from most people.

But in August, after an international trip and a three-month outdoor performance gig (which you’d think would be enough proof of recovery, tough though it was), the gem of my summer was reaching The Rock out in the lake when we visited my in-laws.* It’s the thing one swims to when one goes to that lake. Because it’s there. Just far enough out to be worth going to, but not really tiring. Nice quiet place to sit (barring interference from the inevitable speedboating jackass, but they’ve been around since well before 2016). I wasn’t sure if I’d be making it to The Rock this year.

I made it to The Rock.

multiviewold

For the second thing, I direct your attention back to that international trip I mentioned both above and here. The Stratford Trip. Just in time for the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death (probably, -ish) and his 452nd birthday (-ish, probably), Kentucky Shakespeare took a tiny contingent over to be part of the festivities. And as things that I’ll try to remember about this year when posterity marks it as the time many great people and nations died, this trip will rank highest.

For starters, I got to be Shakespeare Himself (sort of, –ish) bright and sweetsweetMoses early on the BBC’s kickoff to the 23 April festivities as there in slightly muddy and as-yet-unopened New Place (though they did let Prince Charles in later that afternoon, so now I suppose anyone can enter) four of us did a variation on the house blessing scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream live on national(ized) television. That was terrifying after the fact.

Then we had an opportunity to perform some scenes in the courtyard of the birthplace proper, which while not widely recognized as a performance space has a fascinating vibe when used as one. It was touch and go for a moment there when my wife-as-Kate faux-kneed me-as-Petruchio-with-a-“ch”-thank-you in the groin (as planned) and I dropped to my knees, which takes a bit more abdominal strength than I was ready for, but the day was saved by the power of the muscle-tightening and quite slimming girdle under my doublet. We acquitted ourselves well enough, I guess, that two locals said afterwards, “They were quite good! Despite the accents!” to our (also American) friend and artistic director, who smiled and nodded so as not to betray his own accent to them.

Also, I touched a Folio.

There’s a First Folio floating through town right now, at Louisville’s Frazier History Museum. We went to see it (and some Shaker furniture and a Prohibition exhibit and the dresses from the “Sisters” number in White Christmas – there’s a lot going on there) with my folks last week and it was fun to see their reactions…but I had touched one.

You see, down in the vaults beneath the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (and its research facility, at which I got to browse through Bram Stoker’s old Irving/Terry playbills and the prompt books from the RSC’s Barton-era Wars of the Roses which made my fingertips tingle a bit with impertinence), we were shown some fancy and ancient tomes, your Holinsheds and your Plutarchs and your medical treatises of the era and whatnot, and I poked an aforementioned emboldened fingertip at a spine and said, “And what’s this one?”

“Oh, that’s a Folio.”

Now had this been one of my average days, my recoil, which was significant and covered no little ground, would have sent me backwards into a seven-foot plinth atop which was a bust of antiquity which would fall into my arms after I danced about trying to keep it from becoming a bust, full-stop. But the spirit of Buster Keaton kept his distance and all that fell through the air was a high-pitched “Eep!” from me.

But the covers of Folios are well known for being not-particularly-valuable, relatively, and no one seemed terribly upset by it, myself excluded. We had scrimped for the part of the trip we were responsible for, but an irreplaceable volume wasn’t in the budget.

Then a week in Bath, just us two (my wife, not the Folio), then home for more of 2016, ptui.

Thirty-two more days and counting.

(A quick note: I always grouse about quotes out of context, especially when I’m the guilty party. So I’ll note that this post’s headline is (clearly) not about Shakespeare as I imply but about the healing (?) hands of King Edward the Confessor, as spoken by Malcolm in that English Doctor mini-scene everyone cuts, and I didn’t have scrofula anyway, but an intestinal complaint. I also can’t help but note sadly here that we’re not very likely to get aid from England these days in dealing with our own impending tyrant, who is practically on his way to Scone, whatever you choose to rhyme it with, as we sit, what with England having its own non-scrofular troubles at the moment.)

*My in-laws don’t live in the lake. Just near.

March on, and mark King Richard how he looks. – RICHARD II, III iii

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A couple of weeks ago, I taught this Shakespeare workshop – co-taught, really, but the other honcho was focused on audition skills and my area was verse and especially picking meaning out of the Folio – and I have to say, despite my dismal history as an instructor (I can count on Harold Lloyd’s right hand the times I’ve really enjoyed it or felt like I should be the one doing it), I had a ball. The opportunity to geek out with a group of people who asked for it is a pleasure.

I remembered only after the fact why I brought up the idea of this workshop in the first place, or at least what made the nickel drop and remind me that I feel strongly about contributing to this particular kind of conversation with actors: one line.

Not even a line. A turnaround between two lines of verse. There’s this moment in Act III, Scene iii, around the middle of Richard II where Bullingbrooke is about to show off the size of his not-quite-yet-rebelling forces to Richard, who is above peeking out a castle window. Bullingbrooke ponders how their impending parley might go.

          Me thinkes King Richard and my selfe should meet

          With no lesse terror then the Elements

           Of Fire and Water…

 

Then a whole scientifically dubious thing about how fire and water make lightning which isn’t important to this discussion. Then:

         Be he the fire, Ile be the yeelding Water;

          The Rage be his, while on the Earth I raine

          My Waters on the Earth, and not on him.

 

Now, were this not in verse (and Richard II is written entirely in verse, which is uncommon for Shakespeare), that phrase would read:

          The Rage be his, while on the Earth I raine my Waters on the Earth, and not on him.

 

Sure, fine. But it is in verse, and the line break is there, and it is dancing on the edge of treason. Spelling is dicey enough in this era, but pronunciation here is important.

          The Rage be his, while on the Earth I raine…

…a pause, pregnant, or playful, or threatening – does he mean “reign”? Because this speech is full of tricky stuff to talk about right here with Richard the Still Actual King nearby. Not to mention that even if the listener hears the less threatening “rain”, Bullingbrooke has said seconds before that if Richard will un-banish him and give him back the inheritance that was absconded with to help pay for an Irish campaign, he’ll say thank you and move on:

          If not, Ile use th’advantage of my Power,

          And lay the Summers dust with showers of blood,

          Rayn’d from the wounds of slaughter’d Englishmen;

 

There’s about a fifteen line distance between that equating of rain with battle-shed blood and the next use of the word. So again, even if Bullingbrooke means “rain” and not “reign”, it’s dancing on the border of Ain’t Good. Where was he? Ah, yes:

          The Rage be his, while on the Earth I raine […tick tock tick tock…]

          My Waters […why? What did you think I meant?] on the Earth, and not on him.

 

And yes, I have spent all this precious time on a homophone that anyone can see and hear easily. But it’s the one I remember reading and thinking that if the actor doesn’t deal with the verse as it is and just reads the sentence, well…in this instance, the character and the moment change significantly. Not the hinge of an entire play, not some revelation of Whodunnit or Why, but still a moment that ought to be attended to.

I didn’t bring this example up in the workshop, but plenty of other things came up, so all is well. My next devious plan is to try to put together a similar workshop for non-actors, meant for those who would like to read this stuff in the convenience of home but can’t because it makes for dreadful reading…unless…

…as jealous as a turkey… – TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, II ii

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What the hell does that mean? This is one of those times when it’s worth remembering that words keep changing. It’s bad enough when acting Shakespeare that one has to look up all the many unfamiliar words and idioms; it’s even possible to be betrayed by familiar ones. “Jealous” was more in the neighborhood of “suspicious” in the Elizabethan/Jacobean eras. So the wife of the First Countryman in The Two Noble Kinsmen would be as suspicious as a turkey. Which makes much, much more sense.

Gobble, gobble.

A beast, no more. – HAMLET, IV iv

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I haven’t posted on here all week, what with feelings of utter existential futility that ensue when decisions feel like they’re out of your hands frankly not being conducive to having any impulse to dribble forth fleeting notions about how verse works and whatnot. I’ve instead spent the week getting a couple of projects going that I hope are a way to address goings-on in a way that’s some combination of useful to the world and what I know how to do anyway. I’ve also done a bit of stress eating as well as tried to get a few decent nights’ sleep, which as a person who just came out of a production of Macbeth in general and in specific an occasional knitter of sleeves myself, I know the good of.

Then I went to the Louisville Free Public Library last night to hear the University of Louisville Phi Beta Kappa lecture by James Shapiro, author of a bunch of very good and eminently readable books on the world surrounding Shakespeare. I’d had tickets to this lecture, entitled “Shakespeare in America”, for a while and it was clearly planned months before, so I was surprised by how immediately (and intentionally) relevant to events of the past week it all was. Despite the bubbles we all find ourselves in, Shakespeare will not allow himself to be one of them and when you try to make this happen, something unexpectedly relevant always pops its head out and squints in the bright light.

So rather than thinking of myself as a nerd wiggling punctuation around, I remembered (at my wife’s urging) that I’m also someone who right now is supposed to be poring over a trio of scripts, one a story of how people try to break out of a cycle of misogyny, one about one leader being supplanted by another in ways that make them both look dubious, and one about the disastrous effects of a small group of people setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner of a leader even when they firmly believe they’re doing the right thing. I’m also someone who will soon be jumping around in front of people trying to tell a second-hand Shakespearean story of the feelings of utter existential futility that ensue when decisions feel like they’re out of your hands.

So nothing is irrelevant. None of this is a waste of time. And frankly, only about twenty people are reading this thing anyway, so neither am I significantly wasting anyone else’s time (feel free to share this blog, by the way. Thanks).

As stated, I’m mostly a Folio guy, but times like these sometimes make us have to dip into the Quartos, so:

                               What is a man

          If his chiefe good and market of his time

         Be but to sleepe and feede[?]

Don’t read the rest of that speech looking for too much more significance; I don’t have any treasonous plans – just a bit of rediscovered resolve.

Shall I be frighted when a madman stares? – JULIUS CAESAR, IV iii

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All right. Back to this stuff.

death-of-julius-caesar

I’m working on a pronunciation guide/glossary for our production of Julius Caesar and remembering the last time I saw a really effective production. I visited London in 1999 and paid my groundling pound to see it at the Globe. I went in with the same feeling many Americans who went to public school have about it, which is to say I was forced to read it by someone who I can only assume desperately wanted me to hate it because wow was it dull and forbidding.

I’ve since been told that one of the reasons Julius Caesar has been such an academic mainstay for so many years in our Puritan-founded nation (remember them? The ones who closed theatres in the first place?) is that unlike Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, and just about all of the other biggies, there is zero hanky panky; none of filthy flirting and cheap puns about genitalia that admittedly don’t play as well now as they must have done once but would certainly garner a 14-year-old’s attention more than the two possible allusions to sex in JC: the title character’s cheap dig at his wife’s infertility and Portia’s use of the word “harlot” (though she also says the word “sex”, always a distraction to The Youth even when it means gender as it does in her case). That’s it. No booze-flaccid Porter, no Folger footnote about what “nothing” could occasionally mean. No fun.

But it was what was playing and I wasn’t going to miss seeing a show at this space I couldn’t just walk down the road to every day.* So I saw this traditional (Elizabethan, all-male company, pumpkin-pants-and-toga-pieces) Julius Caesar, set on a bare stage with a bench and a potted fern, with the only modern dress given to the Plebians at the top and around the middle (of the play, not of their wardrobes). And it was fast and it was exciting and there was comedy and there was storytelling and there was an intermission about every thirty minutes and I ate a bag of nuts and leaned my right elbow against downstage left for most of it and I loved it.

And not because of anything they did, but just because of the story, my mind kept banking the play off of the Kenneth Starr madness my own country was enmeshed in, the impeachment of a president not because of any particular policy or ability to govern but because there were people in said government who didn’t like him and who decided character assassination was the best way to distract from what was really happening, which was that they didn’t like not being in charge themselves. Which was causing rather a mess for the people on both sides of that equation who were just trying to live their lives in a country.

Which seemed, you know, Roman. Or Scottish. Or wherever any of about a dozen (minimum) works of Shakespeare take place when their conversations turns toward the unholy mess that follows whenever there’s a non-peaceful transfer of power, regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not.

So look out for a lot of productions of the Histories, of Caesar, Macbeth, Lear, etc., coming up very soon being described both positively and negatively as “political” as if just by telling those stories they had any choice.

 

 

 

*UTTER DIGRESSION: I’m fascinated by all the recent Emma Rice controversy, whether you put the emphasis on the first or the second syllable. People keep asking me my opinion of it as if I’ve ever had the opportunity to see one of her pieces. I live in Kentucky. I have not. In April I did see a little chunk of a rehearsal of this Midsummer that everyone’s so on about and I admit I noticed the amplification and lights and thought, “Oh. That seems to be missing the point of this house.” Not “How dare she swap genders and use modern dress and set pieces”, which surely people are used to by now – though I was in the gallery and the big tree balloon thingies were a definite sightline problem even for the short time I was there – but the insistence on amplifying the actors seemed like kind of a waste. If you can’t be groundbreaking and also acoustic in an acoustically astounding place, then you’re not trying as hard as you think you are. And if amplification is still “groundbreaking” I must have read my calendar wrong this morning. I also couldn’t help but notice that the gender parity that’s such a part of Rice’s mission seemed to involve giving two of the plum female roles to men (one a drag performer, one just male) and letting most of the Mechanicals (though not Bottom) be women, a lateral move at best. I understand that making the fairies sexually ambiguous is a fine choice as is making one of the young couples a pair of same sex (that word again) lovers, but that seems like a choice about story, not about casting parity. I don’t know many women who would trade playing Titania for playing Snug. END OF DIGRESSION.

You taught me language and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse. – TEMPEST, I ii

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Must go dig out the extra-large thermos. The debate is settled, the sweaters are out, and in the morning, bright and early (though not so early as it could be thanks to the outmoded but welcome tweaks of Daylight Savings), I’ll be teaching a Dealing with Verse in Shakespeare workshop to a bunch of unsuspecting actors. I’m looking forward to it, in part because I love the opportunity to practice my brand of geek evangelism. But like all evangelists, I’ll be in danger of crossing over into zealot territory, try as I might to rein it in.

I am in many ways a terrible, cruel, unfeeling person when it comes to The Good Of The Show; my concern for the emotions and often the needs of others and self almost always comes after TGOTS (or what I diagnose as falling into that category) which sits poorly with my non-confrontational tendencies and my deeply held but spottily obeyed belief that nothing is so important as to really freak out about it. One of these days I’ll figure out how to surf the balance between wielding a Buddhist’s calm and a nun’s knuckle ruler. Probably. Maybe. Back to Stoppard:

          Guildenstern: Do I contradict myself?

          Rosencrantz: I can’t remember.

It happens onstage sometimes, this balance, but less frequently off it. Which is why actors behave the way they do offstage, I expect (insert cocktail emoji), as well as why Chazz Palminteri shot Jennifer Tilly, though I’ve never taken it that far except in my mind. At least once a production, but still.

But since I’ve been digging through Richard II, living with my contradictions is a little less tricky…

          …For no thought is contented. The better sort,

          As thoughts of things Divine, are intermixt

          With scruples, and do set the word it selfe

          Against the word, as thus: ‘Come litle ones’: & then again,

          ‘It is as hard to come, as for a Camell

          To thred the posterne of a Needle’s eye’.

Except that’s not what the Folio says, now that I think of it, what with the “Don’t Say The Name of Our Lord Or Anything Too Sacrilegious On Stage You Repulsive Little Actors”  Puritan Bullshit Act of 1606 making it illegal to say “the word” in the context of “Bible stuff”. No, unlike the 1597 Quarto, the 1623 Folio says, with my emphasis,

         …and do set the Faith it selfe

          Against the Faith: as thus: Come litle ones…

Which someone felt was better (?). Odd that what may be the two most famous lines from Richard II, this and “For [God’s? Heaven’s?] sake let us sit upon the ground…”, are both affected by this.

Also the punctuation’s a little different, as if to remind me to go lightly on the Folio Zealotry mentioned above since the Folio is every bit as inconsistent as the Bible Richard of Bordeaux is musing on about.

Also, Shakespeare’s use of antithesis will figure into the workshop prominently, so the old actor chestnut of setting the word itself against the word is every bit as likely to come up as suiting the action to the word, the word to the action, so .

Also Richard is murderèd about five minutes later, assuming the pace of the Visiting Groom section doesn’t get too melodramatic. So maybe I’m taking the wrong lesson away from here altogether.

Now, where is that thermos?

Screw your courage to the sticking place – MACBETH I vii (and also HAMILTON)

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Today I’ve been working on my Stoppard’s Guildenstern lines, ridiculous both in content and in number, as well as continuing to annotate Julius Caesar. I have foreseen, theatre people being what they are, a problem.

That problem is in the fourth scene of the fifth act of Julius Caesar, in which 1st Soldier anticipates the entrance of Marc Antony with the phrase:

          Heere comes the Generall

…which will make everyone break into “Right Hand Man” from Hamilton at the first table read and will never stop backstage until closing. Never. There will be no lull, even during tech. Because, as I said, theatre people are what they are.

The other problem is my own, which is the following exchange from the middle of R&G are D:

          Rosencrantz: (peevish) Never a moment’s peace! In and out, on and off, they’re coming at us from all sides.

          Guildenstern: You’re never satisfied.

For I, too, am a theatre people.

I take heart in knowing that when I’m trying to convince everyone of the vital importance of Folio punctuation during this workshop I’m leading on Sunday (and any other time the subject arises), I can freely use the example from “Take a Break” (which is what I’m really quoting in the post title) in which Angelica notices

          a comma in the middle of a phrase.

          It changed the meaning. Did you intend this?

          One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days.

And if it’s enough to preoccupy Angelica, it might be taken seriously. Because, as I believe I have noted, theatre people are. What they are.

He that hath missed the princess is a thing/ Too bad for bad report – CYMBELINE, I i

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I called the blog Yellowstocking Tales, so I suppose I should tell one.

Back in April, as part of this big 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death fanciness we’re now in the midst of, my wife and I were thrilled to be sort of the actor portion of the small (five-person, though really we all ended up acting) Kentucky Shakespeare contingent invited over for the festivities by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were almost the only non-tourist Americans there, save for a New Orleans brass funeral band. (This is also how, seemingly at random, we ended up here, though I think our popularity with photographers that day had mostly to do with our being nearly the only extravagantly costumed people in the parade on 23 April, as well as the let’s say Visually Shakespearean way my baldness/beardedness played off the resplendent ruff I was given.)

Hereinafter we will call this The Stratford Trip, or, in person, “Oh You See In England”, which is a quite useful preface for any American saying something incredibly precious and pretentious in an American theatre – we started throwing this around before we were even home, this sort of faux I-was-in-Britain-for-four-days-but-somehow-managed-to-absorb-the-terminology-into-my-parlance-sorry-you-may-not-know-all-of-it-actually-basically attitude that I for one still find entertaining. “So when we take the interval – I’m sorry, I mean intermission, You See, In England…”

Another thing about that parade – it was likely to be the closest I’ll ever come to being a Disney Princess. In that I was recognized by multiple paradegoers as the character I was portraying, something I didn’t really expect. We weren’t waving from a float or anything; only carrying banners in pairs (“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”). But the costume I was wearing had been built for me for a production of Twelfth Night, so I figured I’d wear my yellow stockings and garters with it. We’d be performing at the Birthplace later that day, so I had them along – it wasn’t like I had to run to the Tesco or wherever and grab a pair of extra large men’s tights, bright yellow. Seemed properly festive. I wore Malvolio’s chain of office, too, but that’s more of a footnote detail.

So a little way into the parade, I heard a woman tell what I assume was her granddaughter, “Oh, look, there’s Malvolio. See his yellow stockings?” And yes, we are in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the locals are predisposed to know a touch more about Shakespeare and related lore than your average person on the street and thousands of them are in fact wearing paper Shakespeare masks for a really specific world record attempt (to unsurprisingly creepy effect). Still, I took it as a one-off. By about the fifth person I heard say this, I understood how the college girls playing Belle all summer in Orlando must feel. Except, of course, no autographs; the loving throngs maintained at all times a respectful distance from me, surely out of awe.

Not everyone assumed Malvolio, of course. I was also marching only a few feet behind the couple who has (or, in England, have) been the parade’s Shakespeare for some years. So the true thrill of the odd spectator recognition, if that’s the word I’m after, was “look, dear, it’s Shakespeare and…I guess young Shakespeare.” Very little my hairline and I do is prefaced with “young” so…I’ll take it.