Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates "The Madness of Hercules"

I took two years of Latin in high school. Even (way back) then, Latin was a dying subject. Nine of us took Latin I. Five of us took Latin II. That was out of an all-boys public high school of 2,000 students. Our Latin teacher was passionate about the language; I can still vividly remember him almost bouncing as he paced in front of the blackboard, always holding a piece of chalk.  

I learned more about English grammar in my Latin classes than in any English class I took. I also unexpectedly learned about the history and literature of Rome. That was because we translated sections of the writings of famous Romans like Julius Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, and a Roman born in Spain named Seneca.

 

Seneca, or Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger), was a Stoic philosopher, poet, playwright, satirist, and, surprisingly, advisor to the Roman emperor Nero. To Seneca’s credit, he was more influential with Nero in the first five years of emperor’s reign; eventually, accused of involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero, Seneca did what many well-known and suddenly-out-of-favor Romans did and committed suicide. I once thought this was a rather extreme practice, but suicide meant the individual’s estate would remain with the heirs and not be confiscated by the state. And the times were such, and the emperors were such, that most of the best people ended up doing that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Reading the 1913 Edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare”

It was an intriguing invitation. Read all the works of William Shakespeare in a year?  

Poet Dave Malone posed the challenge. Writer Callie Feyen accepted. I wavered, trying to balance time commitments, and then I leaped. But before I told Malone yes, I checked to make sure my memory was correct, and I indeed had a one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I did. I also had several copies of several individual plays, small, hardbound editions published between 1890 and 1930.

 

Also pushing my decision was having read The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the movies Shakespeare in Love and Much Ado About Nothing, which I truly enjoyed, and having seen Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones playing the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2013. 

 

My copy of the 1913 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare has been occupying space on my bookshelves for more than 30 years. Judging by the bookplate, I purchased the book sometime in the late 1980s from Dappled Gray Antiques, a shop in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood that had been across the street from the Kirkwood train station. The antiques are long gone, the owner having retired and moved away. The train station is still there, an Amtrak station operating in a building built in 1893.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The actor Robert Mantell in the stage production of Richard III, from Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare.

Forgotten Classics: “Shakespeare of London” by Marchette Chute

You’re reading an article on literary criticism, and you spot an almost easy-to-overlook aside: “For example, no one has really explained William Shakespeare like Marchette Chute did in 1947.” The reference is to a book she wrote, Shakespeare of London, and it was published in 1950, not 1947. But it was high praise indeed.

You ask yourself, “How is that possible? How is a biography of Shakespeare published 70 years ago better than anything more recent? We have so much more research, so many more historical and literary studies, so much more information. And we have the internet. How could someone make a statement like that?”

They were able to make the statement because it’s true. Shakespeare of London has been long out-of-print, but it is still a classic, and you can still find used copies via sources like Amazon and Alibris.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Packing Urgency and a Story into 10-Minute Plays: “Winter Stars” by Sonia Barkat

Sometime in the past six years, I began to read contemporary plays. It may have started with a play we saw at the Hampstead Theatre in London, a dramatic comedy entitled Seminar written by Theresa Rebeck. (The attraction was actor Roger Allam, who plays the young Inspector Morse’s boss in the Masterpiece Mystery series Endeavour.) It’s a play about writing, writers, and academic egos. The script was for sale in the theatre lobby, and on a whim, I bought it to read later. 

I enjoyed the script so much that I started reading others. Three years later, I read The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth, about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, but this time before I saw the play. And I was glad I did – the thick Irish accents by the actors could at times confuse my American ears, but I knew the story. It helped – a lot. A more recent play where reading the script also helps is Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. 

Winter Stars by new playwright and writer Sonia Barkat is subtitled “Three 10-Minute Plays from Tragedy to Fantasy to Comedy.” I’m familiar with one-act plays, but initial reaction was only 10 minutes? As it turns out, that reaction reflects my own lack of knowledge; the 10-minute play is its own theatre sub-genre and even has web sites with catalogs of scripts, how they’re structured and written, how to produce them, and other resources. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.