Raising the Tent - 1953

When the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was founded in 1953 Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s iconic stage was at the centre of a concrete amphitheatre. However there was neither sufficient monies nor assurance of longevity to do other than enclose the “wooden O*” with canvas. For the first four years of the Festival history the Bard was declaimed in a large tent, often to the sounds of pounding rain, whistles from the nearby train yards and umpires' calls from the local baseball diamond.

Nestled in Queen's Park the original home of the Festival rose 61' above the landscape and was 150' in diameter.  It's original cost was $23,000.

From 1953 to 1956 canvas covered Tanya Moiseiwitsch's thrust stage set in a concrete
amphitheatre. When money became tight that first year local contractor Oliver Gaffney
refused to stop work and completed the theatre in time for opening night.  His daughter
Anita is now the Festival's Executive Director. 

In 1953 Tent Master Roy "Skip" Manly and his crew - many of them local volunteers - raise the tent for
the first time.  It took two whole days to complete the operation.  Two miles of cable and 10 miles of rope kept audience and performers protected and dry - most of the time!  This photo was the inspiration for the sculpture group that now adorns the lawn in front of the theatre.

It's hard to imagine sitting for three hours of Shakespeare in
one of these original seats from the tent days.  And what's with the
single armrest?  I guess there was no fighting to see who got it.

At the end of the 1956 season when Christopher Plummer had sounded his final call to the troops at Agincourt the tent was struck for the last time.  By the opening of the 1957 season Robert Fairchild’s unique round structure resounded to the, by now, familiar sound of Louis Applebaum's trumpet fanfare and the answer to Plummer’s Hamlet was:  it is “to be”.  The building has undergone major changes since I first saw it back in 1958 most involved reconfiguring the stage.  But in 1997 the theatre itself was totally renovated with the addition of public spaces for talks, food and drink, a very pleasant members' lounge, as well as an expanded backstage.  And the Festival has grown to four theatres and a season that stretches from April until October - all of it inside without a train whistle to be heard**!

Robert Fairchild's innovative re-imagining of the original tent was expanded in 1997 and turned into an event centre that would have brought joy to the hearts  of Sir Tyrone, Tom Patterson, Miss Moiseiwitsch, "Skip" Manley, Oliver Gaffney and the incredible people who had a vision back in 1953. 

To celebrate the next stage in the Theatre's life and the first raising of the tent a sculpture grouping was created by a talented group of artisans working at the Festival.  As well as honouring the people who made the renewal in 1997 possible designer Douglas Paraschuk paid tribute to the remarkable "Skip" and stage carpenter Al Jones, who's handiwork included that first thrust platform.

This sculpture group on the lawn in front of the Festival Theatre celebrates the many people who's contributions made the renovation of the theatre possible.  But it also commemorates that first exciting day when "Skip" Manly and his crew - many of them local volunteers - raised the canvas on one of the four Queen poles. 

Design Coordinator Douglas Paraschuk's concept was realized in the Festival Workshops by property maker Ruth Abernathy with the assistance of Frank Holte and Brian Mcleod.  Another example of the exceptional creative work that comes out of the Festival shops.

Tent Master extraordinaire Roy "Skip" Manly (right) was known throughout the circus world as one of the greats - and as the years passed Festival veteran Al Jones (left) became as much a legend for his wizardry as a stage carpenter.

The one thing I find a bit puzzling is the little girl and her dog sitting in the bleachers watching - for some reason it strikes me as more Dorothy pointing the way to Oz than anything.  I don't really see where it was needed - those two figures straining at the ropes are enough, in my mind,  to convey the dream and the hard work that established the Festival.   I'm also not fond of the ostentatious statue of the Bard that stands nearby either.  However I do find the lovely rose garden with it's simple plaque remembering Ann Casson (Campbell) a touching tribute to a much respected member of the  company.

The gardens around the Festival Theatre are quite lush - almost too much so - however this simple rose garden serves as a memorial to Ann Casson.  The daughter of Dame Sybil Thorndyke and Sir Lewis Casson she came to Canada with her husband Douglas Campbell.  He was a member of the original company and she was to appear in subsequent seasons.

Though the Festival has grown well beyond the hopes of any of those original (in so many senses of the word) dreamers who watched as that first tent was unfurled in Queen's Park there remians a slightly homespun atmosphere to it all.   We are still in small town Ontario, there is still a nearby baseball diamond and there is still a wonder that this is all here.

*Well okay the concrete O in this case but let's be literary rather than literal!

**Stratford was once a railway hub with as many as 30 passenger trains going through a day - now there are only four though an old chap at the station was optimistic that there would be an increase in service in the future. 

September 9 - 1839: John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.

Lunedi Luancy

Back in the Plasticine era - okay maybe not that far back 'cause that would have meant kindergarten - but back while I was in Junior High I developed a passion for Shakespeare. My father had taken me to my first Shakespeare play when I was ten - an adventure in a tempest to see the play of the same name that I really must recount one day (that man was a saint!).  My sister-in-law, always one to encourage an eager young faggot in training mind gave me a worn copy of Tales From Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and his sister Mary.   This rather odd brother and sister team  retold the stories much adapted to the sensibilities of children of their period - no bawds or bawdiness for the Lambs!  It had some interesting Arthur Rackham illustrations and served as a good introduction but I soon graduated to the real stuff.   I plowed my way through the canon from All's Well to Winter's Tale. Now that's not to say I understand a good deal of what I was reading but being in those days a fairly good actor I gave a passable imitation of literary precocity.

By the time I hit the first year of high school, as my fellows were struggling with the authorized for Ontario school's edition of Macbeth, I was trotting around with a copy of the unexpurgated version where the Porter "did bepiss" himself.   My English teacher was not pleased when I asked why we had skipped an entire scene which obviously would have had them rolling in the aisles of the Globe - and sent my classmates snickering.  I had to serve a "library" detention for my youthful  inquisitiveness or perhaps because I was being an obnoxious little show off????

And in that same library there just happened to be a critical study of "The Works" that gave a decidedly different twist to Shakespeare's Tales.  In fact in his introduction to Twisted Tales from Shakespeare Richard Armour promised that:

Shakespeare's best-known plays are presented in a new light, the old light having blown a fuse; together with introductions, questions, appendices, and other critical apparatus intended to contribute to a clearer misunderstanding of the subject.

Some of the humour was sophomoric but as with any good satire it was based on a thorough knowledge of the plays and much of the humour depended on the reader knowing their Shakespeare.

Because of Mr Armour's little book I discovered that there was a wealth of memorable lines beyond the Tomorrow and Tomorrows, the Where For Art Thous and the Quality of Mercies.  I mean where else, other than that original unexpurgated text of the Scottish play, would I have found and remembered:

Aroint thee witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries! 

Which leads me to today's Lunacy.   As well as being pretty handy with blank verse and the odd rhyming couplet Shakespeare was pretty good at the snappy put-down.  Every one of the words or phrases in the lists below are taken from one of "The Works of".

The game's a pretty simple one:  Take one word from each of the three columns below and preface it with "Thou":

The combinations are almost limitless and just think how you will stop friends, foes and families in their tracks.  I mean who could possibly find the appropriate retort to:  Thou pribbling unchin-snouted skainmate?  Damn did that man know how to write!

And if you'd like leave me a comment with your insult of choice.

16 April - 1346: Dušan the Mighty is proclaimed Emperor, with the Serbian Empire occupying much of the Balkans.

Crollalanza = Shakespeare?

I mentioned that there was a third reason for this sudden rash of Shakespearn posts - if two can be considered a rash? At lunch a few weeks ago my friend Simonetta mentioned that she recently picked up a book expounding the theory that Shakespeare was really Italian! Why not I thought, everyone has claimed him as their own - I recall in the old USSR he was regarded as one of Russia's greatest playwrights!!!

A little background check - what did we do before Google, he asked searchingly - revealed that back in 2000 Sicilian professor Martino Iuvara claimed that Shakespeare was, in fact, not English at all, but Italian. His conclusion was drawn from research carried out from 1925 to 1950 by two professors at Palermo University. Iuvara claims that the writer we know as William Shakespeare was actually born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza. His family was hounded out of Sicilia by the Inquisition and he eventually fled to England to live with family who had previously immigrated there and anglicized their name: crolla = shake, lanza = spear. He was taken in by John and Mary Shakespeare and when their son William died he took his name.

And if you look at the settings of his 38 known plays he seemed to have a fondness for Italy: five (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline) are set wholly or partly in Ancient Rome; three (The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter's Tale) wholly or partly in Sicilia and six (Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well That Ends Well) may be described as being set in Italy. However one indignant correspondent in the Times of London - and the claim led to a rather heated and at times unintentionally funny correspondence - suggested that his knowledge of Italy was no more than what you could learn from reading your local Italian restaurant menu. Assuming there was a Ye Olde Trattoria Italiana in his area of Cheapside!

Its an interesting, if highly debatable, theory, and I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy of the book - provided its available in English. It could explain how a man with no university education - Ben Johnson refers to him as "having small Latin and less Greek" - could write such an incredible body of work. One fly in the ointment as I mentioned to Simonetta is that it would have also taken a great command of English for a native Italian to achieve such language. Well apparently Doctore Iuvara has that covered - Crollalanza wrote in Italian and his wife, poor old - he only left me his second best bed - Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare, translated into English! Behind every great man!

Meanwhile I'm off to see Shakespeare's Sogno di una notte di mezza esate - in English. I just hope they're using Crollalanza's original manuscript for the Italian surtitles.

Note: The Google Earth map is the work of someone named "H21" from France posted the placemarks for 85 locations mentioned in Shakespeare. They purposely left off a few places and challenged people to find the missing quoted places. One of the Google Earth team members added a custom placemark which has a picture of Shakespeare. If you have Google Earth you can access it here.

01 marzo - Sant'Albino

Tutto il mondo è una burla*

Italians love Shakespeare - almost every theatre company in the country is presenting at least one of his plays this season. And its not just the popular ones: as well as your Amleto you also get your odd Tutto e bene quel che finises bene. And here in Roma there is a summer theatre devoted entirely to Shakespeare in Italian.

In one of those wonderful quirks of Italian logic the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre, a replica of Shakespeare's famous playhouse, was built in a grove of trees in Villa Borghese and various companies present their takes on Shakespeare - sometimes traditional often experimental from June to September.

Following the Elizabethan tradition the theatre is open air and there is a pit in front of the stage space for groundlings - or seats on benches (more expensive of course) in the galleries. In either case bringing a cushion is recommended - the ground is hard and I swear those wooden benches harder. And something I hadn't thought of - pretty much wherever you sit in the galleries in an Elizabethan theatre there is an obstructing post holding the gallery or roof above you.

The language or the slightly obstructed view didn't at stop me from enjoying a raucous and rather bawdy production of La comedia degli errore (The Comedy of Errors) last summer - though admittedly its more Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum than Long Day's Journey Into Night, so was much easier to understand. I'm not sure how I would handle three hours of Hamlet or King Lear in Italian but I may give it a try when the season starts in June.

So what brings on this sudden post about Shakespeare and Italians? Two things! Well actually three but I'll post about the other one separately.

First: For the next 15 weeks the daily newspaper La Repubblica is including a DVD of a Shakespeare play with its weekly magazine L'espresso. They launched the series last week with an extremely good Othello starring Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins and Penelope Wilton recorded in 1981. This week its Hamlet with Derek Jacobi and Claire Bloom. All 15 are part of a BBC series of the complete works presented from 1978 until 1985. Some of the finest actors of the period were involved including John Gielgud, Helen Mirren and Anthony Quayle, to name just a few. And as DVDs go they aren't that expensive so I'm planning to collect all of them.

Second: Propeller - in the company of men is in town presenting The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Teatro della Valle this weekend. This all-male 14 member Shakespearean company was founded by Edward Hall with the backing of the Watermill Playhouse in West Berkshire. Their ground breaking performances of Henry V, Twelfth Night, the Henry VI plays and, particularly, A Midsummer Night's Dream have been lauded in theater circles around the world. The company doesn't follow period practices - no hey nonny nonny or fatheringales - except that all the parts are played by men as they were in Shakespeare's time. One thing is clear from all the reviews and interviews published since the company was founded - this is not a bunch of men in drag camping up the Bard but a serious troupe of actors using the text to revive the excitement that the audience at the original Globe must have felt.

I've wanted to see Propeller since first reading about their Henry V back in 1997, so here I am 11 years later in Roma and finally getting a chance. How strange is that? From the reviews and photos (above left: Antonio is prepared for the taking of the pound of flesh)their new production of Merchant looks very exciting but a busy weekend schedule means I'll have to settle for the Dream (right: Titania is smitten by Bottom transformed into an ass). Mind you I am settling for a production of which a critic said: There was plenty of slapstick hilarity. But there was such human sweetness, too, and such generous virtuosity. The truest vision of love this play offers is the love the actors and the director show for its disturbances and contradictions. Yeah I guess I can settle for that.

*All the world's a joke... - Boito's adaptation of the famous Shakespeare quote for Verdi's Falsaff.

28 febbraio - San Romano di Condat

Lunedi Lunacy

It appears there may be a bit of a Shakespeare theme this week; so without much ado about nothing:



And I've had a crush on - oh what the hell a case of the hots for Hugh Laurie since Black Adder - is it just me or is he getting hotter with age?

18 agosto - Sant'Elena Imperatrice

"Quote ... Unquote"

I was down in Centro earlier this week meeting blog buddy Danny for a coffee - we're trying to get together again before he leaves but he's here for his brother's wedding and the weekend has been filling up for both of us. Since I was downtown I figured I'd drop into Feltrinelli International Bookstore and see what was new. I should know better - I came out with four books (all paperback)and a Mastercard receipt for $80.00. Paperback books in English here run about $2 - 5 dollars more expensive than listed on Amazon Canada.

So why not get them shipped over? Two words: Italian Bureaucracy. This is the likely scenario:

1. The parcel is sent from Canada to Rome
2. Thence PosteItalia sends it up to their Customs Centre in Milan
3. I will receive an invoice telling me how much I owed the State for daring to bring something into the country
4. I take the statement to a Post Office - in the morning only as there are only two that I know of that are open all day, except of course from 1 pm until 4 pm when they are closed for lunch.
5. I line up and when I reach the window will no doubt be told I am in the wrong line and directed to another line-up.
6. When I reach that window - if it really is the right one and the employee is not going on coffee - I buy the equivalent in stamps to the customs duty
7. I send the invoice back to Milan in the envelope provided - not stamped so I better remember to buy one - at another window.
8. I receive a notice in the mail that the parcel can be picked up at the local post office - in the morning only.
9. I pick up a parcel of books with pages yellowed by age and print faded by time and find that they have since been republished with corrections and additions.

Think I'll just pay the extra - it will give me one less thing to whine about!

One of the books I had gone in looking for was Bill Bryson's Shakespeare and as you can probably tell it was there. I tend to be leery of books where the author's name is four times the font size of the title (you know Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, Dan Brown) but Bryson is normally a good read and the reviews had been generally positive. Well so far nothing new has come up but as I suspected it is a good sitting-in-the-shade-sipping-a-cool-drink Summer read.

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are
spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used ten times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that altogether he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.

I'll take useless Shakespearean Knowledge for 400, Alex.

10 agosto - San Lorezno

Lunedi Lunacy

Now that spring has sprung and the grass has rise the Baseball season and the Shakespeare Festival season are both in full swing. Here's a tribute to those two great harbingers of spring.



I remember this sketch from a Wayne and Shuster radio show in the early '50s; this version in 1958 would have been from one of their early CBC TV shows. They were funny at a time when funny did not mean resorting to swearing and their comedy always assumed that the audience was literate and knowing.

From one of their classic sketches Rinse the Blood Off My Toga (The assassination of Julius Caesar as written by Micky Spillane.):

Detective (In a bar in ancient Rome): I'll have a martinus!

Bartender: Don't you mean a martini?

Detective: If I wanted two I'd ask for them!

As a grade 9 Latin student that one killed me.

9 giugno - Santa Columba