I’ve been chattering a bit about Bill Cain’s play, Equivocation, of late (here and here), and it turns out that a new novel has hyst been published dealing with similar themes; namely, how a fictionalized Bard might have handled an onerous commission with dangerous political overtones, and what his real opinions might have been on said dangerous subjects.
The novel in question is The Final Act of Mr William Shakespeare, by Robert Winder, and, also as in Equivocation, the author makes so bold as to write a new “Shakespeare” play, as it were, as part of the story. In the case of Equivocation, the play was a “True History of the Gunpowder Treason”, and we only see a few small portions of it, all concocted from bits and pieces out of other Shakespeare play, mainly Macbeth — which in Cain’s fictional world is the play Shag ends up writing instead as a sort of “equivocating” (read: Safe, barely) slam at Tudor-Stuart religio-politics. But Winder, in a case of jaw-dropping chutzpah, apparently does Cain one better and writes a whole damn new “Shakespeare” play. It’s called The Tragicall History of Henry VII, it’s (by the sounds of it) unequivocally critical of the Tudor he had given the hero treatment in Richard III, and it runs to one hundred pages, a fourth of Winder’s novel.
Wow.
(BTW, the London Times reviewer calls it “hugely enteraining” to boot. Here’s their article.
And here’s a link to the Amazon page; the book won’t be available via Amazon until Feb. 4, 2010, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
The rarely performed Henry VIII, written by John Fletcher and Shakespeare, will be broadcast on Sunday, April 19 at 18:00 on BBC Radio 3. The broadcast performance is intended to mark the 500th anniversary in 2009 of Henry VIII’s accession to the English throne.
I’ve had a chance to see Richard III in the Bowmer Theatre and recommend it highly. I might add that though I’m a longtime OSF supporter, I had yet to see a Libby Appel-directed production of which I could wholeheartedly approve. Indeed, I viewed her recent Macbeth, which opened the New Theatre a couple of seasons ago, as arguably the most embarrassingly ill-conceived production I had ever seen on stage, with her previous Hamlet running a distant second. Appel’s productions occasionally come off to me as such overly cerebral attempts at “high-concept” artsy-fartsy, that they end up just plain lacking in good theatrical sense; so striving to be Important and Original that she’s forgotten that her first job as a director is to tell a whomping good story.
Adapted from the award-winning RSC stage production directed by Richard Eyre (helmer of Ian Holm’s 
With its sex and violence and the text generally silenced, Richard III might make a good introduction to the play for those disinclined towards the Bard. That said, the fascist trappings actually obscure much of Shakespeare’s original meaning, and confuse the already complex relationships between the characters (“who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out…”).
no rhythm, no drama, and surprisingly little humor, as if the filmmakers were rushing through scenes so famous they saw little point in dwelling on them. For example, Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne, the wife of a man he’s recently killed, should be a highlight in any production. It’s a bravura scene, and certainly the cheekiest marriage proposal in the history of English drama. Here, however, the scene seems a shapeless afterthought, and pales by comparison to Olivier’s sexy, surprising, and unapologetically salacious treatment of the scene in his 1956 version.
Of course, no actor is more compulsively watchable than Ian Mckellen, and he’s the real reason to give RIII a viewing. Richard commands attention, the hottest-burning star in an otherwise dim firmament. Appropriately, perhaps, only Mckellen seems to know who he’s playing and why. He’s a man enamored of himself: “I may smile and murder while I smile.” And, God help us, we’ll smile as we watch him do it.
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