Thankfully I haven't since been typecast as the disease-ridden whore... 
(L-R and with respect to my friends who may not wish to be named in full) Imogen (Timandra), Me (Phyrinia), Paul (Alcibiades) and John (Timon). Photo courtesy of Arts York, exact credits unknown. 

First impressions of the draw: General nostalgic, warm glow-ey feeling. Shucks. 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? In it's fractured entirety, no. But...

Nothing says 'Happy Father's Day' like a torrent of betrayal and misanthropy! It is, however, rather more fitting for me to do a play reading on Father's Day - it is my wonderful father via whom I first came to love Shakespeare. Perhaps not even to love his works: having been raised amidst the quotations, it is through my Dad predominantly that I grew knowing the world and my own emotions had a lens more beautiful and eloquent than anything I could struggle to comprehend them through. So, thank you, Dad! 

It's also worth a mention that this my first #MyPlayToday since leaving uni. There's something cruelly ironic in pulling the friendless, family-less Timon from the jar days after leaving my second home and the dear, dear friends who are my second family. So to the fates I raise a huge middle finger.

'Nothing brings me all things'
Tim. 5.1.207

But, to the play and to my day. My cryptic answer regarding whether or not I have previously seen Timon of Athens begs an explanation - I have not seen Timon but it is one of the Shakespeare plays I have acted in. That's right. One production amongst the play's performance track record (an illustrious record that I imagine you could count on one hand) featured yours truly. 

Hopefully talking about the play here will elucidate both why this complex tragedy is so difficult to translate to the stage and also why it holds such a high place in my affections. Let's first address the giant Athenian elephant in the room - Timon is a structural mess. Uniquely amongst Shakespeare's plays, it is thought to be both a (potentially unperformed) collaboration and an unfinished play. This poses the biggest challenge in staging the play and I have a big fat bias coming at the play having been in what was a coherent and very accomplished production (our director, Ruby, was a boss). 

I came to reading today with a major soft spot for Timon personally, but giving this troubled and troubling play a reread has given me a renewed interest in the work critically. Like a meringue that is dropped on the way to the table, Timon may be fractured and tragic but some of the fragments are still very tasty. For example, running through this otherwise messy play like a delicious gooey meringue centre (I'm cracking the wind of this poor analogy) is an image system of proto-capitalism as cannibalism that gives the play, quite literally, a distinct flavour. Consumption - monetary and dietary - threatens the play in a way which barbarically blurs the distinctions between the two. It's as if Timon and his wealth (though the two are crucially indistinguishable) is a rich wine, drunk by his flatterers who wake up to the hangover of their lives and that familiar feeling where you swear you will never touch alcohol again. 

'For mine own part,
I never tasted Timon in my life'

Tim. 3.2.78-9 

In this respect and as was highlighted by the recent National Theatre production, the play touches modern nerves on materialism and the human price of capitalism - topics Shakespeare rarely speaks to us upon. It has biting misanthropy and slagging matches that make Hermia and Helena's spat look tame. But it also has touching, defeated loyalty from Flavius. I truly feel Timon, Apemantus and Flavius are gems for any actor and more than this, gems that break the mould drastically on some Shakespearean stock-types of Patriarch, Fool/Cynic and Servant. 

Timon, who in my head will always have the voice of my wonderful friend John, has not only shades of the nakedness-inclined Lear but also has suicidal leanings reminiscent of Hamlet. The plotline is frankly weird and akin to a fairytale, which makes this play the sister to another Shakespearean oddball which is beginning to undergo theatrical rehabilitation, Cymbeline. But I mustn't argue the merits of this play for its resemblance to others: like its eponymous anti-hero, Timon is something of a difficult loner. It is perhaps too often read as a simplistic manifestation of the 'single tragic flaw' taken to its reductive limits. The play is this but it's also more. A study in recognisable greed and loyalty, a bitter purge of tragic/late play world-weariness (think Prospero's 'my charms are all o'erthrown' speech on steroids), an extenuated feast of human flesh, a moralistic take on the insecurities of loneliness. And, perhaps oddly enough, for me Timon is a catalogue of memories and good friends.  

To close up this blog post on a suitably sickly note in honour of Father's Day, 

'I'll have no father, if you be not he'
AYL. 5.4.117

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: 

Is there a bigger slap in the face of gender-diverse casting than Timon of Athens? I should know - I've been in it. 

First impressions of the draw: 'Blood. Kilts. Reading in an accent. Let's do this.'

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

I should open with an astonishing fact not even the weird sisters might have prophesied: today was 25 degrees. TWENTY-FIVE. What a beautiful day to contemplate freezing Scottish moors and cold-blooded murder. Macbeth is one of the 'bigger' plays whose GCSE-tenure escaped me (if I remember rightly, we did The Merchant of Venice). I have seen productions professional and amateur; productions live and live-screened, filmed and revamped for the BBC. 

I promise this isn't the effect of post-dissertation and heat infused delirium, but I had never realised how sleepy the play is. Sleep is so alike to death in the imagination of the characters, which makes Lady Macbeth's somnambulistic episode and her subsequent absence from the stage until we hear the news of her death all the more poignant. Is sleep for Lady Macbeth, as she argues it is for the sleeping guards of Duncan's chamber, some transitional period towards death? But sleep is also deprived; as Macbeth professes, sleep is murdered when Duncan is. How does this, too, link the sovereignty of sleep with the comfort of a good monarch? And how, finally, does this work into the essential arse-kiss for James that underlies Macbeth? (Philomena Cunk's words, not mine.)

A moment of contemplation for the beauty that is my 1887 Victoria Shakespeare Tragedies. 

'He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?'

Mac. 4.3. 222-6

A favourite scene (amidst a play, I realised today, that I have grossly undervalued) is when Macduff hears the news of his murdered family. Macduff's grief is reminiscent of Constance's in King John (particularly, above), which made me reflect on the biographical dating of that play based on Constance's spectacular speech in 3.4. 'All my pretty chickens' is a line, oddly enough, I have grown up hearing - it's one of my Dad's favourites. The rupture of genuine, raw and disbelieving grief from Macduff with the play's imposition of a 'masculine' ideal of mourning is the subtlest of dramatic tensions from Shakespeare. Gosh, he isn't half good sometimes. 

'Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, 
The death of each day's life'
Mac. 2.2.37-8

As for my day, nowhere in York could I find a way to incorporate haggis into my day. I did, however, have a tragically insular day reading on my own in the Dean's gardens (Can I use a very tenuous interpretation of Bamber to link my day to Macbeth? It seems I just did). Though the inevitable sunburn I received may have been better suited to Leontes' penchant for baby-burning in The Winter's Tale, my reading setting today was tranquil bliss. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: An unprecedented amount of the play's phrasing I found I could sing along to. I hadn't expected Macbeth to be quite so full of recognisable phrases.  

First impressions of the draw: Was a visual one - I have very vivid memories of the BDSM style set from the one time I have seen Measure in performance. 

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

Vienna's seedy streets housed me for the day (actually, for yesterday on account of the late-finishing York Mystery plays, but more on those later). I had been an intrigued admirer of Measure for Measure from afar; having seen a wonderful production at the Swan which sparked my interest in this slinky, sly play. My fascination in the play was caught not least by the fact that Jodie McNee's Isabella was wearing the exact same shoes I had on (16 year old me felt oh-so metatheatrically complicit). More than this, however, the moral and sexual tensions of the play that were introduced to me by this production were as attractive and they were intimidating. 

Perhaps that's why I had never actually picked up the beast to read. I was not surprised that my favourite scenes of performance, those between Angelo and Isabella, retained that original gunpowder essence which makes them ignite on stage. One of my favourite lines comes from these scenes, not for it's poetic value but for it's dramatic potential and for it's spotlight into a dark corner of gendered power relations, Angelo's spine-chilling:

'Who will believe thee, Isabel?'
MM 2.4.156

Is there a more concise and biting snapshot of the play's moral landscape than that question? The theatre nut in me revels that that one line has the potential to be the pivotal joint of the whole play, where Isabella's moral framework begins to dismantle and Angelo's power grows increasingly heedless. 

A special segment of today's post, largely for my own remembrance, is going to be entitled: 'Times Angelo is Totally Comparable to Shakespeare's Other Male Characters'. It's like a 'Where's Wally' but with dramatic and canonic intertextuality: 

'What's this? What's this? Is this her fault or mine?' 
MM 2.2.163

Angelo adopts some of the frenzied (or should I say 'prenzie') syntax of Leontes' 'Too hot, too hot'. 

'heaven hath my empty words'
MM 2.4.2

Like Claudius in Hamlet, Angelo's efforts at praying sincerely are just not up to scratch. 

'They say this Angelo
was not made by man and woman after this
downright way of creation'

MM 3.2.113-5

Angelo and Coriolanus are chilling together in the super-human section of Shakespeare's characters. 

What did surprise me reading the play was the pretty painful comic scenes. The momentary and stifled effort to make Elbow seem a Dogberry-esque fool, the extenuation of comic material whose tone grows increasingly agitated and sour. Of course, we are used to the tone of comedy turning bitter in Shakespeare; Malvolio being the example which springs to mind. But, in Measure for Measure, the process of that turn from laughter to pity is simply underdeveloped and leaves the comic scenes relishing of neither. I realised when reading today that it's not only the comic 'structure' of Measure for Measure that sits so uncomfortably with the play's anti-comic content, but also it's tangible effort to squeeze some (really rather poor) comic content in there. 

'Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all!
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.'

MM 2.1.37-8

Just as the play tries to shift itself unconvincingly into generic conventions, so too my expectations of the play were challenged and some of the results left me a mixture of fulfilled and disappointed. My reading day happened to be the anecdote - reading in the beautiful Gatehouse Coffee, discussing Shakespeare and poetry with my wonderful friend Noor was a welcome removal from the play's atmosphere of overwhelmingly putrid morality. The play's implicit religious themes and morality ambiguity was also complemented and contrasted by my evening of theatre; watching the epic Mystery Plays in the York Minster. By 'epic', I mean almost four hours which is (albeit happily!) the reason for this delayed post.  

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Is there a more bare-arsed deus ex machina than Ragozine's death? Come on, even the Duke points out that it's an unbelievably fortunate device. 

First impressions of the draw: *Mental image of Kenneth Branagh flouncing around in that fountain*

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

IIt's been an absolute joy to spend the day with one of my favourite comedies. It slightly baffles me that, to my memory, I had never read Much Ado. Partly because I've listened to Ben Crystal's wonderful Original Pronunciation CD so many times that I can recite a particular scene by heart, albeit in a very dodgy part-Irish-part-West-Country impression of OP. Partly because Much Ado is, I would venture, my most frequently watched comedy. As my initial reaction to the draw betrays, Kenneth Branagh's joyous adaptation is a rainy day (and cloudy day and sunny day... heck, any day) favourite of mine. I also recently saw the play under the guise of Love's Labour's Won at the RSC alongside Love's Labour's Lost (which I reviewed here), a marriage of productions made in heaven. 

My appreciation of the play as a kind of generic muscle flex from Shakespeare is owed solely to Emma Smith's fantastic lecture on Much Ado, focusing on the wonderful question: 'Why does everyone believe Don John?' It's a real kick-yourself question when considering the play's plot development, particularly (in my opinion) in relation to Labour's. What Labour's lacks in its own narrative course are the generic stock-types of blocking figures; a role Don John embodies with Iago-esque motive opacity and which Leonato comes close to in his Lord Capulet-style rage against Hero. However, this didn't inhibit the Royal Shakespeare Company's pairing of these plays, which pivoted beautifully on the mirroring of Berowne/Rosaline and Benedick/Beatrice. Michelle Terry's and Edward Bennett's wonderful performances where very much alive in my head reading the play today. 

As productions consistently reminded me today, the play is fizzling with moments of inspired comic timing (which, to reproduce out of context here, I would necessarily butcher), not least Benedick's bitter expostulation on Beatrice just as she enters the stage. Much Ado is largely counted among my favourite comedies because the fact that Beatrice and Benedick's incessant banter is just about the sexiest thing in Shakespeare is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me. 

I have a little laugh in the hope that Shakespeare has intentionally made Hero and Claudio such plain characters to make Beatrice and Benedick ignite the page and the stage all the more vividly. Reading particularly the first three acts in one of my favourite cafes, I smiled to withstand a conveyor belt of couples on dates (some really rather sweet, some tangibly awkward) whilst engaged in the early courtship rituals of these acts. Beatrice and Benedick's organic, fiery banter of a 'date', like those couples in the cafe, is contrasted with Hero and Claudio's rigidly conventional courtship. 

I hesitate to say that today's reading environment lead me to reflect on Beatrice and Benedick as a 'couple for today', because that wickedly stubborn wit which veils both pride and affection is not commonplace for relationships of any era. Rather, it's something like today's rom-com ideal. Cafe couples, maybe next time will be the one. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Having watched The Two Gentlemen of Verona the night before put a new spin on Claudio's lines 'Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love.' (2.1.184-5)

First impression of the draw: 'Well, today is as good a day as any to have a big ol' reunion cry.'

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

A day at home spent with Shakespeare's notorious wanderer. I say a day - Pericles has been one of those plays that has lived with me for more like the past half a year. For an obscure late play, rarely performed and not even in the First Folio, it's a happy stroke of serendipity that earlier this year I was fortunate to see this play in performance twice in four months. 

'And he, good prince, having all lost,
By waves from coast to coast is tost.'
Per. 2.PRO

As its original audiences were thought to be, I am very much enamoured of Pericles. Its varied episodic structure and propensity for random adventure has the child in me marvelling. The heart-rending plot devices which are characteristic of Shakespeare's late plays as well as a brush with the rarely-maintained threat of sexual violence (earning Marina a mention in my dissertation which I promise I will stop banging on about) makes this oddball of a play stand out to the early modernist in me. It is also a fantastic example of another theme that captivates me within Shakespeare; the ways in which he manifests and acknowledges his source material. 

As in Titus, the source for Pericles gets its own curtain call. Perhaps this is another reason why the 'mouldy tale' has been nestled away in performance obscurity. It's a little uncomfortable to think of Shakespeare as a stand-alone genius when he writes another author into his play. 

Although, I cannot claim Pericles rots on the shelves of un(/der)performed plays and not mention the fantastic productions I have seen. Pericles as a play has lived with me recently, as I mentioned earlier, in part because of the astonishing effect of its performances. As a belated birthday present last year I saw Pericles (with the incomparable James Garnon) at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse which, not least for the atmosphere of that performance space, was enchanting and touching and riotously funny. Within a few months I was back in York watching a company I myself previously acted with, the York Shakespeare Project, bring their joyous and spirited twist to the play. 

'Thou'rt heir of kingdoms, and another life

To Pericles, thy father'

Per.5.1.209-10

... And yes. Each time I cried. For the reunion scene which nearly closes this play I would endure another twenty riddles as opaque and laughable as the one which opens the play at Antiochus. (Among a wealth of other late play tropes that make these plays so truly endearing, the habit of slightly-crap riddles is one that I certainly wouldn't miss. I'm looking at you, here, Cymbeline). 

Though not in the least bit sea-tossed, I had a few reunions of my own today; spending the afternoon on an odyssey of a far smaller scale, wandering the shops of my hometown. More than anything, finally getting round to reading this quirky gem of a play (one that has been search for a spot to drop anchor for a few months now in the back of my mind) felt like a wonderful homecoming. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Note to self, Gower would make a really interesting framework for Shakespeare's models of source authority in other plays. 

First impression of the draw: 'Does Game of Thrones count as research?'


Had I read the play before? Yes


Had I seen the play before? No 

Statistically, it was rather likely that I was to draw another history play and of that likelihood, even more likely that I should draw a Henry (there are, after all, seven of them). My draws seem to be favouring the BBC's recent adaptation releases; leading me to spend the day with the opening chronicle of Shakespeare's so-called 'Wars of the Roses' plays. How apt, then, that I should read the first acts of this play underneath York Minster. That's right, I'm declaring on the white rose side (the grudge still lives...)

For a play so populated by the historically "masculine" feats , I was happy to note that Joan La Pucelle's role is such a voluble one. However problematic her swaying not-so-virginal characterisation might be, the Bamber fan in me favours just how much she talks. However, considering the passivity of the kingly masculine ideal in the ensuing Henry VI plays, I shouldn't be surprised that Joan opens this triad's catalogue of talking women. 

I was also interested to find (bearing in mind the dangers of chronological judgements) that Shakespeare voices some openly plagiarized material through Suffolk. With Titus Andronicus still running riot in my post-dissertation brain, my jaw dropped when I came across this:

'She's beautiful; and therefore to be woo'd:
She is a woman; therefore to be won.'

HVI1 5.3.78-9

'She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd, 
She is a woman, therefore may be won'
TA 2.1.82-3

Heading home to see my parents, the touching and beautifully (if not overly) poeticised scenes between Talbot and his son John were a particular highlight of today's reading. I am an absolute sucker for a couplet split over two characters (I'm looking at you, Richard II 5.1.81-2 and Titus Andronicus 5.3.48-9) and to have a solid three scenes of it left me erring between saccharine queasiness and genuine enjoyment. In reading (though I have no faithful performance parallel to embody this impression), John Talbot certainly stood as a poetic paragon whose propensity for rhyming was the verbal equivalent of the lost potential his father so earnestly mourns.

'Surely, by all the glory you have won, 
And if I fly, I am not Talbot's son.'
HVI1 4.6.50-1

More than this, though I had no cause to use it having spent the day in wonderful company, Henry VI 1 has been a fantastic companion today for it's sheer volume of slagging insults. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: It's opening of 5.3 and Joan is visited by fiends. Your Dr Faustus is showing, Shakespeare.

First impressions of the draw: 'Ooh, a history play. Set female characters to draping-over-corpses mode.'

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? Yes

I spent possibly the laziest Saturday of recorded time today with Shakespeare's fantastic, malicious bottled spider. My draw of Richard III for today's #MyPlayToday couldn't have come at a greater time; the play is currently (literally, as I type this) riding the wave of Cumberfandom with an adaptation on BBC2. 

'Let me put in your minds, if you forget, 

what you have been ere now, and what you are;

Withal, what I have been, and what I am.'

R3 1.3.131-4

I have read the play rather recently and my memories of the only production I have seen are still fresh from last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe (a wonderful production with a devilishly charismatic Richard, almost allowing me to forgive a rather pantomime-halloweenish Margaret). The character of Richard, too, is fresh in my mind having been hooked to the BBC's sword-a-minute adaptation of Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3. 

What struck me in the face with this play today is the sheer volume of parallelism. Richard III is peopled with echoes, which makes it feel (however begrudgingly I admit to the benefits of playing them in a so called 'Wars of the Roses cycle') like a culmination haunted by its predecessors. Structurally, linguistically, characterlogically; everything is met at some point with its own mirror image. To crack the whip of this poor point, not just within this play. What links Anne of Richard III and Pheobe of As You Like It? As I learnt today, the phrase 'I will/would not by thy executioner'.

'No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.'
R3 1.2.71

I haven't yet seen the Hollow Crown adaptation, but reading the play today, I was revelling in the thought of seeing Sophie Okonedo play this Margaret of Anjou. Richard III's Margaret has a new colour washed on her character canvas and emerges structurally as very much a witching 'prophetess' (a name by which she is evoked repeatedly), whose frequent and violent lamentations both threaten and urge the play's teleology. She became a visual motif of misfortune for me, as if she were to jig malevolently across the stage in my mind's eye whenever another character was sentenced to death. 

This looks like a job for my lovely old complete works

As for my day, well, it could not have been less Machiavellian. After a mojito-heavy merry meeting last night, I devoted this pyjama clad day to reading and thereby convincing my wonderful house mates that post-dissertation can still look like work. Richard's bloody climb to the throne was not so starkly paralleled in my day, in which the most ambitious climb I undertook was my stairs. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: 

WHAT is a 'cacodemon'?! (1.3.144)