Caught in time’s current: Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years

Posted on November 7, 2020 by Admin

In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world

Read Dearly by Margaret Atwood

I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

Shakespeare’s secret co-writer finally takes a bow … 430 years late

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Admin

Thomas Watson recognised by literary scholars as the Bard’s forgotten 16th-century collaborator

He was one of the most celebrated English playwrights of the 16th century, yet none of his plays survived, and today the name of Thomas Watson is virtually unknown. Now the writer, poet and pioneer of the English madrigal – who also saved the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in a street brawl – is being seen in a new light.

Watson has been identified as the most likely primary author of Arden of Faversham, the first domestic tragedy in English, which was published anonymously in 1592. Many scholars believe that five of the play’s scenes were co-authored with William Shakespeare.

Catalonia pays €3m to firms linked to theory Shakespeare was Catalan

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Admin

Media companies linked to institute that also claims Leonardo da Vinci, Cervantes and Columbus were Catalan

The Catalan government had paid €3m (£2.6m) in subsidies to media companies with close links to a body that claims that Shakespeare, Cervantes and Columbus – among others – were Catalan.

The figures were revealed in a parliamentary answer given by Pere Aragonès, the Catalan vice-president, who said the money had been paid since 2012 to two media companies owned by Albert Codinas, the joint founder and current president of the New History Institute (INH) – one of which shares an address with it.

Franco Zeffirelli was a master charmer – no wonder we all fell for his Romeo and Juliet

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Admin

His take on Shakespeare’s tragedy tapped the zeitgeist, but Zeffirelli’s whole body of work pulsated with an irresistible camp and romanticism

Franco Zeffirelli was the mainstream maestro of high culture on screens big and small who dashingly made his international movie reputation with an exuberant and accessible adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in 1968; this had some pretty trad doublet-and-hose stuff and featured the syrupy “Love” theme composed for the film by Nino Rota which was to become notorious as the music for Simon Bates’s regular tearjerking Our Tune feature on Radio One.

But there were also muscular and athletic performances from a bright-eyed young cast, vigorous and enjoyable playing all round and bold location work. The year before, Zeffirelli had directed Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in another Shakespeare adaptation: The Taming of the Shrew: clever casting of course, but it was the honeyglow-sunlit romanticism of young love in Romeo and Juliet — not cynical middle-aged love — which caught the public imagination, tuned into the zeitgeist and gave Zeffirelli his massive hit.