#john heminges

[kathylbrownwrites]

The Book of Will by Lauren Gunderson: A Theater Review

New theater review at The Storytelling Blog. The Book of Will. Shakespeare's friends' battle to publish his collected plays and capture the words as he penned them.

The Book of Will. A play by Lauren Gunderson. Image courtesy Library of Congress. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.11290 I recently (July 29, 2023) attended a performance of The Book of Will at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Here are a few thoughts on this wonderful play. If your local theater company produces it, don’t miss it! The Book of Will That Almost Wasn’t Three years after William…

[boyruggeroii]

Do you think Richard Burbage and John Heminges ever explored each other's bodies?

[dontdenymeshakespeare]

The Millionaire and the Bard

From the first time I stood in front of a group of people and spoke Shakespeare’s words, I was in love with the language. That first time I had no understanding of how Shakespeare’s words survived or what precisely I was saying. For me, it was the language and the flow of words and sentences that pulled me in, but the more I learned, the more I read, the more obsessed I became with the plays, the…

[princeofallbones]

Parallels in the original castings of Shakespeare plays

One interesting thing about Shakespeare is that, as we know, he often wrote characters with a specific actor in mind, that would go o to play them (for example Hamlet his good friend, Richard Burbage. I could write an entire essay on why he was such a perfect fit for the character) This often made for very interesting situational puns during the first run of Hamlet. There are two great examples to prove this.

During Act 3 Scene 2, right after his argument with Ophelia, Hamlet asks Polonius (played by John Heminges) if he acted before, to which he replies that he did, and he played Caesar in Julius Caesar, and was killed by Brutus. The prince remarks how it must've been a 'brutal' role to kill such a 'capital a calf'. During The Globe's first year, one of it's first plays to be presented was Julius Caesar, actually starring John Heminges as Caesar, and Richard Burbage as Brutus This a great way to break the forth wall and cross-reference, but also to foreshadow the fact that Polonius will -yet again- will die by being stabbed to death by a character plaid by Richard Burbage.

The other parallel is at Ophelia's funeral, where Hamlet and Laertes begin fighting in Ophelia's grave. This is a callback to the time when same duo of actors (William Sly and Richard Burbage) previously played Paris and Romeo, who also start a fight in the mourning process of their mutual loved one, Juliet.

[shakespearenews]

Peter Straughan, who adapted Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning historical novel “Wolf Hall” for screen has set the story of William Shakespeare’s first folio as his next project.

Produced by Bonafide Films and Runaway Fridge Productions with the support of Film4, “Folio” will recount how a collection of Shakespeare’s works were assembled seven years after his death and preserved for future generations.

“Four hundred years on from its original publication, ‘Folio’ follows the journey of Shakespeare’s former Kings Men colleagues – actors John Heminges and Henry Condell – as they embark on a picaresque road trip through an England on the brink of Puritanism and gather the material to keep their friend’s work and memory alive,” reads the logline.

[pennstateuniversitypress]

The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: An excerpt

The word folio appears only once in Shakespeare’s plays. In the final lines of the first act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy, Don Adriano de Armado invokes the instruments of his literary art: “Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.” The reference is not a flattering one. Armado is a braggart, enamored of his own stilted way of speaking, and his oath to fill folios with the strained devising of his wit is not one we hope he keeps. The irony is that a play concerned with literary fame—that elusive object that can “make us heirs of all eternity,” according to the King (1.1.7)—puts folio, the word perhaps most closely tied to Shakespeare’s own literary legacy, in the mouth of one of Shakespeare’s most mercilessly rendered fools.

Strictly speaking, “folio” describes a bibliographic format, or shape of book: early printed books were made up of sheets of paper that, once printed, gathered, and folded, were stitched together in sequence and bound into volumes. A folio is simply a book made up of sheets of paper folded once, making two leaves and four pages, usually of a large size (see Claire M. L. Bourne’s chapter in this book, and especially fig. 2.1). But folio is more than a term of art. When Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, first performed Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1594, folio was already a word with considerable cultural freighting. And by the end of the seventeenth century, as Francis X. Connor has observed, folios could represent “completeness, cultural prominence, and . . . literary immortality”— a fitting target, in other words, for Shakespeare’s satire and an apt vessel for Armado’s literary pretensions (Connor 2014, 177). But for Shakespeare, the word has accrued other, more specific meanings. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, more widely known as the First Folio, contains thirty-six of the thirty-eight plays attributed in whole or in part to Shakespeare—that is, those written either by himself or in collaboration with other playwrights. When it was issued from the London print shop of Isaac Jaggard in November, 1623, the Folio represented the first successful attempt to gather Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus in one volume. And despite the fact that it was published posthumously, without Shakespeare’s involvement, the First Folio has attained a kind of mythic status: if folios stand for completeness, cultural prominence, and literary immortality, the First Folio typifies the format. Standing first for completeness (its editors, the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, claimed in their preface to have gathered the plays and printed them “absolute in their numbers, as [Shakespeare] conceived them”), it has since become perhaps the most culturally prominent book in the English-speaking world and now functions as a byword for Shakespeare’s literary immortality.

Why, then, does this book, a volume of admittedly slighter dimensions than most folios, consider all four Shakespeare Folios instead of the First alone? Call it an attempt at a corrective. There exists in Shakespeare studies—or at least has existed until recently—an enduring fixation on origins: the authorship and origin of individual plays (so-called attribution studies), the origins of Shakespeare’s plots (which Shakespeare often borrowed and only rarely invented), and the textual origins of Shakespeare in print. In this last category, the Folio has loomed

large: of the thirty-six plays it contains, eighteen were printed in no other edition. This means that without the Folio, these eighteen plays—including The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth—would have been lost, and the Shakespeare canon would be reduced by half. Because of this, three subsequent Shakespeare folios—a Second, printed in 1632, a Third printed in 1663, and a Fourth printed in 1685—have, as Jeffrey Todd Knight recently put it, long inhabited “a critic’s no-man’s land” (2017, 4). The later folios were textually negligible, mere derivatives of the First. And worse than that, each subsequent Folio muddled the First with textual impurities consequent to their printers’ ignorance or carelessness. The later Folios thus carried, according to Fredson Bowers, bibliographer and Shakespeare scholar, no authority in the editing of Shakespeare’s plays (1951, 241). Stanley Wells’s An A–Z Guide to Shakespeare (Oxford 2013) follows suit and describes the later folios as “reprints [with] no independent authority” (Wells 2013). More recently scholars have troubled this account with new evidence, but the premise holds: the First Folio’s proximity to Shakespeare and to those who knew him lends it an authority that the later folios lack. Enshrining this notion, one exhibition held to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016 described the First Folio as “the book that gave us Shakespeare” (“First Folio!”).

This idea has a long history. Samuel Johnson—the eighteenth-century lexicographer and famously voluble subject of James Boswell’s Life—suggested that “the first [Folio] is equivalent to all others, and the rest only deviate from it by the printer’s negligence. Whoever has any of the folios has all, excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of editions will produce” (quoted in Murphy 2021, 112). George Steevens, who edited Shakespeare’s plays with Johnson, was even more dismissive, likening the later folios to “mere waste paper” (quoted in Hooks 2016, 190). Implied by Johnson and Steeven’s language is the idea of sameness, even equivalence between the Folios, and a generally untroubled sequence that led from the First to the Fourth. The chapters in this book trouble this idea, finding alterations, both profound and subtle, made between and within each edition and argue instead for a composite view of the four Folios.

The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: Copy, Print, Paper, Type is available for pre-order from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09732-9.html. Take 30% off with discount code NR24.

[amazinganglosaxonculture]

Preserving Shakespeare's Legacy: The Story Behind the play 'The Book of Will'

William Shakespeare is not known to have authored a book titled “The Book of Will.” However, there is a play titled “The Book of Will” written by Lauren Gunderson. The play revolves around the efforts of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, to compile and publish the First Folio after Shakespeare’s death. William Shakespeare n’est pas connu pour avoir écrit…

[lamilanomagazine]

Sondrio, i 400 anni del first folio delle opere di Shakespeare: alla biblioteca Rajna l'esposizione dei volumi della collezione

Sondrio, i 400 anni del first folio delle opere di Shakespeare: alla biblioteca Rajna l'esposizione dei volumi della collezione La Biblioteca Rajna celebra i quattrocento anni della pubblicazione del First Folio delle opere di William Shakespeare con un'esposizione bibliografica dei volumi della propria collezione. Un anniversario importante poiché, grazie al lavoro di John Heminges e Henry Condell, due attori, per la prima volta veniva data una sistematizzazione nuova e organica ai drammi del poeta, in un assetto che ha influenzato il modo in cui questi testi sono stati letti e considerati nei secoli successivi. Alla sua morte, infatti, avvenuta nel 1616, la maggior parte delle poesie e delle opere teatrali di Shakespeare circolava singolarmente in copie a stampa. Il First Folio, pubblicato nel 1623 con il titolo di "Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies", contiene trentasei opere teatrali, alcune delle quali mai pubblicate in precedenza in maniera ufficiale, come "La Tempesta" e "Macbeth". «Come Amministrazione comunale vogliamo celebrare Condell e Heminges che con il primo infolio delle opere drammatiche di William Shakespeare conferirono istituzionalità e autorevolezza a un corpus di lavori destinati ad essere rappresentati e apprezzati fino ai giorni nostri - afferma l'assessore alla Cultura, Educazione e Istruzione Marcella Fratta -. Un ‘esposizione di quello che c’è di pubblicato nel lontano passato relativo a Shakespeare aiuta ad entrare nell’atmosfera di quegli anni e a ridare importanza alle parole e ai loro preziosi e silenziosi custodi: i libri». Il First Folio è ritenuto uno dei libri a stampa più costosi al mondo, del quale ne esistono ancora circa duecento copie, di cui alcune di proprietà della British Library. In occasione dell'importante anniversario, la Biblioteca Rajna espone al pubblico alcuni pezzi della propria collezione appartenenti sia ai fondi speciali che al fondo antico. Tra questi, un'edizione del "Macbeth" del 1881, a cura di James Darmesteter, e un'edizione di "Re Lear" del 1910 del Fondo Rajna; il "Teatro completo di Shakespeare voltato in prosa italiana da Carlo Rusconi" in sette volumi, edito a Torino dall'Unione tipografica nel 1859, e una bellissima collezione di volumi dei drammi di Shakespeare editi a Berlino nel 1867, entrambi parte del fondo antico della biblioteca. Accanto ai volumi antichi sono presenti molte edizioni moderne, in italiano e in lingua originale, oltre a saggi e commenti delle opere di Shakespeare, per avvicinare tutti i cittadini alla lettura del poeta.... #notizie #news #breakingnews #cronaca #politica #eventi #sport #moda Read the full article

[libramonthlyhoroscope1]

William shakespeare's death

On April 23, 1616, English poet and playwright William Shakespeare died in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon at the age of fifty-two. His death occurred on or near his birthday (the exact date of his birth remains unknown), which may have been the source of a later legend that he fell ill and died after a night of heavy drinking with two other writers, Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.

William shakespeare's death

Although Shakespeare had achieved some measure of acclaim and financial success during his life, writing for the stage was, at the time of his death, not yet thought of as a serious artistic pursuit, and his modest burial at Holy Trinity Church was more suited to a wealthy local retiree than a celebrity.

However, within a few years of his death, Shakespeare’s friends and admirers began to lay the groundwork for his literary immortality. In 1623 John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled his plays into a single large-format edition. We know this edition as the First Folio, one of the most famous texts in English literature. Anticipating that the world would eventually recognize Shakespeare’s genius, Ben Jonson—an important literary figure in his own right—proclaimed in the folio’s preface that his friend was a writer “not of an age, but for all time!”​

The four centuries since Shakespeare’s death have confirmed Jonson’s assessment. The "Bard of Avon" holds a place in history as one of the greatest writers to have lived, and his work is performed, read, and taught across the world. Shakespeare’s legacy has also evolved to keep up with changing times; for example, in the 20th and 21st centuries his plays have been adapted into hundreds of feature films.

[mostly-history]

The first page of Romeo and Juliet in the First Folio owned by Brandeis University (published 1623).

The First Folio was the first collected edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, collated and published seven years after his death by two of his colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell.  17 of Shakespeare's plays had been published in quarto editions, and one more after his death, but the First Folio contained 36 of his 37 plays (Pericles was not included, and Shakespeare may have written only part of it).

[ilredeiladri]

Fun fact This conversation back in 1600 (when Hamlet was performed by Shakespeare‘s company „The Lord Chamberlain‘s men“) was actually Polonios (played by John Heminges) telling Hamlet (played by Richard Burbage) that Julius Caesar (played by John Heminges one year before) was murdered by Brutus (played by Richard Burbage one year before).

Booooom. Shakespeare knew so well what he was doing there. <3

[shakespearenews]

Recent developments include a public “mock trial” of Shakespeare at, of all places, Middle Temple. Though the judges came down on Shakespeare’s side, the very notion that his authorship is a matter of debate serves the denialists’ cause. When I queried this with the Middle Temple press office, the event’s organiser angrily revealed himself as a believer that the real Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford (such people call themselves Oxfordians).

Simon & Schuster has issued a book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler, an American journalist. Its genesis is an article Winkler wrote for The Atlantic in 2019 on reasons for doubting the attribution of authorship to Shakespeare from Stratford. Her misconceptions were patiently dismantled by the Columbia scholar James Shapiro in the next issue. Winkler’s book is a farrago of wounded pride, sly insinuation of mystery where there is none, and a feeble grasp of sources, dates and facts...

...This is no time for genteel dialogue. The riot at the US Capitol underlines that baseless conspiracy theories have costs. If, through cynicism or soft-headedness, periodicals and publishers act as accessories, they shame themselves.

[frimleyblogger]

You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Two

You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Two - the lost play of William Shakespeare, Vortigern and Rowena, or was it?

The lost play of Shakespeare, 1796

During the 18th century the Bard of Stratford had a resurgence of popularity, some theatres dedicating themselves purely to staging his plays. Collectors were on the hunt for relics or memorabilia connected with Shakespeare. He was a bit of an enigma, though. Apart from his will, he had left no personal documentation, letters, diaries, not even a line from…

[cto10121]

Sometimes, when I deign to trawl through the R&J tag and then almost instantly regretting it, I like to imagine what the first Elizabethean fandom for Romeo and Juliet was like in its heyday. We know that the play was popular, especially with the youths (“I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow / Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo”) and in the Parnassus play written by Oxford college students, a character Gullio, who is meant to be the stereotypical ultimate Shakespeare fanboy, enters and another character complains “we shall have naught but Romeo and Juliet now.” Sure enough, Gullio almost instantly quotes from R&J.

So now I’m imagining a fandom of collectively flailing Elizabethean young adult grammar students, apprentices, and law students utterly destroyed from seeing the play at the Curtain (“Er, farest thou well?” “No, I do not fare well, fellows, I am unDONE, look not for me, I am returned to earth as dust” “I knew t’was a tragedy but I did not know I. would. CARE”) and they talk and joke and make memes and inside jokes until even the mention of “a full half of an hour” (the time it takes Juliet to wake up after Romeo dies) makes them automatically start wailing and becomes a meme shorthand for the time it takes for any tragedy to occur. There would have been fans who stan the actors hard, especially Burbage who made such a great Romeo people would still remember it years later as one of his best roles. There would finally have been a fandom for Shakespeare himself when they finally realize he wrote the play and also for his portrayal of the Chorus and the Friar, and the early fans of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s narrative poem, would have been “fINALLY, the people hath appreciated our sweet word wizard, come ye to the dark side, we have lusty goddesses and horses galore.” (And then proceed to gatekeep, of course). There would have been almost exclusively Mercutio stans, including the actor (I headcanon John Heminges, Shakespeare’s real-life BFF). There would have been Elizabethean fuckboys using R&J lines to pick up girls (yes, this actually happened).

And oh, and the wank! Imagine the fans of Shakespeare’s R&J versus the OG fans of Arthur Brooks’ version AND the hipster fans of the original Italian sources fighting constantly and gatekeeping so hard, with the latter insisting that Shakespeare’s play ruined and dumbed down the original’s message about the consequences of teenage lust and disobeying your parents and the Shakespeare fans basically replying “yes we know ‘tis canon but since t’was the most asinine decision yet set upon calfskin, our lord and master of our earthly souls Will Shakespeare declined to accept it, and I know not what you may think on it, but methought t’was truly the fairest thing” and “the Theater play was BETTER, that is flat, therefore hie you all hence home, you stink with drink.” I wouldn’t even be surprised if there were a tiny faction of Romeo/Rosaline shippers who are also hardcore Petrarchan stans and those fans would have been just. universally hated by the greater fandom. No matter the receipts you pull out, no matter the argument, they just won’t accept the Romilet endgame and uphold Rosaline as Romeo’s True Love. Things are made worse by the fact that the only source for the play text is a bootlegged quarto with some deleted BTS material but otherwise very low quality and inaccurate text. The fans are especially furious at the botched marriage scene with an OOC R&J.

Then finally in ‘97 or thereabouts a quarto with the whole complete and accurate text comes out and the fandom goes wild. They have memorized the play, naturally, but the naked page provides many possibilities for other interpretations and the fans can finally, visibly see that Romeo and Juliet’s first interaction makes a perfect sonnet (something that most diehard fans picked up but seeing it so clearly on the page is...something else. “THIS SHIP SAILETH ITSELF” is the common response). It is a deathblow to Romaline, thankfully, but it also incurs a general robust backlash re: the whiny OG fans of Arthur Brooks who are and forever will be salty at Shakespeare’s changes (“they did not speak so long in the Brooks, they kissed almost presently which is how it should be for that ‘tis a ~love~ based on nothing less than mere LUXURY” “hold thy tongue, knave, or I shall cut it out of thee”).

So while the grammar kids are supposed to analyze their Ovid and Seneca, they are reading the quarto version of Romeo and Juliet on the sly, whispering favorite lines and headcanons, leading their scandalized grammar profs to decry the death of learning!!!1!! and the Puritans harangue the Theater and Curtain playhouses for their gross irresponsibility in portraying unhallowed teenage lust as love in front of impressionable teen boys and once again the inherent lewdness of such an erotically-charged story conveyed by all-male actors (“The beast is among us and lo, she is hight the Theater!!1!!!”).

At last the Middle Temple issues a kind but strongly worded reminder to all law students that no, you can’t petition a writ of distringas [restraining order] against a play poet on the basis of “his Romeo causing great emotional damage for that I must lie down and weep every #full half of an hour” because it will be dismissed by the Star Court and most any court in the realm. It also feels the need to write to inform Master William Shakespeare of the phenomenon, politely inquiring, um, what the hell. All this for a stage play you penned???? Shakespeare just smiles wryly.