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Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

All the World’s a Stage

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Paul Kincaid in plays, Uncategorized

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Alan Rickman, Gemma Lawrence, Joe Banister, Ken Nwosu, Leo Wringer, Leon Annor, Mark Benton, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Patrick Godfrey, Patsy Ferran, Paul Chahidi, Philip Arditti, Rosalie Craig, Siobhan McSweeney, William Shakespeare

One of the things that Shakespeare did throughout his career was draw attention to the very theatricality of his plays. Think of the role of Chorus in Henry V, or the play within a play that is The Taming of the Shrew. As You Like It is very much of the same company; it is, after all, the play in which Jacques delivers his famous speech beginning “All the world’s a stage …”. Given that, therefore, it is well worth giving serious attention to how the play is staged. Continue reading →

Reprint: Language

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Alfred Bester, Arthur C Clarke, Christopher Evans, Gardner Dozois, Gary Westfahl, Gene Wolfe, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harold Bloom, Russell Hoban, Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, William Shakespeare

Time for another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one was first published in Vector 187, February 1996. Continue reading →

Reprint: Islands

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Alexander Selkirk, Christopher Priest, Daniel Defoe, H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard, Jane Mendelsohn, Johann Wyss, John Christopher, John Fowles, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nicholas Ruddick, R.M. Ballantyne, Rex Gordon, Robert Holdstock, S Fowler Wright, William Golding, William Shakespeare

This is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. It first appeared in Vector 189 (September-October 1996).

The man was inside two crevices. There was first the rock, closed and not warm but at least not cold with the coldness of sea or air. The rock was negative. It confined his body so that here and there the shudders were beaten; not soothed but forced inward. He felt pain throughout most of his body but distant pain that was sometimes to be mistaken for fire.
Pincher Martin (1956)
William Golding

When you think of life on a desert island, you get pictures in your mind of cannibals and pirates, of desolation and thirst. But at first it wasn’t at all like that for us. It really wasn’t bad … Anyone else stranded on a desert island would probably have wanted to die, but for him the nights had never been more beautiful, the wind more gentle, the sea more calm.
I Was Amelia Earhart (1996)
Jane Mendelsohn

 Between 1704 and 1709 the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned alone in the Juan Fernández Islands in the South Pacific. When he returned to civilisation he became an instant celebrity, his autobiography was published, his story became known throughout Britain, and he was interviewed by the leading journalist of his day, Daniel Defoe. Selkirk’s years on the island affected him, he built a cave in his garden where he lived, he sulked and raged at neighbours, he was such a tormented character that he was a menace to strangers and an embarrassment to his family. Yet when Defoe took his familiar story and transmuted it into the adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) it became the tale of how a true Englishman could master the elements by his resolution and entrepreneurial spirit.

There had been tales of castaways before, Shakespeare’s luckless characters were forever being cast upon strange shores and in The Tempest (1611) he created a memorable magical isle. But what was different about Robinson Crusoe was that the island itself became a protagonist. Before any other human characters intrude upon his story, Crusoe has already conquered the island, wresting from it a comfortable home, a suit of clothes, a steady supply of foods and luxuries. When Friday comes into his life it is only to extend the conquest, for Crusoe to convert primitive man as well as primitive land to the necessities of civilised life.

Thus Robinson Crusoe was not just the exemplar, it was the creator of a small but persistent literary genre, the robinsonade. Curious in that it is a sub-genre which crosses and re-crosses traditional genre boundaries, a form of fiction that can be at one moment the highest of high fantasy and the next the most realist of mainstream literature, the robinsonade is a romance which pitches man, in isolation, against his environment. Most commonly, robinsonades have told the story of characters thrust into some inimical landscape – most usually an island – where they not only survive, but actually re-establish the comforts of their normal lives. This is most noticeable in those robinsonades that have become established as children’s classics, such as Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss (1812-13) and The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne (1857), which celebrate the power of the family to exert its civilising influences whatever it may encounter.

In science fiction, the robinsonade has been a consistent influence, often explicitly so as in Rex Gordon’s No Man Friday (1956) or the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). The island, whether an actual island or an island in space, an uninhabited planet, is an attractive setting partly for the simple, practical reason that it allows the writer to isolate his protagonist, but also because it allows utopias and anti-utopias to be developed. Adam and Eve on a depopulated planet – a post-atomic Earth, the sole survivors of a crashed spaceship – have recreated society countless times in the pages of science fiction magazines. The rational, can-do spirit exemplified by Crusoe is all that we ever need to rebuild our lives, and the safety and comfort we know today can not be lost forever.

But such optimism has not actually been common in science fiction, in a genre that celebrates the social success of humanity as much as the ingenuity of the individual, the loss of society is generally represented as a dark and threatening event. Islands are as likely to result in the triumph of the primitive as they are in a Crusoe-like triumph of civilisation. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) is a place where the forces of Darwinism have a dehumanising effect in the isolation an island provides, and though S. Fowler Wright tried to counter that with The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928) in which morality stands against nature to load the scales in humanity’s favour the more common scientific view has been that nature is triumphant.

Thus William Golding created Lord of the Flies (1954) as a direct response to Ballantine’s Coral Island: this party of schoolboys marooned in isolation from their society will not allow family values to triumph but will regress to primitivism, violence and superstition. It is a notion echoed in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975). Both the traffic island between motorway embankments and the multistorey apartment block are islands in the midst of the sea of uncaring, fast-paced civilisation; they are islands of survival and the establishment of values just as Crusoe’s island was, but with the crucial difference that the values are specifically not those of the protagonist’s off-island society.

Implicit in the island as protagonist is the notion that the island becomes in itself a character, and if the hero is to reshape the island to suit himself, then the island becomes a mirror of his psyche. Thus the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies conjure their fears from the dead parachutist captured by the trees, while Maitland, swept up like technological flotsam on the Concrete Island, finds that it “was becoming an exact model of his head”. But this is perhaps most explicit in Golding’s Pincher Martin. The sailor, cradled by the “negative” rock is dead, though neither we nor he know that yet. His ship has been blown up during the war, and after a wild and disorienting tumble through the Atlantic waters he suddenly finds himself upon an island. It is too small, too barren for him to build any comfort or recreate any civilisation upon it, survival is an end in itself. But the very bleakness of the rock forces his pains in upon himself, and this is a metaphor for the way his memories, his life, are forced in upon him. What Pincher Martin is, in its brutal and unrelieved allegorical manner, is a recapitulation of that old saw: the dying man seeing his whole life flash before him. And this is one of the chief ways in which the island has been used in science fiction, its isolation, its small compass providing a physical shape for the mind, the experience of the protagonist. Sometimes, as in Robert Holdstock’s ‘Mythago Wood’ sequence, it is a forest; sometimes, as in John Fowles’s Mantissa (1982), it is a white room; sometimes, as in Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex (1977) or The Affirmation (1981), it is a dreamscape; sometimes, as in John Christopher’s A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965), it is an actual island: but the island, real or implied, provides an allegory for the human consciousness, the exploration of its landscape is a working out of the hero’s thoughts, feelings, his very humanity.

These examples are, notably, all British. In Ultimate Island (1993), Nicholas Ruddick has proposed that the island is one of the central linking threads that characterises British science fiction. It is not exclusively so, Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, in A Short, Sharp Shock (1990) takes his protagonist along a narrow sea-girt peninsula on a journey that seems in many ways to recapitulate that of Golding’s Pincher Martin. But it is true that American science fiction has not used the island as metaphor with anything like the same enthusiasm or the same bitter, allegorical intensity. (We are, after all, an island race; it serves us conveniently as a metaphor for our social as well as our personal and intellectual existence.)

But the American mainstream has continued to use the island in a manner closer to that originally employed by Defoe: as a figure for survival that isn’t just personal but also social and moral. In her recent fable, I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn imagines the survival of the flyer who became an almost legendary figure in America between the wars before she and her navigator disappeared in the Pacific on an attempt to fly round the world. But here the island becomes not a battleground for survival but a haven for escape, a place where Amelia does not have to be a heroine, does not have to live up to the legend. The island allows her to live the life she wants for herself; like Ballard’s Maitland, it’s a simpler life, but like Defoe’s Crusoe it’s a civilised life.

Notes on Northrop Frye’s Theory of Genres

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas

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Anthony Trollope, Aristotle, Daniel Defoe, Darko Suvin, Emily Bronte, George Borrow, Henry Fielding, Henry James, Herman Melville, J.D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Jonathan McCalmont, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Laurence Sterne, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niall Harrison, Northrop Frye, Paul Graham Raven, Robert Burton, Thomas Love Peacock, William Shakespeare

Three years ago, almost to the day, Maureen Kincaid Speller and I had lunch with Niall Harrison, Jonathan McCalmont and Paul Graham Raven. During the course of the lunch, Maureen mentioned that she was reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. The upshot was, we decided to read the book together, and take turns blogging about it. The first three parts of this exercise were published on Maureen’s blog, Paper Knife: Maureen on ‘Polemical Introduction’; Paul Graham Raven on ‘First Essay: Historical Criticism; Theory of Modes’; and Niall Harrison on ‘Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols’. For various reasons, the exercise ground to a halt at that point. But I have just unearthed my own notes on Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres, and thought it worth while presenting them here.

What follows is partly written up, but mostly in note form. But I think there is perhaps some interesting stuff nonetheless, if only because it shows the shaping and development of my own ideas on the subject. Quotations are from the Penguin 1990 edition. Continue reading →

A Hollow Crown

17 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in plays

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David Tennant, Gregory Doran, Jane Lapotaire, Michael Pennington, Nigel Lindsay, Oliver Ford Davies, Richard II, Suzy Klein, William Shakespeare

richard iiMaureen and I have become connoisseurs of filmed plays of late. Worst is the National Theatre, because of the annoyingly patronising introductions by Emma Freud. Best is the Globe Theatre, which trusts us to know how to be playgoers and simply takes us straight into the performance. Somewhere in between is the Royal Shakespeare Company, with their first venture into the form in the shape of Richard II, or, to give it its proper title, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. We appreciated the fact that we were given a full cast list at the start, complete with photographs, a simple innovation that the other two companies should certainly copy. Suzy Klein made a far better fist of the introduction than La Freud, and her interview with director Gregory Doran managed both to avoid sycophancy and to be genuinely informative. However, she also introduces the Proms on Radio 3, and just as always seems to happen on radio she crashed the start of the performance. I don’t know why announcers seem to imagine that the thing does not begin until the first sound comes from the stage. I also don’t know why they feel the need to tell us in advance what we can see for ourselves, or what the play will tell us in the first few minutes.

In this production, for instance, we open inside a religious building. A coffin stands centre stage, a black-clad widow has thrown herself partly across it. Slowly, various figures come on stage, make obeisance to the coffin and stand back, their body language betokening some tension in the air. These are men, not armed or armoured here, but in sturdy, dark-coloured garments that make you think they are ready for a fight. A pause, then in sweeps King Richard in a long, light, feminine gown and pays no attention to the coffin. And only now does Klein stop telling us that this is the coffin of Gloucester, one of Richard’s many uncles, and that Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, son of John of Gaunt (another uncle) is about to accuse Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of the murder. I’m sorry, but we don’t need to be told this, all of this information becomes apparent in the next few minutes anyway. We would have lost nothing, missed nothing, if Klein had simply been silent from the moment the camera first picked out the dark coffin on the dark stage, with Jane Lapotaire’s long grey hair fanned across it. Continue reading →

Posterity and Obsolescence

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas, science fiction

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Aphra Behn, Charles Dickens, Charles Eliot, Eugene Sue, F.R. Leavis, H.G. Wells, Harold Bloom, Iain Banks, Ian Sales, Margaret Cavendish, Matthew Arnold, Robert Heinlein, Tom Godwin, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare

Two things have struck me forcibly over the last week. One, at the Iain Banks conference, was the insistence that Banks would still be read 100 years from now. The other, on this blog, was Ian Sales insisting that the nature of hard sf has changed, and so a work like ‘The Cold Equations’ or, by implication, any of its contemporaries, is irrelevant to any current discussion of the form. These are two conflicting views of the same issue: canonisation. Continue reading →

Are ye fantastical?

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in plays

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Alex Kingston, Daniel Ings, Emma Freud, Jimmy Yuill, John Shrapnel, Kenneth Branagh, Nicholas Hytner, Ray Fearon, Rob Ashford, Roger Rees, William Shakespeare

Will nobody rid me of this turbulent Freud?

Last November we went to see a live transmission of the National Theatre production of Timon of Athens. A decent production was all but spoiled by Emma Freud’s patronising introduction, and during the intermission she conducted a dreadfully banal interview with Nicholas Hytner. It was almost enough to make me run screaming from the theatre.

So on Saturday we went to Canterbury to see the filmed production of Macbeth from the Manchester International Festival. Only it turned out that this was done in conjunction with the National Theatre, and bloody Emma Freud popped up again to introduce the play for all us kiddies who’ve never seen a theatre before, and to conduct an interview with the co-director, Rob Ashford, that was enough to make the interview with Hytner seem the height of intellectual sophistication. On top of which, the matiness about Ken this and Ken that was extraordinarily emetic. Only this time, if I had run screaming from the theatre, it would at least have saved me from watching the play. Continue reading →

The Taming of the Shrew

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in plays

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Pearce Quigley, Samantha Spiro, Simon Paisley Day, Tom Godwin, William Shakespeare

We spent the afternoon watching the Globe Theatre production of The Taming of the Shrew, which had been filmed and was shown at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury. Despite my dissatisfaction the last time I watched a filmed version of a stage play, this time the experience was entirely positive. Continue reading →

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