On 17/4/05 12:27 AM, "MJ Walker" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "Bach & Bird & Williams ought to be
> enough for any "poet" - and he might do worse than not bothering to read
> anyone after Shakespeare, etc. Who I honestly , like they say, can't now
> read myself. § On this last - it is a constant damn embarrassment, that
> S/ at least in the books I can get, the forms of them etc., is so slow
> on the page I get bugged, and don't make it. That, say, whereas
> Melville, Lawrence, Crane, Cervantes, Williams, yourself, Pound (in his
> prose), Parkman, Stendhal, and Homer - are all of a particular
> relevance, immediately & unavoidably clear to me, - S/ is not.."
I hope, like Mark, that Creeley worked out how to read Shakespeare at some
point. One thing he isn't is slow; he gets the dynamic moving straight
away. As I get older he is more and more a touchstone for me - like Keats
said, inexhaustible; and for me always a source of energy and inspiration.
I reckon it's really difficult to pin WS in any of his plays, hence the
endless arguments about what he really thought; though I venture the
playwright speaks a fair bit about what he thinks of theatre in Hamlet. But
I don't really care who he was; whoever he was, he wrote these amazing
plays.
Though Ken, my introduction at school to WS less than inspiring. It was The
Merchant of Venice, and I loathed it (looking back, I think that particular
teacher didn't like Shakespeare much - and I still think the play is
problematic). It took Polanski's now rather embarrassing film of Macbeth to
open my eyes to the fact that this was language that was meant to be
_spoken_, and that when I heard it spoken well it was the most exciting
language I had encountered. Then I studied Lear, and I was hooked. (I come
from a family of three daughters, which might explain my psychological
attachment to this play...maybe...) After that there was no stopping me.
But I still am not especially fond of The Merchant, which to my mind really
is a potboiler with a couple of nice speeches; aside from being permanently
scarred by a really really really boring production of that awful play
Pericles, which seemed to go for about 15 hours.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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