Hey everyone —
The 2021 Shakespeare at Winedale spring class will share their work on “The Tempest” via a live Zoom webinar performance tomorrow night and you’re all invited to drop by the island to be audience for a word or two.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be something of an unofficial teaching assistant for the course this semester. It’s been a rewarding experience — we’ve been able to do two day trips to Winedale to work in the Barn (with masks) and the students will perform the play there Saturday afternoon. That performance is not open to the public, sadly, though James did finally receive approval from UT to allow each student to invite one guest, as long as social distancing is maintained. (And a masque will be required…)
These students have also been meeting virtually via Zoom every other week since mid-February with a group of 14 students in a Shakespeare course led by Dr. Chris Thurman at Wits University in Johannesburg and we’ll share some of the collaborative efforts from those sessions (created on Zoom and via video) later this spring. It’s a connection we will continue with next year’s spring class as well, so we’re excited to see what we can create and invent together long-distance in this “brave new world” of virtual gatherings.
Here’s the info:
THE TEMPEST
7 pm this Friday
Use Zoom to join the webinar -- please arrive between 6:45 and 6:55 pm if possible.
Please click the link below to join:
https://utexas.zoom.us/j/93667115128
Webinar ID: 936 6711 5128
Cheers to all,
cs
Clayton Stromberger
Outreach Coordinator, UT Shakespeare at Winedale
Department of English, College of Liberal Arts
University of Texas at Austin
cstromberger(a)austin.utexas.edu<mailto:cstromberger@austin.utexas.edu>
cell: 512-363-6864
Coincidentally, I came across this Fitzgerald passage this morning and it
reminded me of Borges and Shakespeare. Happy 456th Shakespeare's Birthday!
"It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like
writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an
answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly,
or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole* lot* of people trying so hard to
be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in
mirrors, who lean* back*ward trying---only to see their faces in reflecting
chandeliers."
*--- from “The Last Tycoon”
<https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-tycoon-f-scott-fitzgerald/1136406…>
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald.*
[Fitzgerald's narrator thinks less of writers (they're like actors!).
Borges's God has a different opinion.]
Everything and Nothing
THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad
paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were
copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream
dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but
the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this
emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual
should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he
would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less
Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he
sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let
himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age
of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become
proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others
would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the
profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage
plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him
for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular
satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once -the last verse
had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the
hated flavour of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or
Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining
other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its
destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that
inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and
Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with
the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this
man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality.
At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his
work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his
person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words 'I am
not what I am'. The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting
inspired famous passages of his.
For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one
morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so
many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge,
diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his
theatre. Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he
recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to
the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions
and Latin terms. He had to be someone: he was a retired impresario who had
made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty
usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and
testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of
pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and
for them he would take up again his role as poet.
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of
God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and
myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I
anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare,
and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no
one.'
>From Jorge Luis Borges *Labyrinths* (Penguin, 2000) Trans. J. E. Irby.