The Epilogue

The Epilogue - Act 5 - The Tempest - by William Shakespeare
Spoken by PROSPERO

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free

William Shakespeare died on this day 1616

You might also want to check this out: The Tempest on Zoom

Shakespeare Day - A Bank Holiday?

I really would like to see today as Shakespeare Day, a bank holiday (as you can never have enough of those), a day to celebrate our cultural heritage. Not because Shakespeare needs the PR, think he’s being doing quite nicely on that front for a few hundred years, but because it deflects the jingoism and ridiculous nonsense of St George. The arts enrich our lives, they are good for our wellbeing, and they help us on the road to happiness and fulfilment. The arts celebrate diversity.

Angry, bored, depressed, perplexed, stressed, having trouble making sense of the world or just generally unhappy?

Then get some art in your life. Open your heart to the arts. You’ll feel so much better for it.

Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing), William Blake, ca. 1825 — Source.

What the dickens?

The recent Dickens season on the BBC has caused me a certain amount of unease. I have a distinct dislike of period costume dramas, particularly those based around Regency and Victorian times. In fact I will often go out of my way to avoid them. In many ways that’s a shame as no doubt some of them will be very well written. The trouble is that they make me want to vomit. The only exception to the rule is A Christmas Carol which I never tire of and which invariably leads to a modicum of tear-duct leakage. I’m sure that somewhere in this land some very good ‘alternate’ productions of his work are being performed, but I would so much prefer it if by default Dickens could be treated in a similar vein to Shakespeare. I know that there is a whole world of difference between the novels of Charles Dickens and the plays of William Shakespeare but I do feel that the approach could be equally as exciting by relying solely on the prose of Dickens and its dramatic interpretation. Does it really need to be reduced to lack-lustre entertainment gift wrapped in frilly dresses, starched collars and sideburns? I‘d like to see Dickens interpreted with some stripped down gritty realism.

Sadly much of the subject matter in the works of Dickens is still very relevant. Presenting his work cosseted in a cloak of mawkish sterility detracts from its power. Charlie boy highlighted the horrors of poverty which sadly are still all too real today; you would have thought that over the last 142 years* it would not have been beyond the capacity of the peoples of Great Britain and their successive governments to have eradicated it by now. But clearly to date it has beaten us. Poverty is very much alive and thriving. So far we have failed. When will we make poverty history? Until that day we are nothing!

“Dear mother it’s a bugger...”

*Dickens died in 1870

We’re all doomed!

THE RECESSION IS OVER!

The recession, that catastrophic financial near-Armageddon is over. We are no longer going to be forever bankrupt as a nation. The reason: The Media has a new scare to generate an abundance of hot air. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! Well I suppose that’s stating the bleedin’ obvious, but our doom is considerably more impending than perhaps we imagined if the newspapers, radio and telly are to be believed. Swine Flu is the latest craze, and boy are they going to town on it.

The News Media could best be described as a nagging old busybody, and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”* It seems to have nothing better to do than whip the public up into frenzy. In a world where there is so much disease, famine, poverty, injustice and war that largely goes unreported it is sickening when something that affects a few white people gets so heavily reported.

We received this email at work today. Opportunist or what?

I fully expect that any day now that a newspaper will report that the government has awarded a contract to Capita to recruit staff to push hand-carts, ring hand-bells and shout “bring out you dead!”

Is it me?






* Queen Gertrude - Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, by Willy the Spear shaker

Shakespeare

"Shakespeare was a man of wit,
And on his shirt he had some sh…


…irt buttons!"

Had he lived, young Willy would have been 445 today.

Today should be a bank holiday, but only in celebration of The Bard!

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)