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Posts Archived Under William Shakespeare
The Sistine Chapel ceiling. It would have
gone so much faster if Michelangelo had
skipped the second coat and used
a roller. (That joke never gets old.) |
A new month brings new commemorations, events, and fun facts, so let's get to them!
Monday:
We’ll begin with the arts, and three of the artiest events occurred on this day. First, in 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was exhibited to the public for the first time. It had taken Michelangelo four years to paint this mural of images from the Bible and it remains a top tourist attraction in Rome to this day.
Not to be outdone by Michelangelo, William Shakespeare chose this day to premiere two of his most-enduring plays, the first, "Othello," opened in 1604, and the second (also Shakespeare's last), "The Tempest," followed in 1611. Both plays premiered in London's Whitehall Palace.
If you feel inclined to create your own artistic masterpiece, today is the perfect day to start, since it's not only National Author's Day - but also the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. If you're unsure whether your novel is suitable for a general audience, you might consult the guidelines of the Motion Picture Association of America, whose movie rating system of G, M, R, X, went into effect on this day in 1968. (PG-13 and NC-17 were originally not part of the lineup; they were added in later years when further clarification was needed as to who could see which movies.)
An artist of a different type was Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, who turns 50 today. Valenzuela was a 19-year-old rookie at the start of the 1981 season when he got the opening day assignment. Valenzuela responded with a five-hit shutout of the Houston Astros, and "Fernandomania" was born, as crowds flocked to ballparks to see the lefthander with the unorthodox delivery (he looked to the heavens while in his windup) and Mexican-Americans across the country adopted him as one of their own. He won his first eight starts, with four more shutouts, and by the end of the year had won 13 games and both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards – the only time such a feat has occurred.
Yesterday was, of course, Halloween, and tomorrow is All Souls' Day and the Day of the Dead, so that must mean that today is All Saints Day. Mentioning saints makes us think of heavenly foods, and few are more heavenly than peanut butter – a happy accident, since November is Peanut Butter Lover's Month. Even more coincidentally, today is World Vegan Day, the perfect day to indulge in a nice PBJ (provided there's no bacon, of course).
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Archived under: 1960s, 1980s, Anniversaries, Artists, Arts, Athletes, Authors, Awards, Bacon, Baseball, Baseball Players, Biographies, Birthdays, Buildings, Celebrations, Creativity, Dia de los Muertos, Eating, Entertainment, European History, Events, Festivals, Fiction, Food and Drink, Halloween, History, Holidays, In Character, Italy, Literature, London, Los Angeles, MLB, Movie History, Movies, NaNoWriMo, Performing Arts, Recipes, Rome, Sandwiches, Sports, Tourist Attractions, U.K. History, United Kingdom, United States, Vegetables, Vegetarian, Vegetarianism, William Shakespeare, Writers, Writing |
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Well, that's what it all comes
down to, doesn't it? |
Welcome once more to The Spark, your source for a deep dig into the week's events. Let's begin, shall we?
Monday:
The week begins with the anniversaries of the deaths of a couple of prominent Southerners. It's hard to determine which was the more notable, though. Obviously, Elvis Presley dying in 1977 got more ink (and the good people at FTD had more orders for flowers to be delivered to Graceland than for any other event or place), and his effect on pop culture is incalculable, but in 1888, John Pemberton died in Atlanta, three years after inventing Coca-Cola. Memphians will note the anniversary with Elvis Week, but we don’t think Atlantans will be celebrating Pemberton Week, so Mr. Presley may get the nod.
But Elvis and Dr. Pemberton aren’t the only prominent folks who died on this date. In 1956, Bela Lugosi died. Lugosi was so identified with Count Dracula that he resented the way the role had typecast him, so it was odd that he chose to be buried in the Dracula cape he had worn on stage and screen. In 1948, baseball legend Babe Ruth died. Had he lived another six years, he might have made the cover of "Sports Illustrated," the first issue of which hit the newsstands in 1954.
In birthdays today, we note two creators and an icon (of sorts). In 1884, Hugo Gernsback was born. Gernsback is all but unknown today, but in the 1920s, he nurtured not only the genre of science fiction (which he called "scientifiction"), but also created what has come to be known as fandom by printing names and addresses of readers in his science fiction magazines. (Coincidentally, the World Science Fiction Convention opens tomorrow in Reno, NV.) 1892, Otto Messmer was born. Messmer was an artist and animator who may or may not have created Felix the Cat, who, until the advent of Mickey Mouse in the late 1920s, was the biggest animated star in movies. The icon is Fess Parker, who was born in 1924. In the 1950s, he played frontiersman and Congressman Davy Crockett (whose own birth in 1786 we note tomorrow) on television, causing a mania for coonskin caps. In the 60s, he played frontiersman and legislator Daniel Boone.
In the oddity file, we see that Chang and Eng Bunker, the original "Siamese Twins," arrived in Boston in 1829. Though they were joined at the sternum, the Bunkers married sisters and fathered 21 children between them. We needn't dwell on the details. And it's the 90th birthday of bohemian writer Charles Bukowski, who managed to turn a life of dissipation and alcohol into poetry.
Tuesday:
Last week, we mentioned that "The Wizard of Oz" had had its world premiere in Oconomowoc, WI. Well, on August 17, 1939, it finally reached New York, opening at the Capitol Theatre on Broadway. Speaking of things reaching the Big Apple, it was on this day in 1790, that the U.S. capital moved from New York to Philadelphia (the government would open shop in Washington DC in 1800.)
Speaking of things leaving New York, Robert Fulton's steamboat, The Clermont, left New York for Albany in 1807. (That route later became notorious in the early 20th century, as philandering husbands and wives used it to follow through on trysts. "Taking the night boat to Albany" became shorthand for having an affair.)
And speaking of illicit affairs, how could we forget that, on this day in 1893, Mae West was born? West was an actor an playwright who traded in the power of sex to scandalize, so much so that a number of her plays were shut down for their scandalous plots and she herself was arrested more than once.
Some musical events of note today. In 1954, Billy Murray died. Murray is all but unknown today, but he was a staggeringly popular recording artist in the first quarter of the 20th century, becoming the first person to sell a million records. In 1959, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" was released. It marked a new type of cool jazz that hadn't been widely heard before, and Miles struck gold, with the album being generally considered to the best-selling jazz album of all time. Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson will release an album of his arrangements of songs by George Gershwin today. It’s also the 27th anniversary of the death of George’s brother Ira, though we don't know if the though of Wilson messing with the Gershwin songbook is what killed him.
Wednesday:
Today is a day for all types of women's events. In 1587, Virginia Dare became the first child of European parents to be born on American soil. She was born in the Roanoake colony in North Carolina, an outpost from which every resident mysteriously vanished soon after. In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women the right to vote. And today, the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders will release a swimsuit calendar. Whether this is a step forward or backward, we leave to you, dear reader.
In three completely unrelated events, we note than, in 1227, Genghis Khan, who created the largest empire the world has ever known, died; that today is International Homeless Animals Day; and that an expedition to create the first 3D map of the wreckage site of RMS Titanic will begin.
Thursday:
Not a good day for witches or those suspected of being witches. In 1612, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, were put on trial, for allegedly practicing witchcraft, and eighty years later, in 1692 in Salem, MA, one woman and four men ere executed after being convicted of witchcraft.
Following the death of Elvis earlier in the week, the death of Groucho Marx in 1977 didn't cause much of a ripple, but to fans of classic comedy, it was a bigger event.
Thanks to the efforts of birthday boy Philo T. Farnsworth (1906), who invented the television, news travels faster than ever -- or certainly faster than it did in 1848, when the news of the California Gold Rush finally reached the New York Herald, a mere seven months after gold had been discovered. Had airplanes been around in those days (and today is National Aviation Day, to commemorate the 1871 birth of Orville Wright), the east coast might have gotten the word sooner, though.
Friday:
Speaking of getting the word late, it was on this day in 1866 that President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, a mere 16 months after the surrender at Appomattox.
(We might also mention in this context that in 1858, Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution in "The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London," alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory, though there are still some folks who either haven’t gotten that news, or who choose to ignore it.)
In musical anniversaries, in 1882 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" debuted in Moscow and in 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan’s "The Mikado," opened in New York.
Some sports stuff today, too. It's the 90th birthday of the National Football League, founded in Canton, OH, as well as the being the openings of the World Series of both mahjong and Little League baseball. A less happy reminder of football also occurs today, when "The Tillman Story" opens; it's a documentary investigating the life and the cover-up of the death of NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman.
On a (much) lighter note, a "Twilight" convention opens today in Parsippany, NJ. Why Parsippany, we have no idea.
Saturday:
In 1878, the American Bar Association was founded. We'd make a joke here, but we don't want to get sued.
Speaking of theft, it was on this day in 1911 that the Mona Lisa was stolen by an employee of the Louvre Museum (There must be something about art thefts this weekend. Sunday is the sixth anniversary of the thefts of two paintings by Edvard Munch from the Munch Museum in Oslo.)
And speaking of exaggeration, it's Wilt Chamberlain’s birthday. Wilt was born in 1936, and while he was one of the most prolific scorers in NBA history, he also claimed to be one of the most prolific scorers off the court, boasting in his autobiography that he had slept with over 20,000 women (nearly as many as his 31,419 career points).
In other birthdays today, piano legend Count Basie, who lead the swingingest big band ever, was born in 1904; Oscar-winning animation director Friz Freleng was born in 1906; Christopher Robin Milne, who inspired (and resented) the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was born in 1920; and in 1938, country singer Kenny Rogers was born. We're not quite sure when his face was born, however.
And on this day in 1959, Hawaii became a state -- just in time to either be or not be the birthplace of Barack Obama.
Sunday:
In 1485, King Richard III was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Shakespeare's play of 100 or so years later painted him as an utter villain, but contemporary historians have rehabilitated him somewhat. Guess history will also be written by the victors.
Speaking of writers, we close the week by noting that, in 1893, Dorothy Parker was born. Mrs. Parker was generally considered to be the wittiest woman in America in the 1920s and '30s, with a pen dipped in poison and a tongue to match. In her later years, she tried to renounce her fame and wit, but any woman who could say, "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised" had something going on.
Earlier, we mentioned how Hugo Gernsback more or less created science fiction fandom, and one of those early fans celebrates his 90th birthday today: Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote more than just science fiction, but that's what he's best known for. "If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder," he once said. Over nearly a century, that"s a heck of a lot of wonder.
See you next time!
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Sure, they look cute now, but they'll be
embarrassed about it once they grow up
(Photo by USACE Europe District) |
When I first heard that Quincy Jones was going to re-record the 1985 song "We Are The World" and donate proceeds to Haitian relief, I had a flashback to the '80s. It was slightly scary, but not for the usual reasons. Although the original Live Aid song, recorded for USA for Africa, is memorable for its catchy tune and stellar group of performers, what it reminds me of is having to sing it at a sixth-grade assembly. For many of the kids and teachers, it was quite a production; they even held auditions for solo parts. The cheese factor was very high, but I'm sure the show managed to leave many parents teary-eyed.
This got me wondering what my fellow Yahoo!s had to perform in their schooldays at the behest of well-intentioned adults, and whether there might be any incriminating photos or video hanging around. Here's what they remember:
Sarah: My school did an "American Music Retrospective" that was framed as an episode of "American Bandstand" (this was 1996, so no "TRL" yet). We sang everything from "Rock Around the Clock" to "California Dreaming" to "Flashdance… What a Feeling" (how the latter counts as great music is beyond me). The scariest part was when one of the teachers came out dressed like John Travolta and did the "Stayin' Alive" dance. I'm still trying to wipe that vision from my memory.
Sebastian: Reciting Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" speech from "The Merchant of Venice" in the seventh grade in front of the whole class, after a large bout of insomnia. Everyone had to do it. Plus, it was a girl's speech! Embarrassing!
(P.S. for Shakespeare nerds: the speech falleth like sack of hammers thereupon, thus interrupting the flow of the play. Critics, scholars and other bores are still scratching their heads as to what purpose Shakespeare saw inserting a long, morality-soaked speech in the middle of continuous action.)
Mike: I think my only on-stage performance was as a dancing clown in our horrible fifth-grade version of "The Nutcracker." It was pretty friggin' embarrassing. [Editor's note: the video is not of Mike but we sure wish it was!]
Mitzi: Our fifth-grade class had to put on a performance of "The Nutcracker Suite." Self-conscious boys and girls in leotards and tutus -- oh, the humanity!
Dave: It must have been sometime in the mid '60s. We were doing a Christmas pageant (not a holiday pageant -- that's how long ago it was), and I was in a skit called "Christmas on Holiday Island," or some such. I was one of a group of illiterate savages to whom Christmas would be explained.
Sometime in the middle of the skit, there was a huge, sudden burst of laughter. I looked around to see what had happened (even at that tender age, I knew the writing was terrible), and noticed that my crepe paper loincloth had pooled around my ankles.
Fortunately, I'd had the sense (and modesty) to be wearing Bermuda shorts under the loincloth, but it didn't help my embarrassment at not only making a spectacle of myself, but of ruining the skit (an admittedly low bar to clear). I pulled up the loincloth and finished, leaving to a nice round of applause.
Michelle: My first thought was the embarrassment of playing "Eye of the Tiger" in band class (so, out of tune, at about ¾ the correct speed), but I've come around on that and now think it's pretty hilarious. More embarrassing was an act that I wasn't roped into, but chose to do: a costumed lip-synch performance of "Rock Me Amadeus" in front of my entire class (or was it the whole school?) at a talent show. I'm sure it was a sight to behold, but thankfully no one got it on video.
More accounts of childhood command performances tomorrow. Don't worry -- they aren't all horror stories!
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The issue that said they'd found
Hitler's diaries. Right after this,
they bought the Brooklyn Bridge
|
They say that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." But whoever said that had obviously never been a writer or an artist. Forging a great book is hardly a compliment -- even if the copy itself is really, really good.
Perhaps the most notorious forgery in the history was the "lost" Shakespearean play "Vortigern and Rowena." In the late 1790s, British writer Samuel Ireland announced his discovery of a large trunkful of previously unknown papers belonging to William Shakespeare. Many of the documents were so extraordinary they bordered on the ridiculous: a letter from Queen Elizabeth I ensuring Shakespeare of her favor and Shakespeare's own profession of his Protestantism. The most famous theater producer of the time, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, obtained the rights to have "Vortigern and Rowena" performed. Its opening night was a disaster. The play was so terrible, theater patrons laughed the whole way through, and it closed the same day. At the same time, the renowned Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone published a book which debunked every document Ireland had produced based on handwriting and spelling analysis. Eventually, Ireland's son, William, confessed to forging all of the Shakespeare papers in an effort to gain prominence for his oblivious father. The two received the fame they had always wanted -- but certainly not in the way either of them imagined.
While Ireland was relatively small-time, Thomas J. Wise was one of the 20th century's greatest book collectors. In fact, he was considered England's preeminent bibliographer, and was friends with such great minds as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. But in 1934, a pair of young researchers exposed Wise as a fraud. Many of his "first editions" were anything but: he had been selling and collecting worthless copies for years. Wise never served any prison time, but wound up spending the last years of his life in seclusion -- with the company of only his books.
These crimes against literature haven't been perpetrated only by the British, though. Several Americans were imprisoned attempting to pass off fake articles of Americana as the real thing. Two different men -- Joseph Cosey during World War I and Charles Weisberg in the 1930s -- tried to sell forgeries of letters written by Walt Whitman, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Both were imprisoned, but Cosey got the last laugh. Today, ironically, his forged letters are collector's items in their own right -- though certainly not as valuable as the real thing!
More recently, a German magazine got duped when they attempted to publish what they believed to be the authentic diaries of Adolf Hitler. In 1983, a journalist for Stern Magazine claimed to have received Hitler's personal diaries from an anonymous source. Experts (who were permitted to view the documents only briefly) vouched for their veracity, but further review proved that not only were the diaries forgeries, they weren't even very good ones. Eventually, the journalist who "discovered" the diaries was found to have been working with a German forger named Konrad Kujau to produce the forgeries. Both received prison time, but Kujau came out of the incident as something of a celebrity, and made a career out of selling copies of famous paintings.
So, whether it was prestige, money, or just the thrill of the con that motivated these forgers, we can't forget that they were all caught eventually -- even in times without forensics or photographic technology. So props are due to the literary detectives who brought these crimes to light -- Thursday Next ain't got nothing on them.
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Archived under: Adolph Hitler, Books, Collectibles, Crime, History, Literature, Plagiarism, William Shakespeare |
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Will Shakespeare -- too sexy
for his collar |
The perception of William Shakespeare as a sex symbol has been something largely postulated by books and movies. On screen, Shakespeare has been played by such hunks as Joseph Fiennes, Colin Firth, Rupert Graves, and, um, Tim Curry. But in real life, the only accurate images of the Bard depict a chubby, balding man with a penchant for bad facial hair (though not as bad as others). This is a guy who looks like he spends his nights with a quill and parchment -- not Gwyneth Paltrow.
But earlier this year, the discovery of a previously-unknown painting of Shakespeare changed the way many imagined the world’s greatest writer. Well-dressed with thick hair, an aquiline nose, and striking eyes, this Shakespeare is definitely attractive, even by 21st century standards. (One could even argue he bears some resemblance to the aforementioned Mr. Fiennes.) The authentication of the painting is still on-going, but the proper authorities seem convinced; so much so that the newly found painting is scheduled to go on display today (the 445th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the 393rd anniversary of his death) at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
So which Shakespeare is the real one? The nerdy writer or the charming courtier? Like so many other mysteries and theories involving Shakespeare's life, this is one question that is probably best left to the imagination -- not to mention all the future books and movies to come.
Suggested Sites...
- Royal Shakespeare Company - world-famous Shakespeare theater ensemble, whose previous members include Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and former Shakespeares Joseph Fiennes, Colin Firth, and Tim Curry.
- Folger Shakespeare Library - American institution dedicated to studying the works of the Bard.
- In Search of Shakespeare - PBS special about efforts to discover the man behind the myth.
- Soul of the Age - new biography by renowned Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate.
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