Shakespeare

[Elgarian Redux]

And, I am prompted to slip The Tempest right back into the tray.

You could do worse, Karl ....

I'll post an image of Caliban's Garden below. It employs collage (a reproduction of a 16th-century engraving) superimposed on a charcoal drawing. The artist is Mike Healey, whose work has enriched my imaginative life for over 25 years.

And here's an extract from an essay I published on 'myth and the imagination' in 2007 (9 years after the exhibition, Tempest mania was still going strong for me, as you see.) The text is a response to having lived with Caliban's Garden during that time (the picture forms the centrepiece to our Tempest display).

Caliban's Garden

We see a prominent foreground figure, set against an organic backdrop. Caliban's presence in the picture is inescapably physical, biological, creaturely. He assumes a monstrous aspect because he's presented to us naked and raw, a Renaissance anatomical diagram, clinically drawn and superimposed on the lush background. His garden is literally, we might think, the rampant sprouting vegetable world that entangles him; that gave birth to him; that will reclaim him in the end.

Yet this is the creature who in The Tempest, against all our expectations, against all probability, suddenly reveals the nature of his inner life:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

These words change everything. The picture is transformed by them. The garden is no longer the source of Caliban; he is the source of it. This is the garden of his most unsuspected and intimate desires; the garden of his imagination, of his hopes and dreams. Caliban is enslaved by his physical appetites and needs. He's violent, lustful, gullible, and vengeful – yet he's also haunted and driven by his richly fertile, imaginative, spiritual response to the world.

    This picture, coupled with Shakespeare's words, makes one of the most profound statements about the human condition that I know. We're all Calibans, struggling to come to terms with our physicality and its limitations, buffeted by the relentless assaults, paradoxes, and conflicts of the material world. But also, as Calibans, we have our gardens of imagination, full of noises, sounds and sweet airs. Their roots go deep. We draw spiritual nourishment from them to fuel our response to the world. We write poems about it; we make pictures of it. Most importantly, we mythicize it...

[Karl Henning]

You could do worse, Karl ....

I'll post an image of Caliban's Garden below. It employs collage (a reproduction of a 16th-century engraving) superimposed on a charcoal drawing. The artist is Mike Healey, whose work has enriched my imaginative life for over 25 years.

And here's an extract from an essay I published on 'myth and the imagination' in 2007 (9 years after the exhibition, Tempest mania was still going strong for me, as you see.) The text is a response to having lived with Caliban's Garden during that time (the picture forms the centrepiece to our Tempest display).

Beautiful, friend, thank 'ee! And indeed, last night, the line "when I waked, I cried to dream again" especially shone a light upon me.

[Elgarian Redux]

Beautiful, friend, thank 'ee! And indeed, last night, the line "when I waked, I cried to dream again" especially shone a light upon me.

Your thoughts have shone plenty of light on me over the years, old chap.

I'm looking around to see what photos I've got lurking here. Here's Ferdinand, below (a pencil drawing). Each work was exhibited with a quotation from the play - not because the picture illustrated the text, but rather so that text and image worked together. I've tried to preserve that multifaceted character by labelling each work with the corresponding quotation on the dining room walls.

The quotation in this case is:

I am, in my condition, a prince, Miranda; I do think, a king.

The image (I imagine) tries to show Ferdinand in a state of flux, with a sense of potential corruption. Prince? Or King? And if King ... then what?

The pictures don't offer an interpretation of the play, as such, but rather provide a kind of parallel visual commentary with a surrealist flavour.

[Karl Henning]

Your thoughts have shone plenty of light on me over the years, old chap.

I'm looking around to see what photos I've got lurking here. Here's Ferdinand, below (a pencil drawing). Each work was exhibited with a quotation from the play - not because the picture illustrated the text, but rather so that text and image worked together. I've tried to preserve that multifaceted character by labelling each work with the corresponding quotation on the dining room walls.

The quotation in this case is:

I am, in my condition, a prince, Miranda; I do think, a king.

The image (I imagine) tries to show Ferdinand in a state of flux, with a sense of potential corruption. Prince? Or King? And if King ... then what?

The pictures don't offer an interpretation of the play, as such, but rather provide a kind of parallel visual commentary with a surrealist flavour.

Love the tone and shading. My impulse purchase last night is the 2010 film with Helen Mirren as Prospero. Will report. One of my favorite Library people tells me that I can stream the 1979 film, if I can find the Roku jigger I speculatively purchased some time ago, and figure out how it works.

[Karl Henning]

And, the next play I've kind of felt it's time I got to know it: The Winter's Tale.

[Elgarian Redux]

Love the tone and shading. My impulse purchase last night is the 2010 film with Helen Mirren as Prospero. Will report. One of my favorite Library people tells me that I can stream the 1979 film, if I can find the Roku jigger I speculatively purchased some time ago, and figure out how it works.

What's a Roku jigger, Karl? Is it the sort of thing that sneaks away and hides under the bed?

[Karl Henning]

What's a Roku jigger, Karl? Is it the sort of thing that sneaks away and hides under the bed?

It may as well have, for all the use I've not made of't.... it connects, methinks, to the TV via the HDMI slot, probably connects to WiFi, and may possibly revolutionize my telly experience.

[Elgarian Redux]

It may as well have, for all the use I've not made of't.... it connects, methinks, to the TV via the HDMI slot, probably connects to WiFi, and may possibly revolutionize my telly experience.

Ah - this brings clarity. I had an image of a little furry creature that jumps up and down a lot.

[Karl Henning]

Ah - this brings clarity. I had an image of a little furry creature that jumps up and down a lot.

And on a frankly trivial note: In the Firesign Theatre's Holmes spoof, The Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, one character is a businessman with a pignut plantation and a pig-oil beer brewery. (A Chicago mobster observes, "this pig-oil beer runs through you like a hot car." So I am delighted at last to learn whence the Firesign pignut came.

[Karl Henning]

And, the next play I've kind of felt it's time I got to know it: The Winter's Tale.

This was (in addition to the interest of the play itself, of course) a good mental exercise for me. I'm out of practice approaching the plays with which I am not already familiar. (I wasn't yet familiar with The Tempest, either, and why I plugged right into that one were an interesting q.) At one point, my ear so lulled by the environment of the language, I might almost have nodded off. The production itself was a bit of a hodgepodge, or, that was my impression. I don't mean that derogatorily. That aspect might have made it more of a challenge for me to get an overall sense of the dramatis personæ (see "good mental exercise" above.) Were I more of a critic I might point at this or that element to serve a thesis that it is not one of the best plays, perhaps. But instead I found it engagingly entertaining, and isn't that the point?

[Elgarian Redux]

I'm going to continue harping on for a little while longer about The Tempest - or rather, Mike Healey's surrealist interpretations of the play.

I said that Caliban's Garden was the centrepiece of one wall of our dining room. On an adjacent wall is another magnificent centrepiece: Prospero's Library. Mike Healey came from a strong background in theatre and his artworks inspired by The Tempest are often theatrical in character, including several remarkable 3-dimensional 'stage sets'. Prospero's Library is one of these. Behind the frame is a box about 2 ft high and maybe 5 inches deep, creating a space into which he builds his strange constructions using reproductions of renaissance engravings, often involving a certain subversion of traditional perspective. One can explore this curiously magical space for considerable time.

It's very hard to photograph clearly, but I've had a shot, and here it is. It was accompanied in the exhibition by the quotation:  My Library was dukedom large enough, which I've retained.

[Karl Henning]

I'm going to continue harping on for a little while longer about The Tempest - or rather, Mike Healey's surrealist interpretations of the play.

I said that Caliban's Garden was the centrepiece of one wall of our dining room. On an adjacent wall is another magnificent centrepiece: Prospero's Library. Mike Healey came from a strong background in theatre and his artworks inspired by The Tempest are often theatrical in character, including several remarkable 3-dimensional 'stage sets'. Prospero's Library is one of these. Behind the frame is a box about 2 ft high and maybe 5 inches deep, creating a space into which he builds his strange constructions using reproductions of renaissance engravings, often involving a certain subversion of traditional perspective. One can explore this curiously magical space for considerable time.

It's very hard to photograph clearly, but I've had a shot, and here it is. It was accompanied in the exhibition by the quotation:  My Library was dukedom large enough, which I've retained.

Harp on, buddy!