As the Wheel of Fortune spins again, I am attempting to shake off private blues to regain control. Privacy proves baffling in that respect: control. Privacy appears to offer control, but in today’s climate it takes plenty away too. After a grilling yesterday in the use of ‘motive’ and ‘intention’, here lies a drop in the ocean on ‘exposure’ and ‘control’.
"A Mirror Up To Nature": David Tennant in the RSC's Hamlet (2009)
Although not wanting to abscond from Roxette’s ‘air of silence’ previously, I am inspired to move from Sweden to Denmark, and from Lear to another fine play, Hamlet. Despite largely avoiding Shakespeare at undergraduate level, I taught this play, new to me then, to first-year undergraduates in a very nervous first term in Geneva. This production, that I watched on the strength of the main actor above any other specific merits, alerted me not only to the skills I have picked up since, but also a new sense of seeing theatre. Between theatre and film, between traditional and contemporary, between stolid culture and celebrity impasse, this version struck an excellent compromise for 2009. I felt like I was watching something unique – that kept me attached.
This Hamlet of 2009 is to tragedy what Shakespeare in Love of 1998 was to comedy (despite the latter, ironically, portraying a tragedy itself). A play is a play, a king is a thing; a stage (all the world) is a stage, and has its stage limitations. For all the intricacies not necessarily visible to the average human eye, stage productions can just be too alike. For classics of Shakespeare’s corpus, played endlessly at the finest theatres by the finest players, it has been time to bring the imagination alive again.
It is certainly no longer golden.
[Written in script one month ago.] I have managed it. I think. Through the trials and perils of 2009, I have managed to keep my mouth shut.
The real ‘temptation’ of the present is no longer the stray drink or takeaway (for this commentator, coffee), but new forms of social networking. Whilst I appreciate the social functions of these sites, I cannot understand the prerogatives for documenting daily existence, the new staple of daily existence.
Facebook and Twitter are as irrefutable in 2009 as publishing has been in previous centuries: their service is to disseminate one’s voice. Unlike LiveJournal or alternative blogging services, Facebook and Twitter cannot pass as serving any real diurnal function; their output can only be ephemeral and serve the trigger-happy. Publishing tends to imply a confidence in one’s own voice ~ that which many Facebook users exude several times daily. To some extent, that is all well and good, but the technicalities of authorship transfer across to give a more condemning view.
After a day like today, recent goblin reminiscence and all, the search for “taking nothing seriously” (relating to this post) rounds itself here. I’m still a boy at heart who finds the childish banal so very funny. Perhaps that is why seventeenth-century literature appeals so much.
The legend, Matt Richings (left). His fault, as great laughter evolves in pairs.
There are many precedents to this kind of humour in English Civil War material. They come in fascinating shapes, forms, and stories. Continue reading ‘Body Schema’
It is a fruitful time to be studying the intellectual history of privacy. Privacy has been connected with print and politics since the seventeenth century, and has become a permanent fixture in current news.
The scandal over MPs’ expenses, which has dominated headlines over a good number of weeks, has posed many moral questions about the jurisdiction of public and private information. Even without the revelation of expenses claims, the attempts to hinder the release of members’ claims, and the vilification of those who supported the suppression, (actions which proved the downfall of speaker Michael Martin), may have been evidence enough that there was something rather dreadful to hide.
Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack, approaching 40 years of service, remarked that “The times that we are living in are unprecedented as far as Parliament is concerned. What is at stake is the institution of Parliament and its integrity”. We witness a brand of secrecy so corrupt that the only way of maintaining any faith in parliament as a ruling body is to preserve that which is already unknown to the public.
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