Summer’s lease

Ah summer. Whether you revel in the heat* or like to sit indoors, wilting slightly, it is undeniably a different experience from the wintry wasteland we Englanders saw only in March.

Lie still and dream

I think Shakespeare must have been a man after my own heart. By which I don’t just mean the fart jokes and the humanity, but also that he was clearly a man who knew the splendid weirdness of dreams. Not everyone does – I have friends who swear they never dream, and those who think an unusual dream is one where they go back to school and have a history lesson – but taught by their old geography teacher (the horror!). I on the other hand belong to that group of humanity who nightly gets vivid technicolour spectacles which have all the plot of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and almost as many dinosaurs. And I suspect Shakespeare was too.

We are the only love-gods

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I feel it is very apt to share with you the single most important I have learnt from Shakespeare. Men, woo your ladies with wordplay.

To prophesy like the parrot

A strange and funny beast is prophecy. All the greats tell us this. And Shakespeare can’t let it well enough alone, like so many.

Eight maids a-milking

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,

Eight maids a-milking

Seven swans a-swimming

Six geese a-laying

Five gold rings,

Four calling birds, three French hens

Two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree

Well we could go down the maids route again – and god knows that once you start getting into it feels like almost everything Shakespeare wrote was in fact a double entendre – but instead the first thing I thought of was Lady Macbeth.

The faith they have in tennis

Wimbledon started today. Come on Tim!*

The tennis of Shakespeare’s time was an altogether different beast to lawn tennis. Played indoors in courts where pitched roofs are an integral part of the playing field, it is an incredibly fast game with the most complicated set of rules, which is why it is rarely filmed, and probably why lawn tennis is more popular in general.

Honest kindness

I was reading an article in the Guardian yesterday with claimed it was Kindness Day – I haven’t found anything else to verify it, but what a lovely and underrated thing to celebrate! Almost immediately my mind ran to Portia’s famous speech:

For he himself is subject to his birth

Happy possibly birthday William Shakespeare!

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Well I hope wherever you were you had a better view of the eclipse than I did. In Shakespeare’s time they were taken for signs and portents – now we know that they are just a beautiful coincidence of the fact that the sun is about 400 times bigger in diameter than the moon, but 400 times further away.

Of what colour it please God

I owe you all a review of Much Ado – which will come shortly, I promise!

In the meantime, I am out and about enjoying the wonderfully changeable British weather. Of course sunshine and rain in quick succession (and even sometimes together) can only mean one thing – rainbows – surely the most fleeting and most individual of weather. After all, as it’s made of light, it’s physically impossible for someone else to see the same rainbow you do…