Eggplant.place

140d

For Shakespeare’s (probable) birthday: Edwin Morgan’s “Instructions to an Actor”, from Collected Poems (Carcanet 2012)

“This single poem gets, via the heart of all theatre, to the heart of the communal in all the arts, and to the heart of form, the heart of voice and silence and to the heart of a kind of life that will never actually stop.”
—Ali Smith, in From Saturn to Glasgow: fifty favourite poems by Edwin Morgan

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #theatre #Shakespeare #ShakespeareDay

Edwin Morgan
Instructions to an Actor

Now, boy, remember this is the great scene.
You’ll stand on a pedestal behind a curtain,
the curtain will be drawn, and then you don’t move
for eighty lines; don’t move, don’t speak, don’t breathe.
I’ll stun them all out there, I’ll scare them,
make them weep, but it depends on you.
I warn you eighty lines is a long time,
but you don’t breathe, you’re dead,
you’re a dead queen, a statue,
you’re dead as stone, new-carved,
new-painted and the paint not dry
– we’ll get some red to keep your lip shining –
and you’re a mature woman, you’ve got dignity,
some beauty still in middle age, and
you’re kind and true, but you’re dead,
your husband thinks you’re dead,
the audience thinks you’re dead,
and you don’t breathe, boy, I say
you don’t even blink for eighty lines,
if you blink you’re out!
Fix your eye on something and keep watching it.

ALT

Practise when you get home. It can be done.
And you move at last – music’s the cue.
When you hear a mysterious solemn jangle
of instruments, make yourself ready.
Five lines more, you can lift a hand.
It may tingle a bit, but lift it –
slow, slow –
O this is where I hit them
right between the eyes, I’ve got them now –
I’m making the dead walk –
you move a foot, slow, steady, down,
you guard your balance in case you’re stiff,
you move, you step down, down from the pedestal,
control your skirt with one hand, the other hand
you now hold out –
O this will melt their hearts if nothing does –
to your husband who wronged you long ago
and hesitates in amazement
to believe you are alive.
Finally he embraces you, and there’s nothing
I can give you to say, boy,
but you must show that you have forgiven him.
Forgiveness, that’s the thing. It’s like a second life.
I know you can do it. – Right then, shall we try?

ALT

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140d

“William Shakespeare was a powerful influence on Robert Burns… I count as many as 16 references to Shakespeare’s plays in his poetry”

—Prof Gerard Carruthers on the links & commonalities between Robert Burns & William Shakespeare

https://theconversation.com/haggis-neeps-and-soliloquys-the-bonds-that-tie-robert-burns-and-shakespeare-53578/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #drama #RobertBurns #18thcentury #romanticism #Shakespeare #ShakespeareDay

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140d

When the sun was white and wintry and drained of energy
Macbeth met the witches under the rim of the sky…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “Macbeth and the Witches”
published in DEER ON THE HIGH HILLS (Carcanet, 2021)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800170940/deer-on-the-high-hills/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Shakespeare #ShakespeareDay #Macbeth

Macbeth and the Witches
by Iain Crichton Smith

When the sun was white and wintry and drained of energy
Macbeth met the witches under the rim of the sky.
Why did you confirm my evil, he said.

And the witches who were lighting thorns in the cold winter said,
There is a play that one plays when the summer is over
and you happened to be one of the cards in our hand,

a deformed king with a coat too large for him
and a crown that sizzled in the white wintry sky.
These things are after all not important

except to those who suffer, who are not important.
Feeling belongs to the spring and the ignorance of lovers.
Here in this wood it is a question of passing the time,

and the abstract intellect constructs dramas
with a queen and a pawn and the immortal joker
who faces two ways at the frosty January gates.

Let be, let be, it was quite a nice structure.
And truth after all can be played with under the sun
which is fading slowly towards a renaissance of leaves.

Come, join us, join us, at the unimportant edge of things
wearing your coat of blood with the hole in the breast.
This is the west. The east has innocent wings.

ALT

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139d

There was this king sitted in his garden all alane
When his brother in his ear poured a little bit o’ henbane,
Stole his brother’s crown and his money and his widow;
But the dead king walked and got his son and said, “Hey listen, kiddo…”

—Adam McNaughtan sings “Oor Hamlet: : a tragedy in 3 minutes”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPclD-m64Tg

#Scottish #literature #song #humour #Shakespeare #ShakespeareDay #Hamlet

Edited 139d ago

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