QUOTES: 12/30/2014

MIKE BARTLETT: "How I Wrote King Charles III"

"There are few stage directions in Shakespeare because the verse serves that purpose. The dramatic action of the lines is related to the physical action required. And the audience is co-opted, part of the drama: it can become a crowd, a mob, the entire English population, or, during a soliloquy, the brain of the character. So I understood that Shakespeare's verse was never concerned with any pure authorial voice, but was instead a vast multiplicity of viewpoints, a rough and tumble performance text."




RUTH GOODMAN: "How to Be a Victorian"


[Goodman] is, she says, interested not in the kings and princes and politicians, “who honestly bore me a little,” but in the ordinary Victorian — “you and me.” This book is over 400 pages of you and me. If you want to understand how Victorians thought, you read Walter E. Houghton’s classic “The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870.” But if you want to know how they looked, sounded, felt and smelled, there is no better guide than this one. Goodman likes to get down in the muck — and there’s plenty of it in 19th-century Britain.