Macbethage

Macbeth at BAM was just about adequate; some good touches in the staging, and not bad acting all round, but they were doing something with the line delivery that makes me crazy, it is the regardless-of-syntax pause before an important word ("ravelled--SLEEVE"), and there was also something very ill-advised going on with the accents: at some point someone must have had a theory, but there was no sign in evidence of a coherent rationale for why one character spoke officer-class English-accented English and another working-class, one Scottish of one stamp and one Scottish of another....

The dead speak

Caleb Crain revisits the to me utterly fascinating question of how John Keats actually talked.

(This post is a nice small example of how Caleb uses his blog to organize and annotate his more official publications.)

Also recommended: Lynda Mugglestone's Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. And there is a magical essay by Peter Holland, "Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick," in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses.

Bonus link: Marco Roth has a really lovely piece at n+1 about Caleb's self-published collection of blog posts The Wreck of the Henry Clay.

Eye vs. ear

From Henry James' preface to the New York Edition revision of The Golden Bowl:

It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of 'poetry' - to apply that term in its largest literary sense - hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva-voce treatment. We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure - which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded.