James Wallace

Infographic with talk title, time & date, and a headshot photo of Professor Grace Ioppolo

Monday 27 October, at 6.30pm online

INTRODUCING PHILIP HENSLOWE'S ROSE

Join Professor Grace Ioppolo, @profshakespeare.bsky.social, Founder & Director of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, as she examines the business partnerships that built The Rose.

More info & book: bit.ly/4nMtaBv

Infographic for the online talk, called 'Page of Plymouth: Ben Jonson & Thomas Dekker's Lost Play', with the time and date – 6.30pm 13 Oct – and photos of Helen Chaloner and David Prescott, the two speakers.

Our new season of online talks starts this Monday, 13 Oct

Discover the lost domestic tragedy Page of Plymouth, & the new @literatureworks.bsky.social project centred on it, looking at theatre, culture & narratives of ordinary lives in Plymouth then & now

More info & book: bit.ly/3WvdoyH

[thread]👇

This work contains the only known bookplate illustrated by artist & author Mervyn Peake. Designed for a surgeon who operated on his family, in lieu of fees. It depicts the 3 little bones of the middle ear

#books #antiquarian #medicine #bookplate #histmed bit.ly/4pSUgbo

Photograph of grand staircase stretching away from the camera, with decorative metal handrails and a patterned carpet.

In Bradford for Widescreen Weekend and staying at the grand but somewhat faded Midland Hotel where, I am perversely delighted to discover, in 1905 Sir Henry Irving breathed his last on this staircase. His manager, Bram Stoker, was in attendance.

Sir Henry’s body was whisked down to London by train, and the sculptor Sir George Frampton was employed to make a death mask.

I’ve traced 9 copies of it - back in 2019 I bought one of them at auction that had belonged to the Irving family.

It hangs on the wall and is looking over me now.

Family Fortunes meme with Les Dennis and... Keir Starmer. "We asked how do you fix the cost of living crisis... You said Digital IDs..."

#Starmer
#BritCard

“BritCard?”

10 Reasons Why the Iambic Pentameter is Not Like the Human Heartbeat On an idea about poetry that needs to die

'And that underlying rhythm probably sounds quite familiar: it’s like a heartbeat. Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter because it sounds very close to natural, heart-felt speech': argh, this kind of thing (from Shakespeare's Globe website) drives me mad: someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/10-reasons...

Interesting, and that would fit, with him not master to just one but working across the company with any / all apprentices where necessary, especially when they had extended scenes all together without their masters - for example in Dream, where, as its author, he would be best placed to do that.

Related: as well as being an actor & playwright, I often wonder if he took particular responsibility for training / directing the younger actors in the plays he had written, so took roles that meant he was either acting with them, or free to rehearse them.

Older actors could look after themselves.

Infographic, with date, times & ticket prices (per play: £10 to take part, £5 to watch) in modern red type, together with a jumble of the titles in old fashioned black type taken from the original printings of the six plays in the Readathon: Twelfth Night, The Alchemist, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, The Massacre at Paris, and The Comedy of Errors.

Sat 20 Sept, 12noon-8.30pm
THE 8th ROSE READATHON

Our hugely popular fund-raiser returns!

Choose to watch or take part, as we gallop through 1hr versions of six plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe & Jonson.

Roles drawn from a hat & scripts provided.

More info & book: www.roseplayhouse.org.uk/whats-on

🤞

Linked to yesterday's OTD post, this is terrific - thanks @jameswallace.bsky.social

Here he is on the cover of The Sphinx magazine in 1944 (for sale on eBay)

YouTube video by Christian de MIEGEVILLE Cantu Magician -Politiquerias- Laurel and Hardy 1931

Have you seen this?

Cantu (the first magician to make doves appear, apparently) eight years earlier, doing part of his act in Politiquerías, the Spanish version of Laurel and Hardy’s Chickens Come Home (1931).

m.youtube.com/watch?v=qIOD...

4K Wicker Man Box Set… 👌

Star Trek's Intellectual Integrity As I write this, the first three episodes of the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) have been released.

Saw this and thought of you:

alvarozinosamaro.substack.com/p/star-treks...

🎵 Shitler
has only got one ball
Don junior
has two but ve-ry small
Ivanka’s
are two great clankers
But poor old Eric
has no tes-tic-les 🎵

fyi @mathewlyons.bsky.social

Production photo from a modern revival?

Obvious choice: Sejanus

(William Houston; Will & Peter de Jersey. Dir. Greg Doran 2005 RSC)

What’s the period covered?

Glad you finally managed to get hold of it

The Rose was the first theatre on Bankside, but the very first south of the Thames was built a mile away in Elephant & Castle in the mid-1570s.

Henslowe records receipts for 10 performances there in 1594, just before it closed.

Find out about the Newington Butts Playhouse @reedproject.bsky.social

A photograph of the archaeological remains of The Rose Playhouse, currently preserved underwater in a very wide and tall basement underneath an office block, looking from the south to the north, with illuminated rope lights in red outlining the position of the inner and outer walls of the seating galleries that ring the yard, with two ropes of blue lights on the north side of the yard, marking the front of the stage in 1587, then pushed back a few feet when The Rose was expanded in 1592/3. The modern day raised viewing platform is just visible at the top right of the photograph. Light from the viewing platform is reflected on the surface of the water.

A photograph of the archaeological remains of The Rose Playhouse, currently preserved underwater in a very wide and tall basement underneath an office block, looking down from the modern day viewing platform across the flooded space east to west. Illuminated rope lights in red just underneath the surface of the water outline the position of the inner and outer walls of the seating galleries that ring the yard. Immediately in front of the viewer are two nearly-parallel ropes of blue lights marking the front of the trapezoid-shaped stage in 1587, when the playhouse was first built, and then pushed back a few feet when The Rose was expanded in 1592/3.

We've replaced the rope-lights outlining The Rose's archaeological remains, currently preserved underwater.

The red lights mark the inner & outer walls of the seating galleries.

The blue lights show the front of the stage in 1587, and then pushed back in 1592/3.

Looking south-north, & east-west.

You and @andykesson.bsky.social there nine years ago - 8 June 2016

It’s public already, though still much I want add, so likewise if you have any thoughts or suggestions to send back my way, they’d be gratefully received!

(I’ve been building The Rose’s new website, and have been working on it this afternoon, so this kind of thing is on my mind.)

Looks good (having only viewed it on the mobile site). I’d suggest having more buttons that link to other pages directly on the Home / Landing page, so that it’s more of an illustrated contents page to easily initially navigate from.

I've found a jester! I HAVE FOUND A JESTER 🥸

David Lynch’s personal theramin, recently sold at auction for $10,400