What I’m Reading This Weekend … 04.09.26
MC Bradbrook, Elizabethan Stage Conditions (1968)
One of the reasons I love going to Shakespeare’s Globe (or watching a play performed outdoors) is to see what they do with the space.
I’m acutely conscious that the plays were written for performance when things were very different: the technologies available for ‘special effects’; the geography of the stage; and the relationship between actors and audience, too.
So far this slim volume, which I picked up for next to nothing at a National Trust second-hand bookshop, has launched into an overview of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism.
Handy, but not quite what I expected, yet …
Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate (2012)
This week’s fiction choice – and yes, I usually have at least one of each on the boil at a time – is partly an attempt to address ‘a gap in my reading’. It’s my first Jeanette Winterson … I know.
So an unfamiliar author, but a familiar-ish subject: the Pendle Witch Trials in 1612. Having lived in Lancaster for a while, the area’s one I know and love, and I’m interested enough in witchcraft in the Early Modern to have read James I’s (in)famous Daemonologie (1597).
Winterson’s style is interesting. A Guardian review of the book says:
The sentences are short, truthful – and dreadful.1
… and this was the first thing I noticed about the writing. I’m slightly bemused by the prospect of Shakespeare appearing in the book (Winterson tells us beforehand) – I don’t usually enjoy such cameos.
And, of course, the thing about this book is that the destination is known. When you meet some of these characters, you know exactly what fate awaits them. So it’s all going to be about ‘the journey’ in this one …
Over to you!
Have you read one of these?
What are YOU reading this weekend?
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