Who’s faffing about here?

Now that’s what i love about returning to the homeland, the lizard-brained ear picks up on anomalies of language like when i were a child, a likkle boy. Faffing is one of those words. It could be spelt pfaff for all i know, i doubt it. Our family had a variant in the word fuffy, as in fuffy knickers, but let’s not go there.

Let us rather sit on the ground and talk of Kings and nascent texts like the Blind Beggar of Bednal Green with our Will Sharpei. Of heroic chaps dashing into burning buildings, the Globe in 1613 or the Fortune some 10 years later, to rescue playtexts and save the company of players from losing their livelihoods.

Life gets in the way of narrative, someone said. Another, we see and hear according to our tastes. Brian Schneider frames the text and brings difference to the old chestnut they came to hear not see a play. Prologues and epilogues seem rather to indicate, O revolution, they did both.

Reminded once again of my old drama teacher at Erindale College, John Astington. Who would have known such slight framed leotarded lycra to have contained such a scholar? My arrogance never, and to be reminded in a session on Elizabethan space and staging? Or how about the four main characters of Julius Caesar being tied to the four humours? Is that your idea Steve Sohmer?

Dong-Ha Seo (Andy) summarised a South Korean Officer’s masculine experience of Sh and the military incongruously teamed with Sandy Peterson’s feminist reading of Gender and Nation in Coriolanus. The day before a witty Andy Kessen explored the meta-narrative of Cupid in Lyly’s plays in the same reading room.

Spatial determinism is one more aspect fueling the arguments on the four meagre ‘as from life’ representations of Elizabethan theatres we have: namely the De Witt, the Red Bull, the Roxana and the Messalina engravings. Sara Thomson reviewed the scholarship leading to now from Victor Albright up to Andy Gurr.

Gwyllim Jones (think he might be from Welsh ancestry)? talked of the SFX guys of Elizabethan drama with the opening of J.C. at the Globe. Where are the records and reminiscences of those guys? Sure as shit they existed. And why doesn’t the renewed Globe use special effects to better effect?

And as agreed on by a plenary of scholars, why doesn’t the RSC admit that their education project is incredibly beholding to one of my own Shakespearean scholar heroes, Rex Gibson? RIP. Talk about appropriation.

For my paper it went surprisingly well. You can read it under pages. A Prosodic Odyssey: Sorting the Sonnets from page to stage.

There were two great plenary sessions. The first was from Gary Taylor on Middleton, the other SHakespeare, who described he and Sh as an All You can Eat, More Than You can Digest Buffet. Open 24.7.365. He also claimed the eunuch as the first cyborg. And how humans are the only living thing that accessorises. Plus the immortal comment when talking of Foucault, I’m spanked therefore I think.

The second was from four directors of the SHakespeare Institute: three ex- Stanley Wells, Peter Holland, Russel Jackson, and for the presentists, Kate McLuskie talking about where they are at in Sh. studies. Allerdyce Nicolls’ spirit may have been looking on bemused or befuddled.

Stanley did a plea for a partially real experience within a loosely connected collection of sonnets. Peter Holland took us online and into a second-life disaster. Russell Jackson, fresh from the Werewolf set, gave us some hearty laughs and a couple of ‘other shakespeare’ howlers at the Middleton canon recently fired. Kate McLuskie summed it all up as interrogating cultural value. The bottom line seemed to be that we are part of the continuum.

Thanks to Emily Burden and a great team working with her for providing an excellent forum and wonderful hospitality. Likewise to my congenial host Prezzers, many thanks. This briefest and highly personal trip through the sessions i attended cannot do justice to the efforts of all involved. If the others were as nervous as I was,

‘y’have passed a hell of time’ Q120.