I haven't been blogging much - I haven't really known what to do with this blog since the rebrand of Beyond Shakespeare and I'm effectively in isolation. Everyone will soon be in isolation. And that's fine, I don't get out much. But all I've got now is to edit things for the podcast. Next to no new recordings will be coming in - or not till I get my head together and organise some remote recording from other people who are in isolation.
So... prose. Stories. Single narrator text. That's the thing to keep me sane. And produce more for the future of the podcast. And keep me sane.
After the live show was cancelled on Friday, and every other job I had lined up over the course of the year also got cancelled, I was a bit manic. Like, I have all this time now, what do I do with it? And then I saw a post from Professor Tracey Hill on twitter, mentioning The Wonderful Year by Thomas Dekker, and I thought, looks interesting. So I hunted around, had a look and thought.
Well, I'm not doing anything on Sunday.
So, Sunday comes and I record the whole thing. I was thinking of editing the whole thing, but I ran out of steam. There are lots of pick ups and questions of how to finish it as audio, but it's basically in the can.
At this time of general plague, doing a reading of a pamphlet about another plague - there's a fuck ton of death in it - would be very bad for my mental health. It wasn't. It might be bad for YOUR mental health, if you listen to it, but it was very therapeutic.
Which is odd, because recording audio books is the most tedious of recording jobs. It is exhausting and oddly painful in surprising parts of the body. But that was a good day. I determined to work through the first session in the morning, and see if I could finish it by the end of the week for the podcast.
And then, this morning, I thought... why not keep going? Why not just keep doing the prose, the poetry, the non dramatic stuff? Not every day, not perfectly - but as part of the day? Because it was good for me to get out of the edit, out of my head, and just say words.
But I know what my motivation is like, I'll get bored - so, I decided to try doing it live. Again, I'm not going to be doing anything live for a while, so why not. Even if only one person is listening, it's part of the practice.
I put out a feeler on twitter, hunted for a platform (so much has changed since I last live streamed anything) and did a test with a short poem The Rising to the Crown of Richard III, which came to my attention, along with other pieces I've been developing, thanks to Dr. Jitka Štollová who I met at the Changing History conference the other year. It's not as good a quality as a proper recording, but it was good enough and it got a few listens - so I'll be going on with it for a while. So, tomorrow (16th March 2020) at 12.30pm GMT, for between 30 minutes and an hour I will be performing a text - probably the same text over the course of the week. Not because anyone is clamouring for it, but because it's good for me. And it basically makes public the kind of initial work I do with any text that comes my way. An initial fun read through. And then I'll get it recorded properly.
Come and join me. https://www.podbean.com/lsw/beyondshakespeare/s-3OlgtMoSJx
From the earliest drama in English, to the closing of the theatres in 1642, there was a hell of a lot of drama produced - and a lot of it wasn't by Shakespeare. Apart from a few noble exceptions these plays are often passed over, ignored or simply unknown. This is a blog about what exists beyond Shakespeare, about the plays, fragmentary and extant, that shaped the theatrical world that shaped our dramatic history.
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