I just put up over on My London Your London a review of the new production of Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe. Not one for those with soft stomaches or dicky hearts, but a superb concept by director Lucy Bailey.
If you’re going as a groundling, don’t take too much luggage with you. (And given all the substances being sprayed around, a white summer dress wouldn’t be the go.)
This is Shakespeare as horror movie. You have been warned.
OK, I confess to being quietly chuffed when the British Library wrote to me asking for permission to archive Philobiblon for posterity as part of the women’s issues collection. Do follow that second link and check out a great range of websites – it is nice to see efforts are being made to collect this material, although I rather pity future researchers having to deal with the bulk of it.
Margaret Gwynnethe, the wife of Stephen Vaughan and mother of the Protestant author and John Knox-champion Anne Lock, was a silkwoman at the court of Henry VIII, serving particularly his two most “Protestant” queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr.
After her death on 16 September 1544, her husband wrote to a court official asking for the £360 that Catherine Parr owed for her materials and labour. In January he still hadn’t been paid and wrote again. (There doesn’t seem to be a final conclusion to this; perhaps he was never paid?)
In 1544 £360 was an enormous sum – for comparison Lady Grace Mildmay was a few years later maintaining a family on £130 a year.
From Felch, S.M. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.)
(Quite a number of Margaret’s letters are in the State Papers of Henry VIII.)
Thailand is supposedly one of the great economic and social success stories of 20th-century development. But as poor old East Timor (the region’s newest state) struggles to restore stability, the state of the Thai nation isn’t looking so great either.
After months of foot-dragging, officials have ordered a government forensics team to exhume 300 unmarked graves in Pattani province. Human-rights activists suspect that these unknown corpses might include suspected Muslim insurgents who were abducted and executed by government death squads. Nearly 1,300 people have died in the 30 months since violence re-erupted in Thailand’s impoverished deep south, home to some three million Muslims.
The area was not much more than a century ago an independent sultanate, Pattani, something that the Thai state has since tried to suppress. I didn’t adequately realise at the time, but when the Bangkok Post ran, about a decade ago, a feature on the archaeology of the area and the sultanate, it was displaying some political courage.
The Thai “national story” runs that very nearly everyone is “Thai” – some 95 per cent – a figure that makes no sense at all as you get to know the country, for not only are there the Muslims in the South, but a great many Khmer and Laos in Isaan (the northeast) and what are known as the “hilltribes” in the North.
In the “nationbuilding” of the past 150 years all of those realities have been suppressed. But I fear that has stored up future trouble. Were you to be a young journalist looking to set up a base as a stringer, to be in the right place at the right time, Thailand might not, sadly, be a bad choice.
The cash spent on internet advertising in the UK will outstrip that outlayed in national newspapers by the end of this year, a major buyer has predicted.
The related factors of growth in broadband usage and declining newspaper circulation appear to have justified the hype. “Reach is what advertisers want most,” says the report. “National newspapers still have lots of it, but less reach means less ad money.”
And it must be some further sort of coming of age when MySpace has its first UK “pop star” creation story, quickly followed by its first not-really-MySpace scandal.
I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), [Sandi] Thom’s quirky single, is tipped to become next week’s No 1. Her rise is already the stuff of music industry myth.
Thom, 24, from Macduff, Banffshire, was awarded a million-pound deal with RCA/SonyBMG after broadcasting internet concerts from her flat in London. Audiences rose from 70 to an estimated 70,000 people during the 21 Nights From Tooting tour and included a top executive from RCA/SonyBMG, who signed Thom for a five-album deal.
Since I first heard this on Radio Four last night, and read it in The Times this morning, I suspect this will be a case of any publicity is good publicity. And good on her – I’m no music buff, but she sounds like a pretty pure singer/songwriter with a guitar, decent lyrics and a catchy beat.
From “Orders for Household Servantes; first devised by John Haryngton, in the Yeare 1566, and reneued by John Haryngton, Sonne of the saide John, in the Yeare 1592”
VI. Item, That no man make water within either of the courts, uppon paine of, every tyme it shal be proved, 1d.
VII. Item, That no man teach any of the children any unhonest speeche, or baudie word, or othe, on paine of 4d.
VIII. Item, That no man waite at the table without a trencher in his hand, except it be uppon some good cause, on paine of 1d.
You can just imagine the servingmen grumbling about all these new-fangled rules and controls…
From: Hughey, R. John Harington of Stepney: Tudor Gentleman. His Life and Works, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1971.
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