#anne barton

[creepynostalgy]

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

[mariocki]

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

"Jane, did you ever stop to think that... if anything happened to me, I mean anything bad, there wouldn't be any money for you? I wouldn't be here to sign the checks. You wouldn't even have pocket money. Did you ever think of that?"

"Yeah, I've thought about that."

[hellish-cruelty]

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

E. E. Cummings - 1894-1962

somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though I have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, I and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of it countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Film enclosed - Hannah and her sisters

Short bare Analysis - "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" is one such poem. At its most immediate level, it is a poem that honors an inexplicable mystery: how, through the experience of love, one human being can awaken something in the beloved that nothing or no one else has ever managed to touch.

[shakespearenews]

A Hamlet for Our Time

In a bold new production, the director Robert Icke finds resonances in Shakespeare’s canonical play which make it feel made for this moment.

...Not until Icke became an undergraduate, at Cambridge, did his engagement with Shakespeare intensify. He began one-on-one tutorials with Anne Barton, the influential critic and scholar, who by then was in her seventies and teaching only a handful of students. “I used to go to her once a week, and write an essay, and argue about text and so on,” Icke told me. Barton was married to John Barton, a founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Icke developed relationships with both Bartons that endured long past his time as a student. Anne Barton died in 2013. At her memorial, Icke recalled, “a lot of people said they had had the same experience—that Anne kind of took them under her wing, and took their brain out of their head, and made it smarter, then gave it back.”

Among the plays he and Barton discussed was “Hamlet.” Barton, he learned, was impatient with the character of Ophelia: in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, she called Ophelia “naïve, passive and dependent.” Icke told me, “We talked about ‘Why isn’t Ophelia’s story moving? Why do you never care? Why do you never follow that story—and why is it never clear why she’s mad?’ I always feel like Ophelia is sidelined in productions, and even in the text.” Icke proposed a dramaturgical solution, arguing that the play would work much better if two early scenes were transposed, and Polonius and his two children—Laertes and Ophelia—were introduced before Hamlet is told by his friend Horatio of the sighting of his father’s spirit. “I always felt that you were getting Part Two of the more important story before you were getting Part One of the less important story, and that made the less important story feel genuinely irrelevant,” Icke explained. “It was always, like, ‘That guy’s going to see a ghost! And, by the way, here’s some advice about your trip to France.’ And you think, I don’t care about that—there’s a ghost!”

...Among Icke’s most consequential textual choices is the inclusion of a scene, from the First Quarto, in which Horatio informs Gertrude that Claudius has plotted to have Hamlet killed on his voyage to England. This has the effect of deepening and complicating the character of Gertrude, whose trajectory through the play, in Icke’s hands, involves a gradual realization of the ways in which her own choices—starting with her insistence that Hamlet go not to Wittenberg—have helped bring about the tragic conclusion. 

[britneyshakespeare]

Most of Shakespeare's comedies involve, at some point, a journey to where life is heightened, of an extraordinary quality. [In the Merchant of Venice], Belmont is a locality of this kind. Portia's house lies in an indeterminate place reached across the sea, among trees and lawns and under an open sky. With its music and riddle-game out of the past, its possession of the kind of limitless, inexplicable wealth proper to a fairy tale, it forms an obvious contrast with the crowded, urban world of Venice where money is a commodity to be counted and painfully earned. There is a sense, however, in which Belmont is really the better self of Venice: a world of clarity, order, and materialism transfigured, presided over by a lady in whom the virtues characteristic of the Christians in the comedy manifest themselves in their most complete and realized form. As generous as Antonio and as reflective, equally capable of self-sacrificing love, she has perceptions and energies, an emotional wholeness and range of response, which he lacks. It is only Portia, in her disguise as the young lawyer, who can rescue Venice from its dilemma.

Anne Barton in the introduction to the Merchant of Venice, from the Riverside Shakespeare (1973)

[yankeecountess]

Romance Advent Calendar December 21–”Book & Mittens”

“One Wild Winter’s Eve” by Anne Barton

[shakespearenews]

The Shakespearean Forest reimagines the real forests that our greatest playwright evoked in his works. The final book of renowned scholar, Anne Barton, it explores the changeable and sometimes sinister presence of the forest in literature and culture.

Fear and forests, writes Shakespeare scholar Professor Anne Barton, go hand in hand. Forests are where we get lost and meet wild men, where chaos rules and anything can happen. Shakespeare uses forest settings, sometimes magical, sometimes menacing, in many of his plays. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there. When in Macbeth Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth knows he is doomed

[milliondollarbaby87]

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Review

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Review

Former child star Baby Jane Hudson has never got over the end to her fame and has now taken to tormenting her sister Blanche Hudson, who had a more successful acting career but is now paraplegic and stuck in the decaying Hollywood mansion with her demented sister. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (more…)

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