Being from Texas, where it’s hot most of the time, South, or Central Texas, anyway, where, or it looks to me, that 23 degrees, why I might still need a sweater (I think that’s 73 in my terms).
I’ve developed a fondness for Nero’s Cafe – Italian Coffee Company, as it’s a lot like any number of places, but the main ingredient in all the important drinks is coffee. More precisely, a well-poured shot of espresso and the house shot is a double. Me? That works just fine.
I asked if they did iced espresso, a warm and sultry afternoon in London.
“Ice? In the espresso? Okay, one or two?”
The guy making the coffee offered to put two small cubes of ice in the shot of espresso.
Crushed ice. A whole cup full. Pour the espresso over it. Really, there’s a language problem – if they only would speak proper English.
(click to visit)
London Calling
(The Clash)
Collected notes on Shakespeare’s Titus:
The Anthony Hopkins movie version, Titus
Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography
“The argument still continues whether the plot of Titus Andronicus is derived from a ballad.” (page 154)
So it was – maybe – based on some old ditty.
“Shakespeare is widely credited for haven taken over the first act of Titus Andronicus from Peele and completing the play, while elaborating upon the older writer’s sensationalistic effects.” (page 142)
“Yet the wood has always been a token of wilderness and resistance. In As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Cymberline and Titus Andronicus, it becomes a symbol of folklore and ancient memory.” (page 7)
“In one os his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus, one of the characters brings a copy of the Metamorphoses on stage. It is one of the few literary ‘props’ in English drama, but it is a highly appropriate one.” (page 60)
And off to Bloom:
Bloom’s Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human.
But first?
“The young Shakespeare, emerging from the composition of Richard III, perhaps rebelled against Marlowe, and as a kind of shock therapy for himself and his public. Something about Titus Andronicus is archaic, in an unpleasant way.” (page 77)
“The young Shakespeare delighted himself, and his contemporary audience, by both mocking and exploiting Marlowe in Titus Andronicus.” (page 78)
“Though I am fascinated by Titus Andronicus, I do see it as an exploitative parody, with the inner purpose of destroying the ghost of Christopher Marlowe.” (page 78)
“The Elizabethan audience was at least as bloodthirsty as the groundlings who throng our cinemas and gawk at our television sets, so the play was wildly popular, and it did well for Shakespeare, a success he may have accepted with considerable inner irony.” (page 78)
“Before three hundred lines of Act I, Scene I have gone by, Titus thus has to be regarded as a bizarre monster, a parody of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.” (page 79).
“To call Titus Andronicus a mere send-up of Marlowe and Kyd hardly seems sufficient; it is a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony carried well past the limits of parody.” (page 83)
“Summarizing all this is like telling the plot of soap opera, but the action of Titus Andronicus essentially is a horror opera, Stephen King turned loose among the Romans and the Goths.” (page 84)
“Though there is a nasty power evident throughout the text, I can concede no intrinsic value to Titus Andronicus. It matters only because Shakespeare, alas, undoubtedly wrote it, and by doing so largely purged Marlowe and Kyd from his imagination.” (page 86)
It’s a good play. Very well done. At Shakespeare’s Globe.
(click to visit)
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