Shakespeare Magazine 12
Shakespeare’s Sisters is the theme of Shakespeare Magazine 12. Our cover stars – Harriet Walter, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo and Margaret Atwood – all speak with authority, insight and wit about their adventures with the Bard. Also this issue, we have Jade Anouka’s Donmar Shakespeare in pictures, while Hugh Bonneville and Benedict Cumberbatch chat about The Hollow Crown. We have brilliant guest essays on Shakespeare’s Storms and How to think like Shakespeare, along with John Foxx’s Arden Shakespeare cover art, the madcap comedy world of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and Benedict Cumberbatch stars in a Doctor Strange/Shakespeare mash-up!
Shakespeare’s Sisters is the theme of Shakespeare Magazine 12.
Our cover stars – Harriet Walter, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo and Margaret Atwood – all speak with authority, insight and wit about their adventures with the Bard.
Also this issue, we have Jade Anouka’s Donmar Shakespeare in pictures, while Hugh Bonneville and Benedict Cumberbatch chat about The Hollow Crown.
We have brilliant guest essays on Shakespeare’s Storms and How to think like Shakespeare, along with John Foxx’s Arden Shakespeare cover art, the madcap comedy world of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and Benedict Cumberbatch stars in a Doctor Strange/Shakespeare mash-up!
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<strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s Storms<br />
“We tend to assume the shipwreck in Twelfth Night<br />
is caused by a storm, but an assumption it remains”<br />
Act I, Scene 1 of<br />
The Tempest.<br />
Engraving by<br />
Benjamin Smith<br />
(1797). Based<br />
on a painting by<br />
George Romney.<br />
(Via Wikimedia<br />
Commons)<br />
provides the story of the death of those on the<br />
ship, whom we have just seen on the stage. In his<br />
phrases, the immediacy is emphasised: ‘Now, now:<br />
I have not winked since I saw these sights: the men<br />
are not yet cold under water’ (102–3).<br />
Finally, in The Tempest is the conflation of<br />
everything we have seen so far. The sea-storm<br />
is staged, the mariners wet. The ship is wrecked<br />
before our eyes: ‘We split, we split, we split!’<br />
(1.1.62). Afterwards, several narrators give slightly<br />
different versions of the wreck, and each in turn<br />
is different from the version seen by the audience.<br />
There are survivors, of course, who are separated.<br />
The play’s opening storm consolidates each element<br />
of <strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s earlier storms of separation.<br />
If we look at these sea-storms as a whole, then,<br />
we see that <strong>Shakespeare</strong> is not simply deploying<br />
them functionally, but is, rather, invested in<br />
developing their dramatic immediacy. From<br />
their literary roots in ancient poetry, <strong>Shakespeare</strong><br />
wrestles them into a new form, in the public<br />
theatres of London. Towards the end of his career,<br />
the audience are made spectators of the storm,<br />
rather than listeners, as in The Comedy of Errors, or<br />
tardy witnesses, as in Twelfth Night. We become,<br />
like Desdemona, the Clown or Miranda, onlookers<br />
as the storms of separation rage.<br />
<br />
Gwilym Jones was the winner of the 2016<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s Globe Book Award, presented biennially<br />
by Globe Education and a panel of academics to a<br />
new <strong>Shakespeare</strong> scholar for their first monograph.<br />
Gwilym’s book <strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s Storms, published by<br />
Manchester University Press, is the first comprehensive<br />
study of the feature in <strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s work.<br />
More on Globe Education<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong>’s Storms<br />
is available from Manchester University Press<br />
priced £14.99 paperback<br />
62<br />
shakespeare magazine
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