The Globe Announces 2014 Season!

Nothing says “great Christmas present” like the email from the Globe Theatre that their 2014 season has been announced.  This coming summer looks like a good one, full of violence, romance, and camp absurdity!

Summer opens with two of Shakespeare’s least read/produced plays: Titus Andronicus and Antony & Cleopatra.  Titus is a problem play of sorts, not fitting in beautifully in any of the simple genres that school students learn (comedy, tragedy, history).  In truth, this is a bloody story of what happens to even the victorious after a war, as Titus returns from battle only to see his own family and state both crumble because of choices he can and cannot make. The darkness of the story keeps it away from most readers, which is also somewhat true of Antony & Cleopatra, a play whose long passages many nineteenth and early twentieth century school children would have learned and recited:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar’d all description: she did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

O’erpicturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature: on each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did.