The image is from dailymail.co.uk; photos are not allowed during the performance, being unnatural-like devices.
The entire program went to see Merry Wives at the Globe, which is just off of the Thames in London. We set off on our trusty chartered Jeffs bus at noon-- were within the city limits an hour later-- and then proceeded to slug along for approximately half an hour on a busy city street. Pedestrians were to us what a Harley Davidson is to a bicycle. Which is to say: way, way faster.
You could hear the bus driver grumbling all the way back where Kathleen and I were sitting. He hates driving in London, he said. It's always like this, he said. And what he said next was obscured by his prolonged honks at the cabbies that were cutting him off.
We were dropped off near the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery. I had forgotten my camera, but that turned out to be a boon. Neither Gallery allows cameras. They want you to buy their posters.
At the NPG, I got to see Cassandra Austen's little watercolor of her sister. It was about two inches by two inches, nonexistent by the grandiose standards of the rest of the portraits, and her sister had gotten tired after half water-coloring Austen's face. There's a tad of sallow color about the face, brown at the hair and the eyes, and then pencil lines squiggle off to denote shoulders and hands and a cap. Yes, Cassandra was an amateur at best, she was. (Though she put love into it, and one can imagine the two sisters giggling about it. Or I can.)
I was also interested in the Tudor paintings. Henry VIII looked like Humpty Dumpty in quite a few of the pieces-- they may have been caricatures. They weren't complete paintings. Anne Boleyn looked like a nondescript; the blurb said the painting had been done years after her death, going off of the description that she had "an unusually long neck." Catherine of Aragon looked noble-- and almost exactly like Anne. Perhaps their portraits were done by the same artist; I can't remember what Catherine's blurb said.
At the National Gallery, I got to see a bit of Da Vinci, a smidgen of Van Gogh, a dollop of Botticelli, a tad of Monet, and a room of Degas. The National Gallery is like... a sequel to the Louvre. It was beautiful, of course, and, as usual, I didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything that I wished to see.
From the Gallery, we wended our way towards the Globe, eating dinner at a little pub along the way.
So, this play was an experience. A stiff, knee-locked, claustrophobic experience, pressed shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of standing adults. We were "yardlings" because, as the Shakespeare professor kindly explained, we can go and sit any time we please in America. Sitting is what movie theaters are for. For this play, however, we were going to interact-- we were going to stand. Why? Because this is SHAKESPEARE at the GLOBE.
Yes, that could be true, but the tickets were five pounds. And there is a reason that they were five pounds.
After looking threatening all day, five minutes into the performance it began to rain. I was flattened into a wall before I even knew it was raining as people surged towards the slight overhang (seats are covered; the yard is not. There's a couple foot margin of error where the yard is slightly covered).
The rain ceased soon after it had begun and never got too heavy, fortunately, and after intermission I moved so that I had some breathing/ fidgeting room.
The actors were extremely talented-- I was disappointed in King Lear last week, so this amusement came as a wonderful surprise. The overweight Sir Falstaff was a particular uproar-- he must have used prosthetics, heavy makeup, or a combination of the two, because his expressions were clear even from my far-off stolen glances over the shoulder of the man in front of me.
