So I bought a book on Michelangelo for Art Hum and never cracked it open. I've been reading it recently, and it's terrific. The guy who's writing it manages to make every fact feel just over the border of my knowledge, so I'm learning, but lightly.
Also today: I saw an open rehearsal of Edward II, by a cast that's currently doing a production of Richard II. The eight of them sat on stools, with music stands in front of them, and read lines cold, with the director pushing them to try different angles. It was fascinating--they spent quite a while working out the character of Isabella.
A sidenote: I've always thought of Marlowe as better than Shakespeare at plotting his dramas, but one of the actors tonight pointed out that Shakespeare keeps certain tensions suspended that Marlowe lets precipitate out. As a result, things are always a bit more ambiguous for Shakespeare.
One of my difficulties w/ Michelangelo has always been his faces: as real as the /David/ looks, his face has an unhuman quality; while it's expressive, it's not quite individual. It's got the smoothness of an apt mask, or a well-done piece of CGI. The Michelangelo pieces I find most moving are unfinished in the face, so that I engage with the conception as much as the accident of the finished piece.
Shakespeare's gift--perhaps--is in finishing his pieces while still giving them room to be mentally completed by the spectator. (Keats called this "negative capability".) I think Marlowe was almost there in "Edward II", except he has an overabundance of plot. (Does whoever played Gaveston double as Spenser the younger?)
