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Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company

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Roger Allam

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“I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.”

ShakespeareRomeo And JulietRoger Allam
Book:Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company
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“Zeytin, varoluşundan günümüze kadar en yüce duyguların tercümanı ve en kıymetlilerimizden oldu. Uzlaşamadıklarımıza dost eli, ağzımızın tadı, meyvelerini toplarken nasır tutan ellere merhem… Öyleyse hediye alıp verme zamanı gelince siz de tanrıça Athena gibi bilge olun ve sevdiğiniz herkesle zeytin ağacının nimetlerini paylaşın. Unutmayın! Zeytin besler, her yönüyle güzellik katar ve korur. Andolsun İnsanın Asırlık Dostuna!”

Olive Trees
Book:Zeytin Ajandası 2015
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“There had been that one month, to be sure, when she lived under a golden canopy among spring flowers, while the March winds and rain threatened outside the windows. Then she was never afraid of cruel surprises. Perhaps that was all she was to have in this world; some people got very little. It was strange, to feel everything slipping away from one and to have no power to struggle, no right to complain. One had to sit with folded hands and see it all go. You couldn't, after all, live above your level: with good luck you might, for a few breaths, hold yourself up in that more vital air, but you dropped back; down, down into flatness, and it was worse than if you had never been out of it.”

Willa CatherLucy Gayheart
Book:Lucy Gayheart
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