The Life and Death of King Richard III

This afternoon I attended Richard III at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox.  I had never seen the play (nor read it) so I was a bit unprepared for just how many people the Duke of Gloucester killed or had killed before and during the play.  They all showed up as ghosts during the night before the battle with Richmond's forces in the last act; there must have been a dozen or more.  The most famous of his victims were the "two little princes", his nephews whom he had imprisoned in the Tower of London and then had killed.  They were in the way, having a legitimate claim to the throne after their father the King died (also due to Gloucester), so they were eliminated.  In fact, pretty much everyone was eliminated because they somehow stood in Gloucester's way as he seized the throne.

Gloucester, who became King Richard III, was clearly a psychopath, at least as Shakespeare portrayed him.  He had no empathy for others, was completely amoral in his actions, and could charm the parka off an Eskimo.  He readily admitted most of the deaths he caused, but then insisted that nothing could be done about them because that was in the past, it was time to move on.  When he was accused of killings, he would castigate his accuser for lacking Christian charity.  A true piece of work.

Ever since Shakespeare, King Richard III has been one of those men that people "love to hate."  There's some debate about just how vile Richard really was, with the author Josephine Tey (pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh) making a case for his innocence in the killing of the princes in her novel The Daughter of Time.  For myself, if he didn't kill the princes, then what about the other 10 or so he is supposed to have killed?

John Douglas Thompson, who played Gloucester/Richard III, was truly outstanding.  That's him in the photo above, although the continuity checker didn't catch the photographer in a faux pas:  Richard was a cripple, with a hunchback, a limp, and a withered arm.  As played by Thompson, the withered arm was the left one, which looks pretty healthy in the photo!  Also very good was Johnny Lee Davenport, who played the Lord Mayor of London.  Davenport is black, and he played the part as if it were a mix of modern black politician and black preacher -- it was funny, and very effective.  He told the audience members, who were assumed to be the people (rabble, really) of London, "Don't forget to vote!" as he made one of his exits.  The woman playing Queen Elizabeth (named Tod Randolph) was also excellent.  Buckingham was played by Nigel Gore, an Englishman.  It was a bit odd to hear the play performed with one British accent, the rest being American.

I'm very glad I got to see the play.  It's full of famous lines, such as "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and "Now is the winter of our discontent."  This line, as it happens, is often used in isolation and thus out of context.  The full text is "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried."  The meaning is just about the reverse of what the first line alone is taken to mean.  As Bill Clinton famously said, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

Tomorrow is my last full day here, and I'll spend it cleaning up the house and packing for departure on Saturday morning.  I can't leave before about 10:30 because I have to make a run to the town dump (there's no garbage pickup here), which opens at 10:00.  As a result, I'm not traveling too far on Saturday, just to Hazelton, Pennsylvania.  I think I'm going to have to get a beanbag chair for the cat when I get home.  She loves to sleep on the ones here, as shown in the Facebook photo.
Tomorrow night I volunteer at Tanglewood and attend a concert there for the last time this summer.

Hancock Shaker Village, Part Deux

The weather has cooled significantly starting Sunday afternoon.  What was projected to be another hot, muggy day turned out to be cool enough to be enjoyable, and I attended a Tanglewood concert Sunday afternoon that wasn't stifling.  The concert was all-Strauss;  Richard in the first half, Don Quixote with Lynn Harrell playing cello; Johann II waltzes and polkas in the second half.  The BSO was very good, sounding like they should be in Vienna.

Kristen returned from Ithaca Sunday afternoon, and on Monday we had lunch at a restaurant in Lee and went to the Hancock Shaker Village.  She had not been there since a family trip in high school.  The people at the village were all different from when I went a week or so ago.  They are all volunteers, and work a day a week or so.  No blacksmith present this time, but there was a man making Shaker oval boxes, and lots of interesting exhibits.  The weather was terrific, a glorious New England summer day with moderate temperatures and a nice breeze.  As you might expect, I took some photos.

The "Brick Dwelling" (the Shakers had such a flair with names).  About a hundred people lived here, women on one side, men on the other.

Taken in the kitchen, in the basement of the building.  We're not sure what the paddle-like objects are.  The seem to have blades attached over the holes, so perhaps they were for slicing apples or some other foodstuff.

The rooms all had very tall chests of drawers, well over head height.  They must have used (what else?) Shaker step stools to see into the top drawers.

This room, for the "Senior Elder" as I recall, contained a classic Shaker candle stand.

Several of the wooden structures contain workshops; this one is the basketry shop.  What looks like a lamp with a wooden shade is a mold around which a basket is formed.

A cobbler's bench.  This is a truly specialized article of furniture.  I've seen one just like it in use at Old Sturbridge Village.

The weaving building had examples of yarn dyed with natural materials.  Madder root was used for the one in the foreground.

In the round barn we found this volunteer carrying a rooster around under her arm.  There's a set of pens with farm animals (calves, pigs, chickens), and something had set off a commotion among them.  She was calming the rooster down.

Here's the man who was making Shaker oval baskets.  He had cut a thin strip of wood for the sides of the box (or side singular, I suppose, since there's only once smooth piece and no corners), and had steamed the wood for about a half hour to make it flexible enough to bend.  Here's he wraps the strip of wood around a form, marks where the overlap is, and nails the strip together with copper tacks using a large steel rod as an anvil.  The top and bottom are cut to fit exactly, and are themselves nailed on with tiny brads, but that comes later.

The medicinal herb garden, with the Round Barn in the background.  The woman in the hat is a volunteer gardener who told us something about the garden.

This thistle plant was growing in the herb garden.  It's not used as a herb or as medicine -- it's a volunteer.  The staff rather likes it, though, so they kept it.

A nice visit, followed by a really nice dinner at Jonathan's Bistro in Lenox.  Kristen flies back to Austin on Tuesday.

Visiting Tanglewood with Kristen

Kristen arrived yesterday afternoon, and will be here until Friday morning.  She then goes to Ithaca, NY, for a Chimesmasters' Reunion over the weekend.  She'll be back here Sunday afternoon, and will stay through Monday.  Not long after that, I have to pack up and head for home myself.

We attended a concert in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood this evening.  This is the only concert this summer that I'm attending but not working as a volunteer.  We did the traditional Tanglewood thing:  a picnic on the lawn before the concert.

It's the roll-up table we've been taking to Tanglewood since about 1991.  I've made a set of legs for it for use with regular-height chairs like these (it came with short legs, for use with beach chairs).  Hidden behind the chair on the left is a picnic backpack that Anne and I got a few years ago.  It packs a complete service for two, from wine glasses to salt and pepper, and has a waterproof insulated compartment for chilled food.  We stopped at Guido's gourmet market for a couple of salads, cheeses, and a great dessert.  With fresh fruit, we had a great dinner.  The chairs are rented from Tanglewood and are very comfortable.  I doubt that I'll bother to take chairs to Tanglewood any more, these are so much nicer than ones we normally use.

We're on the lawn just up the hill from Ozawa hall.  Not a good place from which to see and hear the concert, but we have tickets for seats inside the hall.  Here's the view from our table.

The concert was Bach's complete Suites for Solo Cello, performed by Pieter Wispelwey.  He's really excellent, and we enjoyed the music very much.  Not so for the heat in the concert hall, though.  Even though the night was actually rather cool, the temperature in our first balcony seats was far too high for comfort.  We didn't stay for the complete concert, even though the music was so good.  A shame, really.

Still, a good Tanglewood evening overall.

More flowers

I've been visiting museums and such places where photography is not allowed inside, but is outside on the grounds.  Along the way I've taken a few more flower photos.

These were taken at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.  A Black-Eyed Susan and friend:

A Primrose bush.

Allium.

A window box on a garden shed.

This rose is in the garden at the Mill River house, taken in late afternoon.

The same rose bush (different bloom), taken the next morning with the dew still on.

Kristen and I visited the Frelinghuysen Morris house and studio (they were abstract artists with a Bauhaus-style house and studio adjacent to Tanglewood), and found this lily in their garden.

Old Sturbridge Village

I drove over to Old Sturbridge Village today, about 60 miles east of here on the Massachusetts Turnpike.  It's a "living museum", a reconstruction of a Massachusetts village set in about 1830.  I've been there many times before; the family used to go fairly often when we lived in Connecticut.  As always, there were a few new things since my last visit.

This is called the "Small House", and it's certainly that.  It has two rooms and an attic, and is intended to represent the type of house a poorer family would have had in 1830's rural Massachusetts.  The rest of the houses in the village are rather grand by comparison.  Those houses were moved to Sturbridge from other New England locations; the more prominent houses would have been the ones that survived all these years, while the houses of poorer folk would mostly have been replaced or just abandoned to the elements.  Old Sturbridge Village had to build this one from scratch, a "reconstruction' rather than a "restoration."

The view from the Small House toward the backs of the houses on the village's main street.  Those living on the street were better off, for the most part -- merchants, a lawyer, the local banker.  Still, they kept pigs and chickens in their back yards.

This woman was demonstrating dying of wool yarn, using materials available to the people of the village in the 1830s.  Today she was dying the yarn brown, using material from walnut trees.  Most of the dye materials were local, but some were imported from Europe and Mexico.

I found these tiny flowers in the garden of the Fitch House, on the main street.  Some ornamental flowers were grown, especially by the wealthy, but the contents of most gardens were intended to be eaten or used as medicine.

Speaking of the wealthy, this is the Towne House.  Mr. Towne was the largest landholder in the area and hence the largest farmer.  Many of the people living in the village would have worked for him.  He was, in effect, the local squire, although such terms weren't used.  This photo is from the side garden; the front of the house is on the left.

The Towne House has a formal garden, although not a lot was in bloom in mid-July.  Coneflowers are ubiquitous, and the bees obviously like them.  The last photo is of some really tiny flowers:  the whole flower, including the green part, is about the size of a fingernail.

Near the Towne House garden, a couple of women were giving a talk about what it was like being a servant in the Towne household.

A stagecoach drives about the village, giving rides and demonstrating the form of transportation available to the people of the time.

On an outbuilding behind one of the Main Street houses, I saw this door latch.  You can't buy this stuff at Home Depot or Lowe's.  It was handmade by a blacksmith, and has apparently been repaired at some point (the small piece of metal added to the left tip of the latch).  Today we would never repair something like this, just toss it away and buy another one (from China, most likely).  Back then, no one could afford to discard an object like this just because it had broken.

Here's the village tinman at his trade.  Today, we would call him a tinsmith, but he said that in the 1830s people would have called him a tinman or perhaps a tinner.  This particular fellow has been in the tinman's shop every time I've visited the village, and he said to someone that he's been doing it for more than 30 years.

This "field of flags" is set up near the entrance to the village.  Each flag represents a donation; the money is used to pay for the flag itself and to fund a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village by an underprivileged child.  A worthy cause, and because Anne used to love coming to Sturbridge, I donated a flag in her memory.