London

Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious Sumer by this sun of York.
The sun of England shone today and we were at the Globe to see Richard III, unabashedly rhetorical, performative and thrilling. Mark Rylance as a funny, wheedling, smarmy duke on his way to an unhappy kingship. Things moral and historical, as we know, catch up with him at the end, and what a shame. He's so entertaining to be around!




We sat in the Lords' rooms right over the stage!




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Southwark Cathedral: tombs, history, no pretensions of being St. Paul's. loved it. This is the medieval poet John Gower.


And then, at the site of the Rose Theater, where Marlowe's plays were acted, in a tiny room above the excavated foundations, another strange excavation, the play 'Cardenio' by Shakespeare? fletcher? Who knows? Spoiler: ALL the characters were dead at the end.

This is the underground excavation, the outlines of the original Rose in red lights, lurid and dank like the play.



Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. Well, not actually: another Jacobean tragedy, Duchess of Malfi.