What book are you reading right now?
A few years back I directed The Birth of Merlin, considered one of Shakespeare’s Apocryphal Works. That is, it’s been attributed to him—at least in part; scholars think he collaborated with William Rowley on the text—but no one is 100% sure.
To help explain the play and contextual use it, I wrote one of my famous/infamous/bizarre prologues. I did that for Hippolytus, suggesting that terrible acts freeze souls in the moment when they commit them, and that the dead are condemned to repeat them for eternity.
For Merlin, I had Merlin appear holding a large magical volume: The Book of the World.
PROLOGUE
[Classical music. The curtain opens slightly, revealing a hooded figure—Merlin, not yet born—holding a large tome. We cannot see his face, as he intones the prologue.]
MERLIN. The Book of the World. In the Library of the Cosmos there are many Books. And each Book contains a World. And this Book [opens it] is the Book of Our World…or one possibility, one version of it. It is written in the language of every reader. A universal language, an illustrated text, a vast illuminated manuscript that contains the entire history of our world from beginning to end. Well, end…heh… People speak of World’s End…that’s ridiculous. You just go back to the beginning again! Everything is arranged chronologically and historically. It appears linear, but you can jump at any time to another time and place, simply by turning a page, and put yourself, quite literally, into that time and place. Images rise up, and when you concentrate, you are there! For example—[notices] What…? Oh, no…a wormhole! Some insect has eaten its way through. Now things can spill from one time to the next…. [Sighs] This could be trouble…
(The figure is sucked into the darkness. The curtain opens wider and we see the unit set as it folds out, around several characters, DONOBERT, GLOSTER, CADOR, and EDWIN, EDOLL and THE HERMIT who are frozen in place. The music changes to cyberpunk, and a central door opens upstage. The RACONTEUR TROUBADOR, a Cybergoth Bard, is revealed; she appears to sing a song of exposition.)
Now what is a Cybergoth Bard doing in England? I set the play in the retro-futurist world of Steampunk, where the Britons were Steampunks and their rivals, the Goths, were Goth Vampires. I detailed these ideas, along with costuming choices in an article, “Steampunking Shakespeare: Selling an Apocryphal Play with Pop Culture” that you can read online. The text emerged from a presentation I made at a Pop Culture conference, hence the subtitle.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m currently writing in (or acting in?) the book that is life, and not reading anything at the moment. Deflecting the question again—did it work?
MUSOFYR 