#Fey roman

[5am-the-foxing-hour]

Saw these poses and brain went "draw for Wolfsbane au" and thus... here we are.

A bookworm who fell asleep while reading.

Roman finally got to tag along to a market as his tiny self. Virgil and Remus getting surprised by some rain.

Original poses by Mellon_soup on Instagram

Pose 1 I Pose 2 I Pose 3

[ro-doodles]

I am a little obsessed with the parallels between Rue and Wuvvy’s relationship and Rose and Pearl from Steven Universe. The absolute love and devotion that can never be fully returned, the total romance and tragedy of it all. That feeling when you love someone so much but not in the way they’re looking for.

Also I wanted to give Rue another pretty dress cause they deserve it.

Also this would make Hob Greg which is a little silly.

[seafleece]

feed your love to the flowers, they’ll take all that you can give

[sapphireofmars]

me, whenever i watch aabria gming: aabria iyengar, your mind is *chef's kiss*

[tomris-katun]

[that-one-tired-tiefling]

I hate drawing crystals.

But I drew them, they look like shit, but I don't care.

Anyway, if you read previous post like this you'd know that I run DnD campaign where I base shards of a broken god on Sanders Sides. There are 7, last time I showed how Morality looks like.

Today, I present to you shard of Creativity, Roman of feywild.

Tried to be as creative, hehe, as possible with him. He lives in Feywild and was called a prince since he can create things out of mid-air and is in constant full creative mode and fey creatures love that shit.

Again, not scared that my player will see this.

And again, DeeSkakuna is my furrny nickname I use for signing my works.

Enjoy.

[kiwibirb1]

My middle school Latin teacher had us write stories to increase our understanding of how the language was used (which was a very good idea especially when literature is all we have left of the language) and the pure unhinged things I wrote are amazing.

Grumio was cannibalized then sent off to the Fey, yes, the Fey, never seen again. Prompt was to include a cat by the way.

When we were learning about baths and toilet demons and all that good stuff I came up with the platypus mafia, who are wanted by Caesar himself, not just the empire. They snuck into other people's work too like they were off fighting dragons and shit.

There was one that was just biblical figures? Like we had to change the characters in an already written story and it just turned biblical.

Latin was amazing our class chant was "Multis Sanguis Fluit" because it was like th efirst thing we learned and actually absorbed.

[sagilsnonsense]

Here, you guys get some more odd ass doodles of fey Milo

One of them is him discovering that trolls are WAY more attractive than the man-made books make them out to be.

And the other is the very reason why you should never layer up on clothes when you already have a bunch of fur.

[pulchrasilva]

Lucky when you get to the Fey Ballet you need to add the image of Noise dragging Roman and Youngblood out of Neon by adding like. CATEGORY FIVE DUAL HAND HOLDING MOMENT

Oh I will I will 100%

[roleslayingweek]

Day 6

Today's prompts: Family and the Fey!

[theo-in-the-toaster]

Somehow I only just finished The Fey Ballet. I genuinely forgot that I hadn’t finished it until I was gonna send it to a friend. Now I’m crying cause like… Noise. Why? But also the frog calling Noise “the purple twink” and Roman and Youngblood just sorta going with it. They didn’t even react, they just immediately knew who he was talking about.

I really wanna draw the scene where Roman accidentally dips Noise but I can’t draw dynamic poses very well. Guess I’m gonna have to learn

[5am-the-foxing-hour]

Fey Remus and Fey Roman: *in a competition to see who can chop up their pile of wood into firewood the fastest* Patton *gathering the thrown about firewood into baskets so Janus can carry them to the woodshed*: Oh! Virgil, where are you going? Vampire Virgil *dressed up in a black cape and more vampire aesthetic look, compared to his more relaxed everyday wear*: Coven meeting. Shouldn't take longer than a week... Ugh I hate when the whole family get together. Too many people. Werewolf Janus: Good luck. Vampire Virgil: Thanks. I'm glad it only happens once every century. Patton: I keep forgetting you're really old, Virgil. Vampire Virgil: I'm younger than those two idiots *gestures towards Remus and Roman who are now hurling insults at each other*. Werewolf Janus: ... how old are they exactly? Witch Logan *basket of mushrooms at his hip*: The two of them are about as old as this forest, so a millennia give or take, but who knows really. They never give me a good answer. I'm starting to suspect they don't know it themselves.

[madgirlmuahaha]

Maya angst, here we gooooo!

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Y'all wanna know about a gender-non-conforming knight from 13th century France? No? That's okay- I'm fine with talking to myself.

I'm obsessed with gender performativity in early medieval texts- so obviously I had to know everything about Le Roman De Silence.

To preface-

So, long before there was the Marvel Cinematic Universe- there was the interconnected works of the Arthurian Legends. The original superheroes- King Arthur, Merlin, Morganna le Fey, and the rest of the cast. However, one of the lesser known (only arguably canonical) interconnected texts of the Arthurian legend hails from France. People argue over whether or not to include these texts as part of the cannon of King Arthur because it's technically french- and the french-english divide between characterization of all the main players of Arthur's court is remarkably different. Much research on this suggests the discrepancy of characterization is largely due to distance between where the stories originate, and sociopolitical tensions between the French and the English. Either people were too far apart to share stories- thus too far apart to keep characterization uniform, or they fucking hated each other enough to mess up the characterization on purpose. For example, many of the French portrayals of King Arthur paint him to be a rather terrible person, where English portrayals are generally more kind to him.

All that aside- many people will disagree that Le Roman de Silence should even be part of the Arthurian legend canon anyway- because it only mentions Merlin at the end of the poem and because it's a super french poem.

The main storyline is about this character named Silence. From the Old French Poem- Le Roman de Silence.

Gender? No- Never heard of it.

The latter half of the story in this poem is predicated on a complex mediation of Nature vs Nurture. What happens is that a baby is born into a wealthy family, and for sociopolitical reasons, the family decides to raise the girl baby as a boy. They name this child "silence." Silence grows up with full access to an education, as was typical for the boy children of aristocratic medieval families- this education becomes important later as Silence wrestle with where they fit into the larger social structure after maturing into adulthood. Essentially, they find the idea of marriage too boring and would like to be a Knight or Explorer instead. (I love them.) Anyway, it's fascinating to me that the conceptual ideas of nature and nurture are personified into being something like "deities" which are overseeing the growth of Silence through the ages- and so we get these deities commentary.

Silence wants to be a knight- so Nurture brags about being right that gender is more performative than it is biological. Then, later Silence grows up to be remarkably "pretty" and according to the deity of Nature- they brag about being right that biology and gender are intrinsically tied. It's such a thought-provoking mediation on gender as either performance or pure biology that I forget it was written in the 13th century- long before Freud or Lacan or any of the others who became hyper fixated on human presumption of gender as either a social category or a biological necessity.

I argued in a paper, once, that the narrative itself does actually finally end on the note that Gender is a performance, and it is tied into social roles only so the ruling class can have control of the population. That is why the stories ending shifts into horror-genre-esque of Silence marrying into the upper-ruling class.

I also have a strong urge to write a Fanfiction of Silence as a knight- who does not meet a sad fate but rather lives happily as a knight and eventually marries a princess. Okay- Okay? fine I said it. I said it-

Social pressure to marry?

The story takes a dark turn, however- when the King demands Silence to reveal themselves in front of the court. Obviously, even the author of the story was aware that misogynistic social standards would not allow for people to ever really be free of gender stereotypes and roles. So, Silence is then forced out of the adventurous lifestyle of a knight and into a marriage. Also, this is the place in the story where Merlin makes an appearance (I have a theory that Merlin is representative of the devil, and the author really hated that all AFAB people were forced into marriage back in 1200's. So that's why the devil shows up when all the bad shit is happening to Silence).

Inevitability and dismay-

What I find particularly interesting about this poem is the fact that the end, as Silence is forced into marriage and back into "proper" social roles for their assumed biological characteristics, is the fact that it is written like an early attempt at gothic horror!

So, one of the stipulations for something being a "gothic horror" is 1.) old, archaic, twisted buildings. (this blog is indeed named after my fixation with gothic horror elements, it's interplay relation to social reform, as its emphasis on decay as the tonal necessity for social indemnification). Anyway, the other most important aspect of gothic horror- is an overwhelming sense of desolation, isolation, and loneliness.

Sure, Silence is forced into marriage- but even with the forthright writing style of the author, we, as readers, are struck by Silence's loneliness. Thus, the "happily ever after" part of the storyline wherein the characters get married, as it traditional to chivalric romance, is recriminated against in subtext. Now, we have a moment in which the "happily ever after" is a creation of horror rather than peace.

Ending the narrative with marriage as equivalent to a loss of freedom and a sense of evermore-present loneliness, cumulating in the edifice of horror-struck fear in Silence at their own new future, is a remarkably bold social statement coming from a 13th century author.

I just think it's a really interesting text on the thematic points of negotiating Gender identity, in broader terms of performance and social roles, as much as it is a critique on the total social control that the monarchy held over the people of 13th century France.

Edit: I need to add that Silence themselves consistently rejects the idea that they are AFAB and instead only ever refers to themselves as "Silence" or "the knight"

[insanityclause]

“It must have been in about 1979, I was in New York on holiday. I was sitting up with a friend, and we were both stoned as owls.” Jane Wymark was retelling her brush with a piece of theatre history. She recalled the sound of a telephone cutting through the sour, rising smoke. Wymark answered. Distant and absurd on the other end of the line, a telegram message from her mother. “It said something like: ‘Wonderful job. Hamlet, please come home.’”

After several minutes of laughter, it occurred to Wymark that the call might not be a joke. “So I rung my mother up, and said ‘I’m really sorry if I’m waking you up in the middle of the night for no reason, but is this real?’ And she said, ‘Yes, come home right now, because they want you to play Ophelia.’”

Wymark was being parachuted into a production of Hamlet that was being talked about as among the best of the century. Derek Jacobi, a Shakespearean actor then in his forties and recently made famous by his star turn as the Roman emperor in the television series I, Claudius, was in the title role. In some quarters, Jacobi’s poetic, volatile performance was being talked about as the Hamlet of his generation.

A film of the production would be broadcast in America and viewed by more people at once than any in history. When The New York Times asked Jacobi how he felt knowing that a generation of viewers would come to consider his interpretation definitive, he replied: “That way lies madness.”

One night, Wymark recalled, the cast were taking their bows in the furnacelike auditorium. “By the time we got to the end of the show we were pouring sweat,” she said. “Well I wasn’t, because I’d been dead for a while, but Derek and the guy playing Laertes were just sopping. We’d done all the usual curtain calls and everything, and then Peter O’Toole comes wavering on to the stage.”

O’Toole, then almost 50 and skeletal-gaunt, was carrying in his hands a little red book. As the audience hushed he explained that the book was given to the actor who was considered the definitive Hamlet of his generation. When O’Toole had played the part in 1963, the actor Michael Redgrave had given him the book. Redgrave had been given it by someone else, a great actor of the previous generation, and now O’Toole was passing it on to Jacobi, who in turn could give it to whomever he pleased.

The notion that each generation has its definitive Hamlet is a critical will-o’-the-wisp that has dogged the play almost since it was written. The Edwardian essayist Max Beerbohm called Shakespeare’s most famous part “a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”, but only one actor in thousands gets to “give” his or her Hamlet in a professional production. “Everyone — great, good, bad or indifferent — wants to play Hamlet,” the actor Christopher Plummer once said.

Why? The question feels redundant. If you are someone who needs to perform, you are someone who needs to perform Hamlet. In Withnail and I, the 1987 cult comedy film about actors and their ambitions, the bloated, fey, lecherous character known as Uncle Monty has a short speech on the subject: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”

Earlier this year, I set out to find the red book.

As a trophy, a tradition, a secret succession, it seemed to embody some of the most romantic ideas about the part. I felt that in mapping its passage from player to player, I could trace a shadow history of the thing that has been driving the whole theatrical world for centuries: ambition.

This is what brought me to ask the retired Wymark about her encounter with the book. And this is how I eventually came to be standing outside a rambling, gabled cottage in north London, uncertain about whether to ring the bell until a vast Shakespearean sneeze told me I was at the right place. The door opened and I shook hands with a neat, elderly man who looked just like Derek Jacobi. The living room, decorated with antique furniture and hung with flower paintings, left an impression of a precisely chosen life. I said that I wanted to ask him about a red, leather-bound book, handed down from actor to actor, that had passed through his hands decades ago. I said he might be the oldest living actor to have held it in his hands. He furrowed an alpine brow and fixed his pale blue eyes on a tiny point just past my left eye. “Oh God,” he moaned, in an agony of remembrance. “It was a little copy of Hamlet . . . ”

Of course, there is no definitive Hamlet. This is true, and so obviously true that people have been saying it for hundreds of years. “There is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.” This is true! Hamlet is sour, obedient, suicidal, sarcastic, self-indulgent, flip and outright murderous before the end of his second scene. Modern scholarship has been wincingly keen to stress the heterogeneity of possible responses. As I once heard a professor say in a university seminar, should we be speaking of Hamlets, rather than Hamlet?

Perhaps. But we should also be honest: that sucks and we hate it. We also can’t ignore the genealogy of great Hamlets that exists, stretching all the way back to Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s star performer and business partner, for whom the role was written. That the character and the play are both radically unstable and look totally different in different hands seems to have made us more eager to pinpoint a single actor’s performance as the one. Producers, theatre managers, actors and journalists have connived to reinforce that idea.

Hamlet does offer an actor a scope and centrality that no other part does. “It’s the great personality role in Shakespeare,” Jacobi explained when we were sitting down, his hands conducting the silence around him as he spoke. He had settled in a winged leopard-print armchair, like a portrait of himself. On the side table was an Olivier Award, a small bronze sculpture of the great Laurence Olivier himself, the man who won both Best Actor and Best Picture for his 1948 film of Hamlet, and then launched the National Theatre in 1963 with a production of the play. “You use much more of your own personality as Hamlet,” Jacobi said, “rather than becoming Hamlet by going out and acquiring things. . . Hamlet will look how the actor looks, sound how he sounds, move how he moves. You play yourself as Hamlet.”

Jacobi first came to prominence as a teenage Hamlet, in an eye-catchingly serious schoolboy production at the Edinburgh festival fringe. In his early twenties he joined the germinal National Theatre and played opposite O’Toole’s Hamlet as Laertes. In his forties, he was given the red book by O’Toole, filmed in the role and toured the world. He was sworn to revenge under sheets of pelting rain outside the real Elsinore castle in Denmark. He soliloquised and played mad by the Egyptian Sphinx as the sun set.

A particular challenge of playing the part, Jacobi told me, is delivering lines so famous they risk breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief. In his production, the second act began with Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Unusually, it was played as a speech delivered to Ophelia, rather than on an empty stage. In Sydney, at the end of the tour, Jacobi was waiting nervously in the wings. “I thought, ‘This is probably the most famous line in all drama. What if I forgot it? What if I went on and my mind went blank?’ And I went on, and I started . . . 

“To be, or not to be, that is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or–

Or–

Or–

Or–”

Blinded to the astonishment of a thousand spectators by the force of the footlights, Jacobi realised he’d dried. Dried completely. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten the words. It was like he’d never known them. An entire minute of silence passed, until he was audibly given his line by Ophelia. Somehow, he got through the performance and the rest of the run. Afterwards, Jacobi didn’t go on stage again for two years. When I mentioned the incident, his eyes turned tight and hooded. He asked to talk about something else. Sensing my cue, I returned to the red book.

“Oh God. Rich!” he called into the next room. “Who did I give the book to?”

“You gave it to Ken Branagh,” called Richard Clifford, Jacobi’s partner, from offstage.

“Ken! I gave it to Ken,” said Jacobi. Then, calling back: “Who did Ken give the book to?”

“Tom Hiddleston!”

“Tom! He gave it to Tom.”

I asked how he had received the book himself and he went back into the trance of remembrance. “Now, I was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. And at the curtain call one night, Peter O’Toole came on to the stage with this book and gave it to me. And he had originally been given it by . . . Oh . . . ” He trailed off, unable to remember Redgrave.

“Oh!” cried Clifford from the kitchen.

“Oh!” cried Jacobi in the living room.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson. That was the name of the first owner of the red book. Forbes-Robertson was a legendary Victorian actor who played Hamlet into his sixties. The book itself was a Temple Shakespeare, a handsome reader’s edition of the play printed around the turn of the century and bound in red leather. He probably bought it in a West End bookshop, pacing around between rehearsals. Or so I’m told by Russell Jackson, an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham. “It would have been instantly recognisable,” he told me. “You can hold it more or less in the palm of your hand.”

In 1996, Jackson was working as a script consultant on a film of Hamlet directed by Branagh, who was then in the middle of a hurtling, flame-tipped ascent to near-unprecedented eminence among Shakespearean actors. As a leading man who had run his own theatre company and could direct and star in internationally released film adaptations of the plays, there was no one to compare him to but Olivier. He was now at work on a princely four-hour fantasia, shot amid fake fallen snow at Blenheim Palace with himself in the starring role.

He had cast his old hero, Jacobi, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle Claudius. On his last day of shooting, after the traditional applause that follows a final take, Jacobi asked for silence. Jackson kept a diary at the time: “[Jacobi] holds up a red-bound copy of the play that successive actors have passed on to each other, with the condition that the recipient should give it in turn to the finest Hamlet of the next generation. It has come from Forbes-Robertson, a great Hamlet at the turn of the century, to Derek, via Henry Ainley, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole and others. Now he gives it to Ken.”

Hamlet had been a pivotal document in Branagh’s life. As a teenager in 1977, he had seen Jacobi play the role at the New Theatre in Oxford. In his memoir, he remembers it as one of the moments that inspired him to become an actor. “I didn’t understand it at all, but I was amazed by the power of it because it seemed to be affecting my body. I got the shakes at times.”

Two years later, Branagh went to interview Jacobi, who was then playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. “I got a note from someone called Ken Branagh, saying, could he interview me for Rada’s magazine?” Jacobi told me, referring to the prestigious London acting school Branagh attended. “He was a personable young man. He asked good questions. As he left, he said: ‘I’m going to be playing Hamlet one day, and you’re going to be in it.’”

“Ken,” Jacobi added with a smile, “wasn’t slow in coming forward.”

It was no secret that Branagh had set his sights on matching, even reanimating, Olivier’s career. With his movie of Hamlet, he was threatening to run away with the crown. But while the film won plaudits from some critics, it made back only around a quarter of its budget, and Branagh was nominated only for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, a curiously backhanded compliment for a Hamlet that advertised itself as the complete text.

Branagh held on to the book for more than 20 years, passing over several acclaimed Hamlets (David Tennant’s agonised spectre foremost among them) in that time. “I took special pains to make sure it was preserved,” said Branagh, who was reached with written questions via an agent and an aide during the shooting of his new film. “I felt the book was something rather treasured and private, and not something that you in any way crowed about. You were a temporary custodian.” In 2017, he finally handed the red book on to the actor sometimes thought of as his protégé, Hiddleston.

So there it was. Redgrave to O’Toole to Jacobi to Branagh to Hiddleston. But still, something wasn’t adding up. I began desperately ringing round old actors asking for snippets of information about the red book, and started reciting the list of names from Jackson’s diary entry: Forbes-Robertson, Ainley, Redgrave, O’Toole, Jacobi, among others. Every time I read the list, everyone said the same thing. Where the hell is Olivier?

Here is a story about Laurence Olivier. Once upon a time, in the early 1800s, there was a great Shakespearean actor called Edmund Kean. He was the Hamlet of the Romantics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that watching him was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Kean was also renowned for playing Shakespeare’s other great soliloquist, Richard III. As the hunchbacked villain, Kean would rage and swagger and strut about, swishing a great sword in his hand. That sword was passed to William Chippendale, a member of Kean’s company. Chippendale gave it to an actor called Henry Irving, who gave it to the great Ellen Terry who, we understand, gave it to her great nephew. His name was John Gielgud. Gielgud gave the sword to his contemporary, Olivier, telling him to pass it on to the great actor of the next generation. And Olivier kept it.

He is rumoured to have been buried with it. Certainly, the sword has not been seen since his death. (One of the last people to see it was Jacobi, who confirmed to me that Olivier still had it as a very old man.) Is Olivier really lying in his grave with no tongue between his teeth and Kean’s sword beside him? If he is, it feels like a little parable about the sharp, inward points of ambition. Here was a man who got everything and more from a life in the theatre. But he couldn’t bear to part with a prop sword.

The question of why Olivier never received the book becomes more pressing when you read the letters he received playing Hamlet from the Edwardian actor Henry Ainley, the book’s second owner. On opening night, January 5 1937, Ainley telegrammed Olivier in his dressing room: “THE READINESS IS ALL.” Later that night he wrote: “You, my sweet, are the Mecca . . . Pay no heed to the critics, they do not know. You are playing Hamlet; therefore you are a king [ . . . ] You rank, now among the great.”

Ainley’s hornily free-associating letters seem to imply a physical affair at times. “Larry darling, I have been tossing (now now) about at night thinking of you,” he writes in one of the letters, currently kept by the British Library.

“Well, you know what you did. I can’t walk [ . . . ] And the child has your eyes.” Yet it is Olivier’s fame that Ainley most obviously covets. “Soon you will be like [me],” he writes in another. “Your public, your following all gone, dear old boy! The harlequinade. We do not endure!” There is no mention in their correspondence of the red book. Whether Ainley had already given the book away, or felt compelled to hang on to it, or simply had forgotten it, remains a matter of speculation.

It’s not the only agonising gap in the archive. In 1963, an older Olivier cast Peter O’Toole in the production of Hamlet that would open the National Theatre. O’Toole had already played a wild, revelatory Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958, in which he famously climbed the proscenium arch mid-performance. It was an interpretation that harnessed the young actor’s modernity. “He’s a lean, lank, individualist Teddy Boy!” one reviewer enthused.

But in 1963, Olivier had other ideas. “It was very strange,” remembers Siân Phillips, O’Toole’s then wife, now aged 91. “Larry [Olivier] had talked him into this terrible costume. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a Peter Pan collar and clean, beautifully cut dyed blond hair.”

Phillips thought Olivier seemed to want to trim the edges off her husband. “Larry had this new kind of concept of a very tidy Hamlet, which was the opposite of what [O’Toole] did best. But he had such regard for Larry, who was flattering him enormously. He just did everything asked of him.” Phillips had put her own starry career on hold to let O’Toole have the spotlight. She did his filing and kept track of gifts he had been given, making sure people were thanked, which was why she found it strange that she’d never heard of the red book.

Together, we wondered if the unhappy production had made it a sore point for her husband. “The thought did cross my mind once or twice that Olivier might be trying to sabotage him,” she said. “But how could he want to do that on the opening night of the National Theatre?” On the other end of the phone, I thought of Kean’s sword.

Perhaps this is harsh. Perhaps we can understand the desire to have and hold on to a physical token of fame, strength, adulation, applause, youth — the things that slip away from even the greatest artists. All performers live in fear of unemployment and redundancy, and even the successful ones are loved, fiercely and temporarily, for being someone they’re not. “Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing,” wrote William Hazlitt, the English essayist.

“British theatre has traditionally privileged innovation,” the Shakespearean scholar Michael Dobson told me. In France, he explained, you could see Phèdre performed with the same gestures, the same intonation, for hundreds of years. “The British are always inventing new things, like gas lighting and ways of doing ghosts with mirrors. It’s never the old, boring Hamlet your parents used to like. It’s always got this young, original, absolutely real actor in it, instead of those stylised old geezers.”

In which case, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about great actors who fell from fashion. It was Burbage who first delivered Hamlet’s acting advice to the players: “O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

Until the modern day, actors didn’t play big roles just once or twice in their careers, in a long run of performances. They performed them frequently. Even in Shakespeare’s time, actors became associated with certain parts in the minds of spectators. Burbage died in March 1619, and the funeral baked meats were hardly cold when he was replaced by another actor, Joseph Taylor.

An unreliable but enticing story has it that Burbage taught Taylor, and Taylor taught the next great Hamlet, Thomas Betterton. Betterton was the Hamlet of Restoration theatre, among the first to play opposite women. Confronting his father’s ghost, Betterton’s Hamlet could “turn his colour”, as though his face had drained of blood with fright. Betterton made his face “pale as his neck cloth”.

Betterton died in 1710, immortality assured. Within a few decades his reputation had been all but vaporised by the greatest actor of the century, David Garrick. Garrick was almost a religion among theatregoers. “That young man never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival,” was the poet and critic Alexander Pope’s verdict. Garrick was both a shameless showman and pioneering realist. He played Hamlet in a mechanical fright wig that made his hair stand on end when activated.

Garrick was replaced by John Philip Kemble, a severe and statuesque Hamlet. In the early 19th century, Kemble was outmoded by Kean, whose ascendant star was quickly selling out theatres. “Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got,” wrote Jane Austen, struggling to get seats. Out with the old. Next came Samuel Phelps, the actor-manager who first made a point of performing the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays. He was toppled by Henry Irving, a drawn and gothic actor. Irving was supposedly the inspiration for Dracula; his theatre manager was Bram Stoker.

Enter the melancholic, effeminate figure of Forbes-Robertson, the first owner of our red book. His Hamlet, first performed in 1897 and still being revived into his sixties, was in some ways the last definitive stage performance in this unofficial, highly debatable but surprisingly enduring tradition. “Nothing half so charming,” George Bernard Shaw wrote of his performance, “has been seen by this generation.” Orson Welles described one recording of Forbes-Robertson as the most beautiful Shakespearean verse-speaking he ever heard. You can still listen to it on YouTube, uploaded from an ancient LP.

“The next reference to the actor’s art,” creaks the old voice above the hiss of imperfectly transcribed sound, “is Hamlet’s advice to the players, written, obviously, by an actor who has complete command of his calling.” In a voice ponderous with time but still capable of lightness and precision, he begins the passage in which Hamlet gives notes to a theatrical troupe. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

Forbes-Robertson would have seen more clearly than many of his successors how rapidly the galaxy of theatrical ambition was expanding. He was the first great Hamlet to play the part on film, in a lumpy silent production in 1913. If that film looks stagey and stylised to modern eyes, then looking back at these nested revolutions in realism, it’s also obvious that old actors have always looked that way in the eyes of their successors. Naturalism is just the style each era brings with it.

Hamlet’s advice was itself part of this reach towards the endlessly receding goal of the real. To an Elizabethan audience, the travelling troupe with their heroic verse and stagey couplets would have seemed obviously to belong to a previous generation of players, one playwrights like Shakespeare, and plays such as Hamlet, were making redundant. Hamlet says to the players what the theatre is always saying: be young, be modern, be new.

You can’t ask too much of very famous actors. Basic professionalism demands that they don’t tell you anything too interesting. They live like criminals, travelling under pseudonyms and booking the front seat on aeroplanes. We abhor in their personal lives the basic human latitude we praise in their work. “I am myself indifferent honest yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,” Hamlet says to Ophelia. “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth?”

I had hundreds of questions for Hiddleston, the 43-year-old star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and current holder of the red book. Unfortunately, Hiddleston is not an easy man to reach. As the man who plays Loki in the Marvel series (global gross about $30bn), he has been watched at his craft by an unimaginable number of human eyes. He does his work in green-screen and widescreen settings that would also have been unimaginable to 90 per cent of the people named in this article. Where Burbage played Hamlet without an interval, Hiddleston’s fame is a postmodern mosaic, put together in franchise films with an average shot length of two seconds. Given that he commands multimillion-dollar fees for these acts of cinematic pointillism, you may imagine his time is precious. I was able to reach him by phone for 15 minutes during press week for Loki season 2’s Emmy campaign. “Good morning,” he said, dialling in from Los Angeles. “I mean, sorry, good evening.”

Hiddleston played Hamlet in a fundraiser production for Rada directed by Branagh in 2017. He told me how he had left drama school and joined Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl theatre company, standing out as Cassio in a somewhat legendary modern Othello, in which Ewan McGregor played Iago opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead. Branagh saw the production and persuaded Marvel studios to let him cast this relative unknown in Thor, which then grossed almost half a billion dollars. Afterwards, they sat down for lunch and Branagh suggested Hamlet. “And I said, ‘I would absolutely love to do it with you. What an honour.’”

The production played for three weeks in Rada’s tiny theatre, with tickets that were won by lottery. Among the critics, Michael Billington, Britain’s most decorated theatre writer, was one of the few to have got a seat. “If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury,” Billington wrote in his review. On Saturdays, Hiddleston remembered, there were gala performances for graduates and theatrical somebodies. “I think at the first one almost everybody with the last name ‘Attenborough’ in the UK was in attendance.”

On one of these evenings, a glass was clinked with a spoon. Jacobi began to speak, explaining something about a book that had passed from actor to actor. “And then Ken was at the microphone, explaining that the responsibility of the keeper of the book is that they pass it on to the next generation. And suddenly Ken said, ‘I’d like to present it to Tom.’”

We were 10 minutes into our 15. I looked at my list of questions — on frontispieces, annotations, signatures, printing quirks — about the red book. Hiddleston was in LA. The book was in London. He was not contractually obliged to talk to me, as he was to the other journalists who were waiting on iPhones all over the world. All that was sustaining this conversation was the actor’s private enthusiasm for the kind of acting he is rarely, if ever, able to do anymore.

Hiddleston began to talk at length. He said the gift of playing the part was to be presented with the most beautiful, profound poetry written in English about the question of being alive, of death, of the possibility of spiritual life after death.

An email arrived saying our time was up. “It has the effect of making me feel more alive,” Hiddleston was saying. “Learning and internalising those great soliloquies, and having to perform them, there is no escaping those big questions of what it means to be alive,” he went on, the minutes ticking by. “And actually I find it very reassuring to ask those questions. I find it repetitively reassuring to say those words. Because it actually makes your life mean something.”

[ruthryry]

A list of things that didn’t make it into Masculine Pursuits, on account of it was already Really Fucking Long:

The first person to blow their secret is actually Alan. Violet corners him and demands to know why Edwin is looking at him Like That. Alan makes the reasonable choice to admit to the foursome (unverifiable as an invisible intangible purple dragon in your garage) rather than fess up to being the Roman (ten years of public evidence, a warrant will turn up unpublished drafts).

Violet of course chats about this with both Jack and Maud. Jack, knowing that Robin will always be honest with his little sister, takes it upon himself to intervene with Maud before she can inflict the most uncomfortable conversation known to man on both herself and her brother. They still talk about it, obviously, but Jack deals with any gory details she tries to ask for and makes some suggestions about which dogs to just fucking let lie. Perils of sharing a friend group with your sibling! Sometimes you get up to sex party shenanigans and you just really don’t actually need your sister to know that you know what all your friends' junk looks like! It’s good to be honest, it’s also good to have boundaries about what sorts of questions you ask!

Robin is responsible for fessing up to Adelaide, though. She’s his wife, she’s still his typist, she runs his calendar, by proxy she half-runs Edwin’s calendar, and god was she upset by the idea of a “little get together” with “just the boys” before it was clarified that this was a sex thing rather than a sexism thing. It was a brief moment of fear that the friend group’s male contingent had gone off the deep end, but it was a very intense brief moment of fear.

On the night of the foursome the girls get together at Spinet House and… drink whiskey and smoke cigars. Maud’s not very good at it and it’s very cute. Maybe they switch to wine because whiskey is Terrible, Actually. Probably Violet blows a lot of very impressive smoke rings (that might just be illusion magic). No threesome because that’s not Addy’s bag but they do have a very nice time. Maybe Kitty is also there? I like Kitty so I say yes.

(Incidentally if I were to write a foursome with the women it would be Maud/Violet/Polly/Phyllis. I bet Polly can still Get It and am Interested in the kind of weirdo MILF domme that Phyllis-the-ancient-fey-hermit would likely be. Imagine the things that Maud and Violet can learn from those two ladies! Imagine Maud and Violet introducing them to the latest DevicesTM!)

In amidst the negotiations about sex Jack finds a bit of time to ask Robin how to go about telling Alan and Edwin that he’s going to buy them a small publishing house. He doesn’t want to hear their stupid conversations about grammar, but he does support their bordering on Marxist politics re: deciding that what magical Britain really needs more of is pamphlets supporting servant’s/gardener’s/women’s magic first and refusing to explain anything that can be easily turned to violence or control. He’s also (rightly) convinced that both Alan and Edwin will be mad at him for solving their censorship problems by throwing money at them. 

Alan absolutely does get to interview Robin about his past sexual adventures, which could theoretically turn into a whole series of Roman books. Edwin is a little bit surprised at exactly how much Robin downplayed the volume of his past sexual experiences, but of course, Robin isn’t lying when he says that a high volume doesn’t mean much in terms of quality. Future Roman novels include, of course, “a bloody-nosed boxing blowjob”, “gangbangs in the change rooms”, "sadomasochistic hazing", and “highly sexually charged initiation rituals”. Robin is delighted by the flights of fancy Alan takes in these books, and resists Alan’s desire to have any blatant implausibilities revised out before publication.

My wife and I debated at length about how much sexual experience Edwin had before Robin. Eventually I came around to her way of thinking: aside from the canonical mentions of furtive boarding school and university encounters, there was a period after his relationship with Jack where Edwin decides that he, you know, misses sexual contact/physical contact generally, and goes through a Sad Handjobs In Bathhouses Phase. He never really gets the hang of the nonverbal communication required for much more, but he does manage the Subtle Longing Stare often enough to get the occasional furtive handie.