Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare, by Greg Bell
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Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare, by Greg Bell
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This book is haunted. It chronicles a lifelong (and poetic) journey through the ghosts of the past toward William Shakespeare. Author & Shakespearean actor Greg Bell even calls himself "archaeologist of the invisible." Inside are a preface that admits to digging up the past and maps a trajectory, then the poetry: free verse, blank verse, Shakespearean sonnets-even a few excerpts of his solo play, Alms for Oblivion, in which Bell conjures up the Bard of Avon. Be prepared for paranormal phenomena!
Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare, by Greg Bell - Amazon Sales Rank: #2106075 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-26
- Released on: 2015-06-26
- Format: Kindle eBook
Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare, by Greg Bell About the Author As a playwright and Shakespearean actor, Bell has performed in several of the Bard's plays, including leads on stage in Troilus & Cressida, Henry V, Richard II, and the roles of Oberon and Theseus in A Midsummer Nights' Dream, as well as Prospero in The Tempest. However, his deepest insights into the immortal Bard began when he took on the role of Shakespeare at the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1984, continuing on through 1989. It was this challenging improvisational portrayal at the Faire (where he would be Shakespeare for eight hours a day), along with numerous film and TV parts as the Bard, that gave Bell his unique understanding of the man and his life in Elizabethan England. This fascination with Shakespeare and Bell's resultant inquiry into the 'authorship question' led inevitably to Bell's crowning work, the aforementioned Alms for Oblivion, where Bell would stand before audiences as Shakespeare for the entire play, thus personalizing and bringing alive this heretofore dry, vague historical figure, inviting audiences into a new and much more intimate relationship with the Bard. So far, Alms has been performed, as Bell says, "about a hundred times," and has played in California, Utah, Hawaii, and the UK. Here is what T.H. McCulloh of The Los Angeles Times had to say about Alms: [An] "insightful portrait, physically inventive, varied in tone and splashing joyfully over the playwright's life like a cascade of recalled incident and emotion... This is a Shakespeare as alive as his plays and sonnets, as much fun as a romp in the Forest of Arden, as full of truth and humanity as any character born through his pen." After Alms, Bell moved on to other projects: it took a critical illness and near-death experience, however, to renew his dedication to what he has to say about Shakespeare via the written and spoken word. This new book is the result, lavishly illustrated and beautifully layed out. Currently, Bell leads the Green Poets Workshop at Los Angeles cultural mecca Beyond Baroque. Says he, "We are the witnesses, the Jiminy Crickets of conscience, the agents of change, and we have a deal of work yet to do!"
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. It's an amazing feat of art By John S. Shakespeare has stayed alive in our culture because he helped make us what we are—his inventions of language and story; his plots and imagery have been continually rediscovered by every one of the 16 generations to have come since he died. It's an amazing feat of art, to write so richly as to be relevant and *entertaining* centuries later.Greg Bell has made a lifetime study of Shakespeare—who was, after all, a man, who used discernible, emulatable techniques to achieve his art—and has assembled here some of the notes from his journey. he says this book is "haunted" because it revives the spirit of Bell's quest. Good writing can be a kind of necromancy; not everything which rises from the magic circle on the attic floor is malign.And this book offers much of Bell's presence, too, which you'll enjoy. He's erudite, but he's funny (scholars are often made droll by desperation). He's an actor, but he's modest. He walks the reader alongside him as he worked on Shakespeare's texts over the years; as he acted the great parts in the great plays; and as he performed *as* Shakespeare in a one-man show, now lost to time, hélas.The book is thin because it's rich. It's cheap because our culture doesn't know how to spend money on the good stuff anymore. That'll come back when people rediscover how much fun a guy like Shakespeare can be. Greg Bell's a bit of fun, too. Give him a read—consider it, if not a balm, then an alm.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. CA 90048 Steve Goldman I have never read anything quite like Greg Bell’s intriguing and delicious little book By elkingo Looking For WillGreg BellIon Drive PublishingLA, CA 90048Steve GoldmanI have never read anything quite like Greg Bell’s intriguing and delicious little book, Looking for Will. A beautifully knit-together mélange of autobiography, (a singular literary quest consequent to poet Greg’s great idol and stylistic model: Shakespeare - who better?) and original poetry, beautifully, accomplishedly and successfully “Shakespearesque”. This is, you will allow: a hell of a risk, but Greg Bell brings it off. What’s more, this is a kind of fully poetic autobiographyTo write deliberately and avowedly in the manner of another poet, and carry it off, is apart from the obvious consummate homage value, an idea that may well need further exploration by today’s so widely vectored and disparate poets. I for one have always held that genius sometimes is constituted by knowing when not to be original. Mayhap we can stand more explicitly “on the shoulders of giants”.The book kicks off with an account of a 5 month hospital ordeal from some fell illness or condition that the doctors did not expect Greg to survive. His own personal to be or not to be – and, electing to live and succeeding at it, we have Greg and we have this book. But it is in the depth-space of that ultimate confrontation, - Greg calls it ontological and it is, that this book is fashioned. This is the very fundamental question of personal ontology, nicht war? Now since that enigma (death) is the ultimate concern of living, the ultimate tragic nature of life, thus a book so fashioned cannot lack significance and a kind of, well, powerful allure. And when confronted with this biggest of issues, it focuses the meaning of your life i.e. the proper calling of your work, in whatever time you have left. I know, this has befallen me. And Greg’s overriding passion, along with poetry itself of course, is the Bard, William Shakespeare.So we start off with a biographical underpinning, limning Greg’s – the accomplished actor’s – ongoing career of playing many roles, but none so awesome to him as Shakespearian leads, say Henry V for example. From his first assumption of the role of Shakespeare himself at the Faire in Agoura, CA – when he realized that the Bard’s greatness is beyond the power of mere mortals to even approach --, it seems obversely if not paradoxically to have freed him to write “Shakespearian” poetry. This included pilgrimages to immerse himself in Shakespeareana - at the original sites of all those Elizabethan doings in England. Stratford on Avon, etc. (And there is a lesson in this, Dear Fellow Poet: forget about your stature, now or ever, which you cannot perceive anyway. Your job is to get your stuff right. You’ll know when it is (ain’t saying it’s other than bitch-hard) – because that alone is what is given to us.Greg attains to a true Shakespearean rhetoric. That rhetoric is the mightiest we have in English poetry – this pretty much by common consent. I think we only see the like in the Bible, the Ancient Greek corpus and those are translations for most of us, and a handful of other poets. If you don’t know what I mean by mighty rhetoric, by high poetry, go look at your copy of the Gettysburg Address.Somewhere along the line, Greg penned the play (he’s a playwright too) Alms for Oblivion, which treats of the perennial “authorship” question: did Will write the plays or did someone else? (At this point I must observe that Wm. Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him: these were written by another Elizabethan poet of the same name and birth and death dates, also in Stratford on Avon.)Now all of that is prologue: this is a book of poems and related items, so let’s get to cases.The opening poem The Earth Corroborates My Find serves as a more tightly focused intro to Greg’s quest: an early station of the “Shakespearean Cross” for him: broadcasting his joy at acquiring a complete Shakespeare at the Harvard Coop, with an ensuing survey and celebration of the plays. This is a closely knit not exactly Shakespearean poem: Greg has range as a poet. “…But winter’s chill is overcome // by the warmth of this my find // for all but the apocryphal plays // are now at my fingertips…”The book is also characterized by a sort of running commentary, largely a chronology of where, when and how the poems occurred. These and other creative works yield prose connective tissue explicitly or de facto. , also handily acquitted. Thus his solicited paean to San Francisco is his first sonnet. That’s right - sonnet – this is neo-Shakespearean prosody, so expect sonnets - we hear: “… Of a city that doth heights inspire: // With her beauteous sights, her windy passion // Her voluptuous anatomy, // Bequeathing brisk caress in lover’s fashion…”A note on this poet’s prose style: buoyant, lilting, tender, witty and never cloying. In mentioning the last day of school, a propos a visit there at the Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, (Shakespeare’s own and still in continuous operation,) Greg allows “Here they were again (the kids) trying to cool down, ties loose, blazers off, cherub-cheeked, buying sodas and sweets and somehow I gleaned that it was the final day of school. Aroint & Carpe Diem”. See what I mean? And as well, what a lovely suggestive invocation of the perennial continuity of the great, should I say “eternal” Shakespeare!In one of the many excerpts from the aforementioned play Alms for Oblivion, the character Will Shakespeare (who else?) tells of his departure from Stratford: “…When I left Stratford Town with the players, the voluble part of me did reason thus; ‘twas the fittest way to find out Dame Fortune and redeem the family honor…”Snazzy in’it? Credible and valuable Shakespearean rhetoric here too. Even this narrative prose/ cum dialog is poetic.And what deliberate evocation/emulation of the Bard would be complete without a love poem uh, sonnet? This from Mothering Day, an oblique and witty one honoring the mother of the beloved on Mother’s Day. I find this sly obloquy suggestive of Will S. itself. “…So do we honor Gaia and Cybele? // Yea, but yet, the goddess, I aver: // ‘Twas a woman bred thee, bore thee, birthed thee // And tendered thee, O let us honor her…” and of course an elegant closing rhymed couplet: “Tell me this, my sisters and my brothers, // Where would be with our mothers?” So not only obliquely a sonnet to the “(dark?) Lady of the sonnets”, but to all women, to the goddesses, to the Earth Mother, to the eternal feminine. And all while plausibly Shakespearean.And yet this assay, poems, excerpts from a play and occasional pieces cleaves together harmoniously, in the manner of a suite – a heterogeneity of objects – and here formally heterogeneous elements as well – thematically and aesthetically one. Get and read (yes, Amazon, the Beyond Baroque Bookstore, Barnes and Noble and your favorite local bookstore) this oddly pleasing delight. Zounds!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Elements so mixed By Drowsy Maggie This is a pleasant little book apparently intended for friends and companions with whom the author worked the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura and Blackpoint, California in the 1970s and 1980s. Like the faire, it is anarchic, a little subversive, spun out in a merry stream of consciousness that stops and starts and stands aside from time to time while we all have another beer, then seems to forget where it was going. The first half is a kind of memoire including his acting career, his love of Shakespeare and all things Elizabethan, a play he wrote and directed, adventures at the Faire where for many years he portrayed William Shakespeare, and a trip to England “in search of the Bard”. But while his enthusiasm is palpable, the telling of it is all too brief. The experience flickers by. Many people are named without introduction, as if we should know them already, and many events are merely glanced at or overwhelmed by sidebars. I’m afraid I found this part rather unsatisfying.The books concludes, however with a beautifully designed and laid out chapbook of Greg Bell’s excellent verse. The poems – a number of sonnets, some free verse with classical resonance, and other works – are skillful, sensitive pieces in which I believe we hear a deeper, more genuine voice than in the memoire.
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