We Are So Blessed To Have A Recording Of Ronald Colman Reading All The Shakespeare Sonnets... Like, Wow,

We are so blessed to have a recording of Ronald Colman reading all the Shakespeare sonnets... like, wow, that's crazy...

This is the human skull used as Yorick's skull in the Royal Court Theatre's acclaimed production of Hamlet directed by Richard Eyre, starring Jonathan Pryce as Hamlet, which opened on the 2nd April 1980. The skull was signed by many of the members of the cast and production team before it was offered as a raffle prize, presumably by the theatre.

The most popular image of Hamlet is that of the solitary figure of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull, despite the fact that when Hamlet holds it he is with the gravedigger and Horatio. The incident comes from the graveyard scene in Act V scene 1, where Hamlet takes Yorick's skull from the gravedigger and says to Horatio: 'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.' That moment has somehow become emblematic of the play, and is often misquoted as: 'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well'. The critic Francis King, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, 6 April 1980, noted that when Pryce picked up the skull: 'it wasn't with the usual wistful regret for human mortality but with a childish glee'.

she let slip on my dogs of war til i cry 'havoc!'

‘Our drama class did an excursion to the Melbourne Theatre Company.

‘I saw a production of Richard III which had this Australian actor called Ewen Leslie in it who is one of my favourite actors.

‘It was just amazing, I remember watching and being like ‘whatever he is doing is so incredible and so inspiring, maybe I could do that’. We were doing a production of Richard III at school and I was playing Richard. It was obviously such a vastly smaller scale but I was so inspired by what the production was offering and what he was doing.

‘Then from that point, I went to university in Melbourne instead of going to acting school. I didn't have the courage to try to get into drama school at that point. I don't know what it was that was stopping me, maybe a lack of self-belief which I still struggle with. It wasn't until three years later I plucked up the courage to go and audition for drama school. Luckily I got in, but even then looking back I didn't tell anyone I was auditioning.

‘Then I eventually found out I got in and that was a whole big moment in itself because I had to face the prospect of leaving. The school I auditioned for was in London so I had to face the prospect of changing my life.’

— Charlie Vickers, Boys By Girls, 5 September 2022

(see quotes from Richard III, one of the plays used to audition for Sauron)

Shakespeare fans: we really need a fandom tag so we don’t have to sort through pages upon pages of quote posts. Y’know how the Greek classics people have #tagamemnon? We need something like that.