Second-guess my love of danger
I always wondered what "Second Edition, Revised" meant in all the copies I'd ever seen of The Lady's Not for Burning, including the one I bought for myself in college and the one with which I became engaged. Turns out it means the green-bound first edition I discovered this afternoon in Raven Used Books is a lot like a first draft. It's a hardcover of the usual dimensions from Oxford University Press; it has a foreword by Fry—not included in later editions—dated January 1949 and from the very first page the text is different. Not everywhere, and sometimes not hugely, and the shape of the play is still the same, but sometimes it's a word altered and sometimes it's a speech and sometimes it's a whole chunk of dialogue. In all cases I could recognize I prefer the revisions. I think this text must belong to the very first production of the play, the two-week run at London's Arts Theatre in March 1948, starring Alec Clunes; the Globe production starring John Gielgud (and Pamela Brown and Richard Burton and Claire Bloom and I know there's an audio recording, but I still want that time machine, with an option on the night Esmé Percy's glass eye came out while he was alleluia'ing it up as Matthew Skipps) didn't go up until May 1949. It was like discovering manuscript Housman. After making a phone call, I took it home for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch.
Meanwhile, the mail has brought me, courtesy ofyhlee, Kristina Sabaliauskaitė's Vilnius Wilno ווילנע: Three Short Stories (2016) trans. Romas Kinka, which two stories in is amazing and reminds me of selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), which I just consider another reason everyone should read that book. I had lunch with a_reasonable_man and we talked about the New Deal and Gabriel Over the White House (1933). When I got off the bus at the top of School Street, the sky on the western side of the train tracks was the smoky warm rust I associate with Childe Hassam's At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight) (1885–86). Rob made steak and shortcut risotto (rice cooked with the last of the sherry mushroom cream sauce) for dinner and I just finished the last of the apple crisp I made with the ginormous quantity of Cortlands and McIntoshes my cousins and skygiants picked in late October. I have been hearing train whistles all evening.
Autolycus thinks that if I am on the couch, obviously what I want is a cat on my lap, and if I am at my desk, obviously what I want is a cat on my shoulder, and either way he makes it very difficult to type. He is a good cat. I work on being here.
spatch.Meanwhile, the mail has brought me, courtesy of
yhlee, Kristina Sabaliauskaitė's Vilnius Wilno ווילנע: Three Short Stories (2016) trans. Romas Kinka, which two stories in is amazing and reminds me of selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), which I just consider another reason everyone should read that book. I had lunch with a_reasonable_man and we talked about the New Deal and Gabriel Over the White House (1933). When I got off the bus at the top of School Street, the sky on the western side of the train tracks was the smoky warm rust I associate with Childe Hassam's At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight) (1885–86). Rob made steak and shortcut risotto (rice cooked with the last of the sherry mushroom cream sauce) for dinner and I just finished the last of the apple crisp I made with the ginormous quantity of Cortlands and McIntoshes my cousins and skygiants picked in late October. I have been hearing train whistles all evening.Autolycus thinks that if I am on the couch, obviously what I want is a cat on my lap, and if I am at my desk, obviously what I want is a cat on my shoulder, and either way he makes it very difficult to type. He is a good cat. I work on being here.
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O my! What a glorious find! It wanted to live with you.
Nine
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I didn't even know a published version of that text existed! I would love to know about the process of rewrites. The additional copyright date of 1950 in the second edition makes me think it might have continued through New York.
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https://www.tor.com/2009/03/19/we-havent-got-there-yet/
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Hell yeah.
Nine
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I don't see the problem here.
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I can try to put together a comparison of the variant passages, although I suspect not this weekend.
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So, how did you like them apples?
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Quite a lot, thank you. They baked extremely well.
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Autolycus thinks that if I am on the couch, obviously what I want is a cat on my lap, and if I am at my desk, obviously what I want is a cat on my shoulder, and either way he makes it very difficult to type. He is a good cat.
Heh, indeed!
(Time-travelling theatre trips are clearly a niche wing the tourist industry needs to invent asap. My flister
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Totally unexpected. I am glad/amazed no one else snapped it up.
Time-travelling theatre trips are clearly a niche wing the tourist industry needs to invent asap.
Amen!
What are some of the productions you want to see?
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Oh, it varies! But mainly things with my favourite people in that happened many decades ago.
ETA: To answer properly, I mean, for today, we'll go withJames Maxwell as the Duke in Measure for Measure at the Old Vic (which was the final play of the final season as That Incarnation of the Old Vic) and as Prospero in The Tempest for the Royal Exchange, or the 69 Company, I forget which (and Journey's End, also for the 69 Company). And also the Birminham Rep Henry VI for Alfred Burke, because I'm curious from reviews. (Among my favourites, he's a very fine actor, very modest, generous, very restrained, but he also has fantastic intensity & I am v curious to see if he ever really went right over the top with it. The reviews of that Henry sound as if maybe he did there, as his death scene was apparently the highlight of the London performances.)
But I'm always adding things and crossing stuff off the list - and, of course, we need to stop off at all the TV archives and rescue things before they can junk them. (I have an even longer list for that.)
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Saffron thinks that if I'm anywhere at all I want a cat on my collarbone. She is too long for my lap, but the collarbone works; it merely requires at least one arm and sometimes two, if she goes to sleep and becomes boneless, to support her in the manner to which she has somehow become accustomed. Like Autolycus, she is a very good cat, and like you, I try to live up to that.
P.
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I didn't realize that had substantial variation!
I agree with you about the superiority of the revisions, but it's an amazing look into Fry's thinking processes to see him working so minutely at the text.
Agreed. The timing makes me think that the Globe production (and possibly its New York transfer) must have been a factor. I should see what Gielgud says about it.
She is too long for my lap, but the collarbone works; it merely requires at least one arm and sometimes two, if she goes to sleep and becomes boneless, to support her in the manner to which she has somehow become accustomed.
I can hold Autolycus on my shoulder with one arm if he falls asleep, but that doesn't really help the typing situation.
You have lovely cats.
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I was not in any way expecting it, including the part where it exists in the form it does!