Great Aunt Joan

She wasn't religious, or married and had no children. She worked and travelled, and delighted in new discoveries. She went her own way. She was small and steadfast and strong; and her strength has become mine: galvanised by the way she lived. She was witty and wise, and I will miss her. I already miss her.

We watched The King’s Speech one Christmas, which she enjoyed ‘although, I don’t actually remember the speech they’re all going on about. But then we were being evacuated at the time, so we had other things on our mind.’ She remembered singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King’. 

She went on to college and graduated as a teacher to deaf children. It was strictly forbidden at that time to use sign or even gesticulate too much so that children were forced to learn to lip-read, and she learnt to teach with her hands in her pockets.

She stayed curious and captivated by learning her whole life. There was hardly a time when she wasn't on a course, whether restoring Ancient pottery or reading Modern literature 'not really my period, I think I shall stick with my 18th century, I know all of them.'

She was stoic and private but also acutely astute and social.

Our last conversation before she went into hospital was about the trouble she was having with her iPad, which she had bought because 'as far as I can tell, if you're not on the email you may as well be dead'.

She had a smile that made her whole face turn upwards towards her eyes. Her laugh was simultaneously generous and knowing: a gleeful acknowledgement of ‘yes, I see what you did there’.

The last time I saw her was at the theatre, she had come to see me perform. At the top of the show we asked the audience to make little plasticine protestors and placards (it was a show about activism). Aunt Joan was not going to be rushed. ‘I don’t like all this pressure’ she declared to anyone attempting to badger her. I made a point of reading the placard she had given her protestor ‘No Bullying.’

She took herself to hospital during her first heart attack. On the bus. I went to see her in hospital and when I asked her what she wanted from her flat she replied 'Reading material. There's a copy of The Odyssey in the bookcase, bring that'. I laughed and asked if she wanted anything a bit lighter. 'Now's as good a time as any for Homer, don't you think?' came the reply.

I find myself wanting to use the word ‘delight’ over and over again. She delighted, brought delight, was delightful. She took pleasure, unapologetically. And was equally nonplussed about not going along with anything she didn’t want to. ‘We’re going for a walk in town Aunt Joan, fancy it?’ [Great Aunt Joan peers at the blizzard outside the window]. ‘No thank you.’ [Turns the page of her book, looks up, smiles].

She was born in Kennington, but for as long as I have known her she lived in Highgate. In a little crows nest of a flat at the top of the hill, on a clear day you could see the Eye winking from the Thames. She loved living in Highgate. ‘Victoria Wood lives in Highgate, sometimes you’ll see her out and about but nobody bothers her.’ When I lived in Muswell Hill, we would meet for lunch. She didn’t drink much anymore, ‘that’s the thing about getting old, you can’t do as many of the things you enjoy. But you must have a glass of wine, and I shall take pleasure from yours.’

She couldn’t drink proper coffee anymore either, but didn’t count instant ‘which is more of a coffee flavoured drink’.

‘Was it the years of drinking too much coffee when you were teaching that has stopped you drinking now?’

‘Yes’ and then after a pause ‘and all the gin’.

 

Have I said she was small? She was the size of a grande latte, which meant losing her in a crowd was almost guaranteed. I turned around for one minute in the British Museum, and that was it, she’d disappeared. ‘I don’t much like that photograph taken with your father, your Gran and I look like a couple of smurfs.’

 

But she was also a giant. If you try and follow her footsteps now you will see, by a trick of perspective, that in fact you can never span the full breadth and length of the imprint she left on the earth.

One of the last voicemails she left me was in typical Great Aunt Joan form. She didn’t want to make a fuss ‘we’ll revert to Plan A, I’ll give you a wave and then disappear.’ 
And then last week, she died. Suddenly, and without fuss, she disappeared.

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

- Homer, The Odyssey.

On you go Great Aunt Joan; I’m following right behind you, with my face turned upward to the sky.

Going off-script: real life ad-libbing.

In the show I’m currently touring we open by asking members of the audience to make a plasticine version of themselves as they enter the theatre. Last night in Alnwick a gentleman came up to me during this initial pre-amble to protest that he ‘comes to the theatre to be entertained by the performers and not the other way around’. On leaving he let it be known that he still prefers ‘plays with a script’, which we took as a gratifying compliment. Thing is, we do have a script, but we’ve also got carte blanche to meander from it according to whatever is happening in the room during each performance: heckling, phone calls, stage invasion - all actions are gleefully incorporated into the show. We’ve done our jobs well when even the scripted bits feel as if we’re improvising.

Yet again I find myself comparing this experience to the theory around life scripts. This weekend on my psychotherapy course we explored our own life scripts [meaningful face]. The psychotherapeutic counselors among you will be familiar with the ‘this is your life as a play’ exercise, for the uninitiated: essentially, you imagine your life as a play.

To envision the First Act of our life play we are led by the course tutor to imagine the stage onto which our life is set. What kind of play are we watching? Who are the main characters? What is the atmosphere? Act One ends with the beginning of adolescence.

The theatre maker in me was already on guard for any Chekhovian weaponry adorning the flats. (Anton Chekhov’s remark about playwriting that ‘if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, it must be fired before the end of Act Three’ is one of the oft quoted golden rules for making theatre, along with Aristotle wanging on about time, and if you’re going to tour a show, three is the biggest cast you can fit in a van). Of course because life scripts are by definition ‘unconscious’ it might not have helped the exercise that I was cognitively analyzing my life script with such professional interest. I found myself resisting the reflex to imagine a proscenium arch stage with obligatory red velvet curtains, yet despite the fact that I can count on one hand the times I have performed on such stages in my career, this stereotype is what sprung to mind when asked to ‘imagine a stage’. In a small way this is an example of how life scripts work: an inherited idea with which, despite present-day resistance, we are compelled to comply.

The Second Act of our life plays took us up to present day. After the fight-dance choreography item of my late adolescence I found myself turning to the box and asking for the house lights to be switched on and the red velvet curtains taken down. I stood on the lip of the stage, conscious of being higher than the stalls and not wanting to be, conscious of ‘being in a play’ and not wanting to be. As we took a break to notice what we had conjured in our respective life-plays my mind wandered as I wondered about the connection between my desire to break the fourth wall in both my ‘life play’ and work in general.

So much of the theatre being made now that excites and engages me enacts this deconstruction of inherited convention. The artists I look up to are the ones you don’t literally look up to from the stalls – they’re on the threshing floor with you, in this moment, in the same room, and they’re talking to you. Not yesterday’s audience, not the audience they imagined in rehearsals, but the living-breathing-right-here-now audience. In a sense, the theatre I’m interested in making is theatre that is interested in breaking it’s own inherited script.

I’m thinking of Steiner’s assertion that life script is ‘a life plan which is rigid and unchangeable. Like the lines of a play, a life plan expects to be followed word by word from beginning to end and allows for little improvisation. A script is written by somebody else and like actors in a play we feel bound by ourselves and others to act the part to the bitter or happy ending’ (Steiner C, 1979, Healing Alcholism).

Far be it for me to contradict the man who brought us ‘Warm Fuzzies’ but there are plays that allow for a bit more than ‘a little improvisation’, in fact there are plays that allow some of the script to be created live each night. I happen to be in one. I concede the ending is always (necessarily) the same, and to that extent it is absolutely scripted, however the care taken to make it feel like it might not be, speaks to the desire to ‘break script’ and act according to the moment, to be truly ‘live’. It is pleasing that the same language when applied to breaking life scripts describes people who are wholly a-live.

To imagine one’s Third Act is to contemplate the type of ending you feel your life play is heading toward. ‘Ah’, I thought, as I returned to the mind-theatre I had just flattened at the end of Act Two, what to do now then? Make it about the audience, I supposed. Let some of the audience onstage. Go and sit amongst the others. ‘What happens next?’ Well I have no idea - it entirely depends on who else is in the room. ‘How does it end?’ Well I guess I’ll leave, at ground level, probably through a fire exit, I might afford myself a Hollywood-esque backward glance, perhaps I’ll sight a space once called ‘a stage’ filled with people getting on with stuff. Maybe I’ll have played a part in starting that.

[Curtain]

On why I owe Sam West a pint...

If any of you are within elbowing distance of Sam West, give him a little nudge for me, and tell him Beaumont owes him a pint.

In May 2012 I packed my bags, and everything else, and left London by mistake. The flatmate was headed to the seaside and I thought I might stick my stuff in storage, gan hyem for a few weeks, and then head back to the smoke for Round 3. 

My stuff is still in storage. 

Albeit a different storage unit in a different city, but there are still pairs of shoes I haven't seen since before the London Olympics, and to be honest, I haven't really missed them.

Thing is, a couple of days after I got home for my unintentional-life-change-that-I-thought-was-just-a-holiday, Sam West re-tweeted 140 characters that would 
*cue swell of bathetic music* get me a job, in the first instance. (Life change is gradual, stop getting ahead of yourselves).

Some lad from Middlesbrough who seemed to have a bit of a thing for milk, wanted to meet artists with links to the North East for a show he was making about demonstration.

'I've got links to the North East' I thought, 'I can be an artist when I concentrate. Climate change? I'm against it, in the main...' I mused, as I clicked on the link...

Nearly two years later, the show we started making that summer got me through the door of three regional theatres, up to Edinburgh, and back out on tour: we open in Norwich tonight.  (It's called How to Occupy an Oil Rig, it's for anyone who ever wanted to change anything and you get to play with plasticine). 

In between times I've got in the habit of playing Geordie lasses; so convincingly, that I think I might have become one. 
And thanks to that particular Edinburgh community and one very particular regional theatre I think I might be on my way to being a proper artist as well.

My first solo show will preview this July (almost exactly 3 years after that fateful retweet). And as I step out to say what I want to say to an audience, in my own distinctive mash up of northern vowels and expatriate consonants, I'll have finally come home. 

Yeah. Sorry, I know this is really twee, but when you spent your whole childhood thinking home was more of an idea that an actual place, the possibility of having an artistic home (I'm looking at you ARC) is pretty fucking special, and I'll have all the John Williams orchestral interludes I like, thank you very much.

*cue Cello solo*

And I am looking for an actual home too. In Gateshead, as it happens. I'm putting down roots on the same bus route as me Nanna and Granda's auld hoose. Turns out that dreaded old question 'where are you from?' is just as much about where you are going. 

Speaking of which, here are our tour dates http://www.danielbye.co.uk/how-to-occupy-an-oil-rig.html, come along if you want to know how to change everything. 

Change gets a bad press, but I strongly recommend it.

These are the places I will always go

If there's a theme tune to the trip to Oban - this would be it. The piano hammers bouncing harder the higher we climbed in our borrowed car, further and further into the mountains and away. Hearts lifting and lightening with every mile. The weather level: Scottish. We laughed in the face of gale force winds, we cackled at snow-rain-sleet. We were going on holiday damn it, even if it killed us. Those were the kind of giggles ringing round the metal and then out the window into the wind; swooping over lochs and bridges, and down into the valleys.

Weather. I'd already vowed to buy plastic trousers by the time we'd swam across the carpark at motorway services outside of Ecclefechan. 

I went to the wild West (of Scotland) for new year, with one of my wisest, kindest, lucky-to-know-her friends from way-back-when. And we chugged into the mountains, and ate cheese sandwiches by the loch in Luss where the river path was more river than path.

We pressed on, further than we'd ever been before, under clouds that trap red and yellow light on the snow-capped mountains. We chased a triangle of blue sky all the way to Oban. Which, by the way, is something to behold. The A85 ripples over one final hill before she reveals the treasure cove below. By the time we got there the town was full of glittering lamplight allure. It had finally stopped raining.

The next day we walked. Into the town and then out of it. The light. The light under Scottish skies sings colours. The light clangs against your pupils and makes your head ring like a bell.

Unlike the whisky. Which, when taken correctly, as prescribed, will cure all matters physiological and philosophical. 

New Year's Day meant walking boots, two castles, one mystical rock, nine miles over beach, hill and road, dodging children on quad bikes, acres of air, only a bit of rain, and two blisters. 

And then crash-bang-wallop we're back in the car and heading South, but not down, because these are the places I will always go - later this year when reality bites back, these are the places I will always go. I am on my way. I am on my way. I am on my way back to get things started...

Does my psyche look big in this?

WARNING: This blog displays potential VPL (Visible Phenomenological Life)

 

 

I'm a big fan of metaphors in the main: handy, visual maps for slippery thoughts and stark concepts. But what if your whole life were a metaphor for what you really want? What if every decision you ever made was made 'as if' you were making it, and was actually just a map for the 'real' neural pathways being stumbled upon by your 'true self'? yes, I have recently started a course in psychotherapy, what of it?

I'd written the first draft of a script and got interested in the story I wanted to tell and the way I wanted to tell it.

Act One, Scene One, Draft One:
 

A storage unit, piled high with boxes and bits of furniture.

A woman walks into the space, she knows this place, it is hers.

Two boxes explode behind her. Confetti flutters to the floor.

The woman watches the confetti fall, raises her face to the audience and begins to speak.
 

Heroine: Ignore them. A couple of titans I locked up year's ago. And now they're pissed.
 

It doesn't take a head doctor to guess what might be going on here, but as I grapple with being as readable (and predictable) as a dog-eared paperback, an exciting new chapter begins... Chapter 30, 'Changing the script'.

Scripts aren't just satisfying thud-makers on an actor's doormat. Turns out 'scripts' are also what psychotherapists term 'an unconscious life plan made in early childhood and based on decisions made in response to external influence and internal vulnerability.' (Christine Lister-Ford). Like, I don't know, becoming an actor to legitimise being a precocious little show off, perhaps. Ergo, my career choice was effectively determined by a three-year old. Which is to say, I'm 30 going on 3. Send help! And a snuggle blanket!

This stuff is the best kind of wisdom: new knowledge you have a familiar fuzzy feeling that you already knew.
 

Of course, I might choose to continue being managed by my infant agent (it has it's benefits) but once you draw back the curtain and acknowledge there's a tiny wizard crouching behind your big head- pulling levers and ruling Oz, it's only polite to strike up a conversation:
 

Me: Err hello. What are you doing here?

Little Wizard: Pressing the buttons for making the show.

Me: What show?

Little Wizard: My show. Silly.

Me: Have you always been here?

Little Wizard: Yeees. DON'T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!

Me: Umm-

Little Wizard: Go and get your own buttons, these are my buttons.

Me: Can we share the buttons?

Little Wizard: [frowns, firmly strokes the top of a shiny red button with her right index finger]

Me: ...

Little Wizard: You can press... that one. [points to a tiny round topped button, worn silver with over use].

Me: What's this one do?

Little Wizard: Makes the big head laugh. [giggles]

Me: [laughs] Can I press it now?

Little Wizard: No dafty, this is serious.
 

Self exposure in my world is supposedly par for the course. Being a performer I am used to the idea of exposing myself- physically, emotionally, intellectually. And yet. We kid ourselves that being an actor, for the most part, means being in control of what people see, in order to make them think or feel something we intend. Now re-read that sentence but substitute the word actor, with the word 'adult', and welcome to my present world.
 

And many of us are used to the idea that no matter what we intend, our performances will be perceived according to whoever's doing the perceiving. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that. Or grief, or fury. And sometimes we play one feeling and mean another, because we want to be perceived but also create unease, or allure, or... But other times no matter what we intend people see what they want to see or what they're ready to see or what they expect to see, forever and ever Amen.
 

So what of the stuff that is perceived but not intended? The buttons pressed by little wizards or knarly old witches for that matter, that we don't know are being pressed. Maybe it is because I'm a performer that I find this idea terrifyingly exposing. 'You mean I've been out there with my pants down this whole time? And nobody told me?!' The only thing for it is to unpack some of those exploding boxes, calmly, methodically and gently. Unpack them, catalogue the contents, archive what's no longer relevant, and leave everything else within easy reach. Especially pants.
 

I'm up to the fourth draft of my script (performance script that is, there's no draft for the life script, just one very long performance).

 

[Kathryn enters with a backpack and a bottle of water]
 

Hello. [say something about expectations of this audience before coming onstage, and what she feels now she can see them].

 

Can I start?

 

Is everything ready?

 

Ok.

 

The thing about life scripts is they have predictable endings: according to the games people play in order to fulfil them. I'm hoping the same won't be said of my final draft for the show (whatever number that will be). Mind you, a wise man told me recently 'you haven't written a script, you've written material for development.' Perhaps that's a concept I can apply to my psychotherapy course too - it's not a life script, it's the 30th year of material in development.

I hope I didn't just give away the ending.

 

 

 

 

Some Brand new thoughts. Some good. Some bad.

Before we change the world, we need to change the way we think

I’ve really tried not to say anything about the recent re-branding of a certain verbose celebrity hair-raiser. But I’m sorry, I can’t help it, Brand new revolutionary rhetoric is everywhere and it’s stirring something that makes me feel conflicted, like I might be betraying myself or the sisterhood or something.

He was right, what he said about social injustice and the disenfranchisement of anyone outside of the spam-head political classes. That’s all true, and the way he said it, it has a charm: the multisyllabic clackety clack of that Essex jaw, has a certain je ne sais pourquoi vous utilisez tous ces grands mots quand un ‘bonmot’ ferait le travail, mais vous aller, Monsieur. Is he casually sexist? Yes. And what follows is not an apologist ‘but I like him anyway’ whine, so if it feels that way please stick with it, until it doesn’t.

We don’t get to pick our heroes. They choose themselves first, and thrust themselves into greatness (with all of their inadequacies) by being brave or arrogant enough to stick their coiffed heads above the parapet.

Am I surprised and appalled that a man of the media said something sexist as a flippant joke? You’re having a laugh aren’t you? Sexism is endemic in our culture; it is simply part of the fabric of life: like tea drinking, and oppression of the poor. Spend ten minutes on the @EverydaySexism feed if you need further convincing. Do I think that’s ok? Of. Course. Not.

But, we’ve got to stop reducing everything to a Hollywood binary of goodies or baddies, or we’re never going to get anywhere. It’s pretty tricky to march on the opposition when you’ve shot yourself in the foot, twice.

People do good things, and people do bad things, most of us dabble in both. Welcome to the complexity of human endeavor. We need to get used to this so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater – or the revolution with the personal transgressions. It is possible for someone to do something great, like, found Wikileaks, and also be accused of forcing non-consensual sex. Does that make him any less heroic for taking the risks he did to expose one of the world’s superpowers? No, I don’t think it does. Does it also make him (if the accusations are proven) an abusive shit? I think so, yes, but for some people it just makes him a ‘player’. And come the revolution, it’s that mentality I want up against the wall.

Russell Brand demeans women with cheap gags because he can, because he is rewarded for doing so. Contract after contract, column inch after column inch, because our culture thinks it’s ok for women to be objectified. So who is he, a mere dandy, to oppose time held tradition? Except that’s what he was on Newsnight to do, right? Oppose the order of things? That’s what his guest editorship is about, surely? A call to arms, a time for change, enough is enough…

Russell, babe, I couldn’t agree more.

1 in 3 women will be raped in her lifetime. 85,000 women reported rape in the UK last year. The rapists I know of have never been reported on. Oh, we all know rapists. Let’s get used to that idea as well. If 1 in 5 women (aged 16 - 59) in the UK have reported experiencing some form of sexual violence since the age of 16 it follows that there are enough abusers to go round. Like I said, fabric of society, like the banks and honest coppers on every corner.

So I suppose what I’m saying is this. If we’re going to have a revolution, can we start again on an equal playing field?

And in the meantime let’s drop the ‘oh well, that would’ve been nice but he’s not perfect (despite the self-styled Messiah complex) we best ignore everything he says’. Make like magpies people, take the shiny-shiny and leave the congealing old shit for the likes of UKIP to feather their nests with. Reward the good behavior: yes Russell, social change: good idea.

And educate on the bad stuff: because of an attractive woman Russell? That wasn’t very funny, call yourself a comedian? In fact, come to think of it chevalier, it’s pretty fucking ironic – there you are, doing your best schpiel on oppression of the powerless and you’ve kicked the whole thing off with a joke to the detriment of – HANG ON A MINUTE. Could that be the pungent tang of irony I detect? Sharp on the nose, but a complex floral bouquet wafting about in the background. Could you have been playing up to your own well-documented relationship with sex, and the expected perception of you – to ‘make like capitalism’ and absorb the expected criticism before it becomes a real threat. Huh. To answer the inevitable question ‘what are you, Clown, doing speaking of serious things?’ before they’d even asked it. Ok, that might be a bit funny, clever, even. I note the BBC saw fit to caption him ‘Russell Brand – Comedian’ and not ‘Russell Brand – Guest Editor of the New Statesmen’ when that was the capacity within which he was being interviewed.

Am I giving him too much credit? Very probably.

Does it matter? If we’re going to have a revolution, we need symbols, icons, something to attach the ideas to - and here we have a presumptuous court jester reeled out to speak of kings and things on a national platform. Someone who stands on the outside of the current system – he doesn’t even vote – but looks in from under his coxcomb and allows the rest of us to see the madness in our method.

This is not altogether fool, my lord.

(Assume) the position has been filled

I’m by no means the first to observe that job-seeking is a full time job.

And if the Torybullies continue to get their way – it won’t even have the benefit of being something you can do from home.

 

I’m lucky in my repeated returns to unemployment, for one, I chose it. In a naïve flush of ‘it’ll all be alright really’ I gleefully guffawed at Withnail until I was laughing on the other side of my face. Oh the folly of youth. More meaningfully, I have the support of my family who have put me up in between acting jobs and continue to put up with me while I decide to entirely overhaul my life. Again. But what of the queues at jobcentres? Dutifully showing up to show willing, only to be met by paper-pushers doing everything they can to stop you signing on. Questions like ‘why can’t you borrow money from your parents?’ ‘if you live with your partner, why can’t you live off him?’ (This actually happened to someone I know, it took her a full afternoon to travel all the way back to the supposed 21^st century). ‘Here, have a zero-hours contract’. Job’s a good’un. ‘Oh look, unemployment figures are down’. Jesus wept. Nothing to do with Torybullies needing to massage unemployment figures before the big bad Bank of England will budge on interest rates. Blame (Mr) Canada ey Georgie Porky Pies?

 

And breathe. Sorry, but today has been a particularly long day of thankless form filling, cover letters and ooh lovely, another form. Not helped by the recruitment automaton who saw fit to reject one of my applications no less than ten minutes after I had submitted it.

> Dear

> Thank you for your application for the position of Copywriter (ref: xxxxxxxx) advertised on http://www.xxxxxxxx. Unfortunately in this instance your application has not been successful. Please keep visiting http://www.xxxxxx where new jobs are posted every day, and good luck with future applications.

>

> Yours sincerely

> 

Unfortunately in this instance? Instance being the operative word, hinny. Perhaps it was because I had put ‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’ in the ‘any other questions’ section. But it was for a copywriting job, and we’ll never know whether the person who wrote that job specification would have cracked a curiously feline smile, because computer said no.

Dear Roborecruitment*

Many thanks for your email. I would appreciate any feedback you may have on my application in this instance.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Kathryn

*real names have been replaced to protect robot identities.

Nothing yet, I’m sure she’s just drafting her measured and bespoke response…

 

So, thank Hera for the hero of Wednesday:
 

Hi Kathryn,

Thanks for getting in touch but I'm afraid that we've just filled the vacancy we had for "hell raiser" (although she's on probation at the minute and, between you and me, is looking a bit ropy in the role. Not ever bringing any milk into the office does not constitute hell raising in my eyes - it's just annoying).

I did enjoy reading your blog over my cup of tea and sandwich, though. That job interview that kicks it all off sounds a bit mad.

Really sorry that I can't be more help on the jobs front at XXX; it's a struggle as it is to keep our few staff here in pop and crisps.

Good luck with it all (hope that doesn't sound too glib).

HERO OF WEDNESDAY.

Huzzah! There is hope for me and mankind and also just me on my own, yet. Get behind me Officeangels, you harbingers of doom, in the name of all things holy I defy your endless opportunities to sell my soul and join exciting global yawnfest. (It wasn’t Officeangels but their name is more useful for the harbinger of doom analogy – not that the automaton at ‘Recruitment R Us’ would appreciate that).

Ah well, whilst the muse has me, I’ve written this sonnet for the RSC casting department. What do you think?

This actor’s eyes are nowt like Stevenson’s-

Callow was more well-read than she well-read

If Judy be thy mark her quest is done

If Atwell’s diary’s clear, my suit is dead.

You have seen English roses, pale and white

So will not rush to pander at my cheek,

But in my verse there may be some delight?

If nothing else it proves I am not meek.

You have not heard me speak, and I won’t lie

And say my dulcet tones bring all folk round

Of course, you’ve seen famed idols launched on high-

I grant, thus far, I tread boards on the ground.

And yet, by Rylance, give me chance to share

That stage some have left, pursued by a bear.

Too much?