We watched a Stratford production on television last night, thanks to COVID-19. Their season would have started this week.
We say Martha Henry play Prospero in The Tempest in the 2018 season of Stratford. She was 80 years old. Her first season was 44 years before that and she played Miranda to William Hutt's first Prospero in The Tempest. What a wonderful experience for her of completion.
The original play has Prospero as a duke rather than a duchess. Was it even possible to have a duchess? It did seem to me that it is more traditional for a duchess to be the wife or widow of a duke. But it was possible for a duchess to hold the rank equivalent to a duke in her own right and there are 16 Italian duchesses listed in Wikipedia.
Prospero portrayed as a woman is strikingly in contrast with the play's otherwise male roles/cast. Wikipedia includes a section on the feminist interpretations of the play.
"The Tempest is a play created in a male dominated culture and society, a gender imbalance the play explores metaphorically by having only one major female role, Miranda. Miranda is fifteen, intelligent, naive, and beautiful."
That must have been a tricky area to address in the staging of the play and for Martha Henry to give meaningful interpretation of the character. There would have been many explorations and workshops to bring this version alive.
And the last of our pear trees on John Street were blooming a few days ago. You can easily recognize a pear with its vertical structure. All the other fruit trees have an open vase shape.
Radio celebrated 100 years in Canada yesterday. The first broadcast was between Ottawa and Montreal - a concert.
The first radio broadcast was on Christmas Eve 1906 from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts. That was led by Canadian Reginald Fessenden who is considered to have invented radio broadcasting. I found his biography HERE.
Those were very turbulent times for inventors. While he had patents for voice transmission and wireless telegraphy, he didn't receive the money for them or maintained rights when the company he worked for was sold to Marconi. The biography says he went own to other things to invent. One of his greatest inventions during WWI was the fathometer, aiding submarines to detect their depth and how far down the bottom was, so is considered the inventor of sonar.
And radio has continued to develop over the decades. Doom and gloom was predicted because of television. But it didn't happen. Radio remains vital today with many applications and all those frequencies used.
Look at the pear orchards on John Street - I took these yesterday. In the second picture you can see the Meglomanic Winery building on the escarpment.
