2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: The Comedy of Errors

Posted on February 10, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus

The Comedy of Errors

My aunt Regina was in a production of The Boys from Syracuse at the Goodspeed Opera House, which we were taken to as kids, and it was my introduction to Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s shortest play. Plautus’ Menaechmi is the source material, except Shakespeare added another set of twins to add to the confusion. Comedy of Errors plays like a bat out of hell. You don’t even need to do it WELL. The play works, whether you are competent at comedy or not. When you do it well, of course, it’s anarchy and the audience doesn’t have a moment to breathe (preferable, because the play is absurd and if an audience is given time to think, they can poke holes in the entire premise). The device is artificial. Two sets of twins. Identical twin brothers who have servants who are also identical twins. And not only that, but they all have the same names. What are the odds!! ALSO, the Abbess who lives in seclusion isn’t who she says she is!

The whole thing is preposterous! It’s even funnier because … you’d think after the first couple times of misidentifcation you might put it together, like “wait … maybe my identical twin is here and she thinks I’m him?” But no! Antipholus of Syracuse is bombarded by an angry wife, an angry goldsmith, all kinds of people running up to him and shouting condemnations – and he has no idea who these people are or what the hell they are talking about. And he puts it up to sorcery, witchcraft, etc. When you READ it, it might get a little tiresome but when you see a good production of it, the joy of it is in the anticipation, and the accumulation of these misunderstandings. You are, at all times, WAY smarter than everybody else onstage – and this is one of the keys of really good comedy.

So by the time you get to Act IV, the MOMENT the angry goldsmith comes onstage, you alREADY start laughing, because you know he’s mad at the wrong person, and shit’s about to get even funnier.

All that being said: the words “doom of death” appear in the 2nd line of the play, which is not only a comedy, but a comedy where the word “comedy” is in the title. DOOM OF DEATH!! In the first scene, the father speaks for, my God, 10-15 minutes, laying out the entire story of his wife, his twin boys, the twin servants, the storm at sea, the ship cracking apart, the poor wife strapped to a mast with one baby – the other baby strapped to the other mast – which puts really unfortunate vivid pictures in your mind – horrifying! We need this information, yes, but again, this ridiculous comedy is haunted by death and destruction. Shakespeare’s themes are always present, even in early plays and the sonnets: the two constants are time and death. The two, of course, are connected. In The Comedy of Errors, there’s actually a deadline written into the script: everything is going to come to a head at five o’clock!

In one of the books I read, it’s mentioned that Comedy of Errors is the only play where Shakespeare mentions “America”.

The other thing I got in my reading is the importance of St. John’s Letter to the Ephesians. Probably deliberate of Shakespeare to set his play in Ephesus? His audience would recognize immediately. And then there’s all the “wives obey your husbands” talk. What’s interesting though is there is an ancient Greco-Roman atmosphere/environment: Syracuse, Ephesus, the names, the source material! But laid on top of it is Christianity. In the time gap between Plautus and Shakespeare … Jesus happened.

And so I guess Shakespeare was doing this consciously, so as not to write something completely pagan. I mean, I’m just speculating. It’s all speculation. The Christianity here feels super super-imposed, in other words.

I’ve seen this Shakespeare play probably more than any other. It’s un-breakable. You really cannot fuck it up.

Quotes on the play

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“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. Books think for me.” — Charles Lamb

Posted on February 10, 2026 by sheila

Charles Lamb was friends with everyone. He knew Coleridge from childhood, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt (great writer and portrait painter – Hazlitt did the painting above), Lamb met Keats, he was inner circle with these guys. He was different, though. He had a job, first of all. He worked as an accountant clerk for 30 years before deciding to retire. He was given a severance, enough to live on. He wrote essays regularly, and had a column for many years. He wrote a couple of essays about over-indulgence in food, and the stories about him – and his behavior – are legendary. He shows up in so many other peoples’ memories, their letters and journals, his drunken playing around, etc.

I figure he was owed a little fun because his personal life was absolutely horrific. His mentally ill sister Mary stabbed their mother in the heart, killing her. Mary was institutionalized, but eventually came out, and she and Charles lived together for the rest of their lives. Charles had to care for her. It was not easy. They also collaborated together, coming out with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays for kids, I think. Charles himself was supposedly institutionalized for a period. Information is sketchy. But he clearly understood mental struggle and this shows in his writing. He is such a HUMAN person. Like he told this anecdote of attending William Hazlitt’s wedding and barely being able to hold back the laughter during the service.

I actually just read his collected essays for the first time last year. But I felt like I already knew the guy, since I’ve been such a fan of Hazlitt and Coleridge. Everyone talks about him all the time! It was so fun to “meet” the original. I loved his essay on Hobarth. It’s a classic. His essays on Macbeth and Coriolanus are amazing. Then there’s the personal stuff: his love of food and eating too much. He was a pleasure-hound! Did he have romances? I think maybe one? But other than that …

He struggled. But he survived. He did things his way. He felt so cramped by having this job he finally went to his bosses to complain. They were like, “You have worked here 30 years, why don’t you stop, we’ll give you a severance, enjoy the rest of your life.” The best possible response, one which surprised him because he had been dreading the confrontation. Again, he was just such a human person. I love Coleridge but … he’s not exactly human-sized!!

You’ll see what I mean below: everyone had something to say about Lamb.

Very glad to have “met” him. He leaps off the page. You can practically hear his voice. Here are some excerpts:

“Christ’s Hospital Thirty-five years ago”, remembering his old schoolmate:

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee–the dark pillar not yet turned–Samuel Taylor Coleridge–Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!– How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts) or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar–while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!

Describing hearing Coleridge recite “Kubla Khan”, and also living near him:

I think his essentials not touched: he is very bad; but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he sings or says it, hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged. ‘Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him, or the Author of the Excursion, I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity and be dragged along in the current of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a net.

“The Two Races of Men”, London Magazine, 1820:

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection be shy of showing it; or if they heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C.–he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his–(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not infrequently, vying with the originals)–in no very clerkly hand–legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands–I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor their library, against S.T.C.

“Witches, and Other Night Fears”, London Magazine, 1821

The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes–where I cannot muster a fiddle.

“Grace Before Meat”, London Magazine, 1821: (“C” is Coleridge)

C. holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right.

“Popular Fallacies”:

“The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor mother and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, — before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles.”

“On the Genius and Character of Hogarth”, Reflector, 1811

It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or life with being a vulgar artist.

“On the Genius and Character of Hogarth”, Reflector, 1811

It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which assimilates the scenes of Hogarth and of Shakespeare to the drama of real life, where no such thing as pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twi-formed births, disagreeing complexions of one inter-texture, perpetually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world.

Now listen to THIS: I see this all the time in my film critic world:

“On the Genius and Character of Hogarth”, Reflector, 1811

It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man’s works, and to pass over in silence what they do.

“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare”, Reflector, 1811

I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted.

Similarly:

“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare”, Reflector, 1811

The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear … The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare … On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear …

That’s so good.

“Witches, and Other Night-Fears”, London Magazine, 1821

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.

QUOTES

Thomas Carlyle, diary entry, 1831:

Poor Lamb! Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius! …Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane … he is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners … Besides, he is now a confirmed, shameless drunkard.

Mary Shelley, letter, 1823:

A good saying of Lamb’s: talking of someone he said, “Now some men who are very veracious are called matter-of-fact men; but such an one I should call a matter-of-lie man.”

Roy Park:

[Lamb has] the status of cultural teddy-bear in the Victorian Establishment.

George Orwell on Lamb’s writing:

… no attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense.

Oscar Wilde:

[He] had, undoubtedly, great sorrows, or motives for sorrow, but … could console himself at a moment’s notice for the real tragedies of life by reading any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio tradition.

William Thackeray, after reading one of Lamb’s letters, pressed it to his forehead and said “Saint Charles!”

Valentine Le Grice, classmate:

I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness.

This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]

… Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity!

Charles Lamb took exception at this, at Coleridge calling him “gentle”:

The meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost almost means poor-spirited.

William Wordsworth, on Lamb not going to university:

He would have probably been preserved from the indulgences of social humours and fancies which were often injurious to himself, and causes of severe regret to his friends.

William Hazlitt:

His jokes would be the sharpest thing in the world but that they are blunted by his good nature. He wants malice–which is a pity.

Charles Lamb busting out laughing at William Hazlitt’s wedding:

“I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

E.V. Lucas, The Charles Lamb Day Book (1925):

Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for antiquity.’

Charles Lamb, letter to Coleridge (1810):

“A book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”

Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, June 26, 1806:

“William Hazlitt owned that he could not bear young girls; they drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, where he recovered perfect tranquility.”

George Dyer:

He could not enter a room without a joke, and he may be said to have almost conversed in contemporaneous humour.

Thomas De Quincey:

On awaking from his brief slumber, Lamb sat for some time in profound silence, and then with most startling rapidity, sang out — “Diddle, diddle, dumpkins”; not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For five minutes he relapsed into the same deep silence; from which again he started up into the same abrupt utterance of Diddle, diddle, dumpkins. I could not help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication, contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed. Lamb smilingly begged to know what I was laughing at, and with a look of as much surprise as if it were I that had done something unaccountable, and not himself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin:

[Lamb’s taste] acts so as to appear like the unmechanic simplicity of an Instinct–in brief he is worth an hundred men of mere Talents. Conversation with the latter tribe is like the use of leaden bells–one warms by exercise–Lamb every now & then irradiates, & the beam, tho’ single and fine as a hair, yet is rich with colours, & I both see & feel it.

William Hazlitt:

It was at Godwin’s that I met him, with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing fiercely which was the best–Man as he was, or man as he is to be. “Give me,” said Lamb, “man as he is not to be.”

Mary Lamb:

I know my dismal faces have been almost as great a drawback upon Charles’s comfort, as his feverish, teazing ways have been upon mine. Our love for each other has been the torment of our lives hitherto.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1886:

No good criticism of Lamb, strictly speaking, can ever be written, because nobody can do justice to his work who does not love it too well to feel himself capable of giving judgement on it.

Leigh Hunt, reviewing Lamb’s work, 1818:

There is a spirit in Mr. Lamb’s productions which is in itself so anti-critical, and tends so much to reconcile us to all that is in the world, that the effect is almost neutralizing to everything but complacency and a quiet admiration … The author’s genius [is] in fact of an anti-critical nature (his very criticism chiefly tending to overthrow the critical spirit).

John Scott, Lamb’s editor at London Magazine:

Who does not eulogize his writing for displaying a spirit of deep and warm humanity, enlivened by a vein of poignant wit,–not caustic, yet searching.

Marilyn Butler:

Lamb’s ordinariness made him in the 1820s. His variant of the man of letters was the figure with which the middle-class readership could empathize.

Thomas De Quincey:

The very foundation of Lamb’s peculiar character was laid in his absolute abhorrence of all affectation.

Crabb Robinson, diary entry, May 28, 1832:

I was reading Boccaccio when Lamb was again at my door. He however did not stay, but I made a cup of coffee for him. He had slept at Talfourd’s again with his clothes on. Yet in the midst of this half crazy irregularity he was so full of sensibility that speaking of his sister he had tears in his eyes. He talked about his favourite poems with his usual warmth, praising Andrew Marvell extravagantly.

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January 2026 Viewing Diary

Posted on February 9, 2026 by sheila

The Sound of Falling (2026; d. Mascha Schilinski)
It took me a couple of days to shake off the effect of The Sound of Falling. I saw it at a screening room on 29th Street. I knew very little about the film going in. I made plans with someone after, because I hadn’t checked the run time. Yeah, those plans had to be canceled. The movie is long! I emerged from the screening room, all caught up in the world of the film and the spiritual/philosophical elements addressed … I felt haunted. I walked back to the hotel, kind of wrung out. It’s so good. I reviewed for Ebert.

Death Is a Caress (1949; d. Edith Carlmar)
The Criterion Channel is streaming a number of film noirs from Norway. This one is kind of like Postman Always Rings Twice: there’s a car mechanic, there’s a lady married to a man she doesn’t love. Sparks fly. Handsome mechanic has a nice appropriate girlfriend, and suddenly he’s lying to. her, he’s nowhere to be found, she’s getting hurt. 1949, man. 5 years after the end of the war.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943; d. Maya Deren)
Maya Deren is one of the pioneers of American experimental film-making. Her name comes up all the time, as a wellspring and inspiration for the generation that came after. A fascinating woman, she lived in Hollywood, collaborated with her husband, they made these surreal movies at their house. She was only 44 years old when she died. Meshes of the Afternoon is haunting and mesmerizing, with a woman (Deren) falling asleep – perhaps? – at her house, and getting recurring strange images of a cloaked figure with a mirror face (scary) – time loops and loops, she pursues but can never catch. The camera angles are filled with meaning (Lynch, I am sure, knew her work well), and there’s violence in the air, in the juxtaposition of images.

In Cold Light (2026; d. Maxime Giroux)
I like Maika Monroe, I’ve reviewed a bunch of her films, so I’m happy to keep that up with her latest, In Cold Light. I reviewed or Ebert.

Possession (1983; d. Andrzej Żuławski)
I haven’t seen this in years. But it is burned into my brain forever. The subway-tunnel scene will never leave me and exists as an apex, of sorts, of a kind of raw acting you rarely see on film, or anywhere else. You can’t even believe what you’re watching. She is extraordinary. The film is a fever-dream of marriage. It flat out would not work if Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani weren’t so completely authentically FERAL.

Predators (2025; d. David Osit)
What a strange disturbing watch. I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Worth a watch, especially if you ever watched To Catch a Predator.

Somewhere (2010; d. Sofia Coppola)
A windy empty masterpiece. Her best. Her most uncompromising. There’s nothing to grasp onto. It makes Lost in Translation look plot-heavy. But it’s the FEEL. It’s a film from another time, a freer time. It feels contemporaneous with Five Easy Pieces or Two-Lane Blacktop: a confrontation with emptiness. Not too many people can take it. American film, in general, REALLY can’t take it.

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“All my work is about uncovering, especially uncovering of voices that speak without governance, or that speak without being heard.” — Seamus Deane

Posted on February 9, 2026 by sheila

“So broken was my father’s family, that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire … I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it.”

That’s the voice of the narrator in Seamus Deane’s Booker-shortlisted first novel Reading in the Dark: A Novel, published when Deane was 57 (this fact gives me hope).

Seamus Deane, a Catholic poet and novelist, was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, on this day. (He died in 2021 at the age of 81.) He was good friends with the OTHER Seamus. Deane was born into the thick of politics in Northern Ireland. He was a poet and critic and editor for years, and was one of the world’s pre-eminent Joyce scholars. His first novel, Reading in the Dark, was published to almost universal acclaim, and no wonder. It is a haunted story about Northern Ireland, as filtered through a young boy’s vivid mind. Tough and well-trod terrain. Perhaps because he understood his influences so well, having incorporated them so much into the whole of his work, he doesn’t suffer from intimidation (something I have written about before). He didn’t feel he needed to re-invent the wheel, or somehow push Joyce to the side – a problem many Irish writer face, male or female (but mostly male). Especially writers who attempt to write about male childhood, which Joyce pretty much owns. Deane didn’t let Joyce silence him. I really like Andrew O’Hehir’s words in his review in Salon (link no longer works, damn the Internet, but I’ve saved some excerpts):

But there’s a sense in which Deane is ideally positioned to tackle Joyce on the great modernist’s home ground. For one thing, Deane couldn’t conceal his debt to the Irish literary colossus if he tried; Deane is one of the academic world’s leading Joyceans, and even edited the Penguin edition of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” For another, he has grown old enough to lose the fear of Joyce all young Irish writers must feel, old enough to write a very different kind of autobiographical novel.

Deane’s book is the warmly compassionate, painstakingly gorgeous work of a mature man who wishes to memorialize the dead without yielding to sentimentality; Joyce’s is a younger man’s literary tour de force, intensely self-involved, concerned above all else with the interior world of a consciousness coming to fruition. Stephen Dedalus’ creator believed that Ireland’s three bonds — family, nation, church — were imprisoning him like a seabird in a cage. Seamus Deane understands that Ireland’s endless ability to spin stories, to tell lies, to make tragedy into comedy and history into drama, is its all-in-all, both the prison and the key.

Although he was a patriot, Deane’s vast perspective of history saved him from jingoism. But he couldn’t help but ponder how badly things usually work out, especially for nationalist causes, and why should Ireland be any different? This troubled him. Reading in the Dark is all about that, and it was published smack-dab in the middle of the hope-filled “peace process” in Northern Ireland. Deane didn’t say what people wanted to hear in the moment. He saw the present-day hope, and he couldn’t help but look back on the times when similar statements were made by similar types, followed by another round of disaster and betrayal. I like hope without optimism. lol Pessimism is helpful. Not fatalism. People confuse the two. It’s more like realism. We need pessimists. We need realists. Deane was a realist.

Along these lines: the following poem shows Deane’s pessimistic side as well as the scope of his vision. One can feel the budding novelist here. “Coals ripening in a light white as vodka” … isn’t that good?

History Lessons
for Ronan Sheehan and Richard Kearney

‘The proud and beautiful city of Moscow
Is no more.’ So wrote Napoleon to the Czar.
It was a November morning when we came
On this. I remember the football pitches
Beyond, stretched into wrinkles by the frost.
Someone was running across them, late for school,
His clothes scattered open by the wind.

Outside Moscow we had seen
A Napoleonic, then a Hitlerite dream
Aborted. The firegold city was burning
In the Kremlin domes, a sabred Wehrmacht
Lay opened to the bone, churches were ashen
Until heretics restored their colour
And their stone. Still that boy was running.

Fragrance of Christ, as in the whitethorn
Brightening through Lent, the stricken aroma
Of the Czars in ambered silence near Pavlovsk,
The smoking gold of icons at Zagorsk,
And this coal-smoke in the sunlight
Stealing over frost, houses huddled up in
Droves, deep drifts of lost

People. This was history, although the State
Exam confined Ireland to Grattan and allowed
Us roam from London to Moscow. I brought
Black gladioli bulbs from Samarkand
To flourish like omens in our cooler air;
Coals ripening in a light white as vodka.
Elections, hunger-strikes and shots

Greeted our return. Houses broke open
In the season’s heat and the bulbs
Burned in the ground. Men on ladders
Climbed into roselight, a roof was a swarm of fireflies
At dusk. The city is no more. The lesson’s learned.
I will remember it always as a burning
In the heart of winter and a boy running.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.” – Happy Birthday, Brendan Behan

Posted on February 9, 2026 by sheila

“Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.” – Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan, Irish playwright, IRA man, was born in Dublin on this day, 1923. He lived a life filled with poverty, violence, controversy, and aimlessness. He spent time in jail as a teenager for being part of a terrorist plot (there were bombs in his bag). Then he was involved in the attempted murder of two detectives, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. While in prison, he started writing. He wrote memoirs, confessions, poetry. He was still only 23 years old. His IRA activities ceased after that time, although he remained connected and friendly with most of its members (naturally – his whole family was involved). While in prison, he also learned the Irish language. He had trouble getting published in Ireland (joining the river of Irish writers who faced similar censorship issues). Behan was raised in a staunchly Catholic and Republican family. His father was involved in the Easter Uprising.

“I am a drinker with writing problems.”

Please go check out my friend Therese’s post about Behan.

In the 1950s, he left Ireland (following the path of Irish writers choosing exile) and moved to Paris.

More after the jump:

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For James Dean’s Birthday

Posted on February 8, 2026 by sheila

Some links:

For Library of America: I wrote about East of Eden … an essay I had been waiting to write for almost my whole entire life.

For my Substack, a re-post of the piece I wrote in 2013 on Rebel Without a Cause.

I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book The Art of American Screen Acting, and, of course, we discussed James Dean at length.

Here’s an essay I wrote on the 60th anniversary screening of Giant at the Film Forum, special guest Carroll Baker.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

The First Glimpse of The Guy Who Started It All

Posted on February 8, 2026 by sheila

For James Dean’s birthday

giphy

Age 13. Babysitting. Up later than I normally would be. East of Eden was on late-night television. I had never seen it. I don’t even know that I was aware of who James Dean was. And certainly not Elia Kazan. I was a ravagingly unhappy middle-schooler. I spent months in a state of literally wild despair. I was recovering from what I now realize was my first breakdown at age 12, bipolar having stepped into the room along with my first period, as it so often happens for girls. Good times. Of course I didn’t know that at the time and it would be decades before things got so harrowing that I got diagnosed. But also, even more importantly: at age 13, I was already a budding actress, involved in community theatre and drama clubs. My aunt was a professional actress and an inspiration: In my family, acting was not some weird pipe dream, acting was a JOB that could actually be DONE. I was ambitious enough to figure out – on my own – how I could get myself to New York for an Annie open call. (I learned about the open call from actually calling the Broadway theatre where it was playing, and asking questions of the poor box office lady who finally forwarded me to someone in the office. Crazy, I realize now, but that’s what happened.) I wanted to move to New York some day. I was one of those very young people who knew, without a shadow of a doubt, what I wanted to do one day. No question.

In East of Eden James Dean is first seen in long-shot for the haunting opening sequence, a lanky figure in the background. And this – up above – is our first real glimpse of his face. It is not an exaggeration to say that this moment shook my world. It re-arranged me. A seismic shift. My priorities, my awareness. My GOALS changed.

This one moment led me to the Actors Studio many years later, where I sat in the balcony of that famous renovated church on 44th Street, where Marilyn Monroe had sat, Al Pacino, Eli Wallach, steeped in the history I had been dreaming about since I first saw East of Eden. (After seeing the movie, I used my after-school job at the local public library to research the film. I discovered a treasure trove of biographies. I DEVOURED The Mutant King, the biography of James Dean, and followed the trail of bread crumbs available in that book. I learned of a man named “Elia Kazan”. I became obsessed with Carroll Baker and Marlon Brando. I learned of Lee Strasberg. A whole world and history opened up to me.)

And so, years later, after a nervewracking audition, I attended sessions at The Studio, I got involved in projects any way I could. I studied with Actors Studio members who had worked with Lee Strasberg, with Kazan. I was involved in a project about Joseph Cornell, developing a theatre piece about him, and actually got to work with Lois Smith (who appears in East of Eden. Joseph Cornell made one of his famous boxes for her.) And, most movingly, I finally got to MEET Elia Kazan. (A propos of nothing, recently I realized – and I have no idea how I did not notice this before – that in my life I have had not one, but TWO, romantic entanglements with men whose fathers had roles in Kazan’s autobiographical film America America. I swear I did not plan this. I wasn’t targeting people from afar, based on their IMDB credits. I swear.)

This above – my first glimpse of Dean, hunched over on the sidewalk, forehead wrinkle, clothes the same color as the light – was the Moment.

The genesis of everything. A to B.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully.” — poet Elizabeth Bishop

Posted on February 8, 2026 by sheila

“All the intellectuals were communist except me. I’m always very perverse so I went in for T.S. Eliot and Anglo-Catholicism.”– Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop, born on this day, is one of my favorite poets. She didn’t write all that many poems during her life (compared to other poets who lived as long as she did). She was meticulous, picking and choosing every word with the utmost care. She was not hugely famous during her lifetime, although famous enough to be Poet Laureate from 1949-1950. However, since her death, her reputation has skyrocketed.

I want to point you towards Andrew Chan’s beautiful piece about Elizabeth Bishop in 4 Columns. I’ve been a guest on podcasts a couple of times alongside Andrew – and Elizabeth Bishop had never come up. Of course. We were too busy talking about James Brown or Aretha Franklin. So when this piece went up, I was so excited to discover Andrew was also a “fellow traveler” Elizabeth Bishop fan!

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“The only people who ever called me a rebel were people who wanted me to do what they wanted.” — Nick Nolte

Posted on February 8, 2026 by sheila

It’s Nick Nolte’s birthday.

He has always been one of my all-time favorites, and despite the odds – or maybe because of the odds – and his personal struggles – it’s a thrill that he is still with us, still pushing himself, still going deep as the Mariana Trench in his work. As always, with someone who goes as deep as he does (and he started OUT that way), there’s a little bit of mystery involved – because it’s not JUST talent. Or … with him, it shows that talent looks different on different people. Maybe his talent is the ability to go as deep as he goes, into the most brutal unforgiving shameful places of our human lives. But … that’s not about talent. I would say this is a LIFE skill, more than “acting talent” – the willingness to LOOK at what SUCKS about himself. The willingness to SHOW that to others. This is what Nolte does.

“To allow the fear to come on you and then pass through. If you keep cutting the fear off by intervening – let’s say, taking a Xanax to try to cure it – you’ll never understand what fear is really for. Fear is part of a survival mechanism. The way you conquer fear is to feel it all the way, and then you’ll find out that there’s nothing there – it’s just emotion.” — Nick Nolte

I’ve mentioned him in passing many times on my site, but there are two pieces in particular where I zoomed in on this aspect of him.

The first is a piece I wrote about one moment in North Dallas Forty where he, as they say – or as I say – “drops in”. He drops in to the moment, or – into himSELF – and it’s like he plunges to the center of the earth in one breath.

When I had my column at Film Comment, I devoted an entire column to the career of Nick Nolte, focusing especially on this aspect of him – that willingness to look into and SHOW his own darkness, flaws, failings, his shame. Shame is such a terrible experience people LIE to avoid feeling it. He never lies.

His acting gift is awe-inspiring.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” — Charles Dickens

Posted on February 7, 2026 by sheila

DICKENS MISCELLANIA: QUOTES AND APPRECIATIONS

My favorite Dickens? Oliver Twist was my gateway drug. I read it when I was 11. Because I was obsessed with the movie. Tale of Two Cities came next. Read when I was 15 in 10th grade, under the tutelage Mr. Crothers, my great great English teacher. I’m sure I read Christmas Carol when I was a kid: going to see Trinity Repertory’s annual production of it, it was part of the air I breathed as a child. But then came all of the others. Great Expectations. Dombey & Son, Pickwick Papers. David Copperfield. And, for me, the Grand Pooh-Bah: Bleak House.

Charles Dickens, “Hunted Down”:

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

William Thackeray, after finishing the fifth installment of “Dombey and Son”:

“There’s no writing against such power as this – one has no chance! Read that chapter describing young Paul’s death: It is unsurpassed – it is stupendous!”


Letterhead for Charles Dickens’ literary magazine, ‘All the Year Round’, founded in 1859

Queen Victoria wrote in her journal two days after Charles Dickens died in 1870:

It is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

[William Cullen] Bryant became a big noise in American journalism, a champion of liberal causes, and a catalyst. When [Charles] Dickens arrived in New York, he is reported to have asked on coming down the gangplank, “Where’s Bryant?”

Charles Dickens kept up a voluminous correspondence. He responded to fan mail, to reader questions, to any letter that came across his desk. In 1866, a woman wrote him about her desire to be a writer and if Dickens had any advice. Here is Dickens’ reply, dated December 27, 1866:

Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.

Charles Dickens:

I don’t go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, November 30, 1954:

I’ve been reading Dickens, too, volume by volume by volume, and having a wonderful time. That abundance and playfulness and slopping allover the place is sowonderful.

Charles Dickens, after reading the manuscript of Robert Browning’s “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ in 1842:

“I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant [Gerard] begin his tale upon the scene [II, i]; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it [ms.], tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.”

Charles Dickens
By Dorothy Parker

Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o’er my lifeless body.
I heartily invite such birds
To come outside and say those words!

L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, wrote in her journal:

I first read [Pickwick Papers] when a child — there was an old coverless copy lying around the house and I reveled in it. I remember that it was a book that always made me hungry.”

William Styron:

E.M. Forster refers to “flat” and “round” characters. I try to make all of mine round. It takes an extrovert like Dickens to make flat characters come alive.

Ralph Ellison:

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Saul Bellow:

“Dickens’s London is gloomy, but also cozy. And yet realism has always offered to annihilate precisely such qualities. That is to say, if you want to be ultimately realistic you bring artistic space itself in danger. In Dickens, there is no void beyond the fog. The environment is human, at all times.

Jeanette Winterson:

Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the aerial power of words.

Evelyn Waugh:

[Dickens] liked adulation and he liked showing off. But he was still deeply antagonistic to Victorianism.

Peter Carey:

[Edward] Said was writing about Magwitch, the convict from Great Expectations, who is a classic Australian figure. There he is, trasnported to Australia, a free man after serving his seven-year sentence. He is an Englishman, but only as long as he doesn’t go to England. But he is so fucked by it all that he’d rather risk his life to go back to England and sit at the feet of his invented gentleman child and have cakes and ale. I thought, Oh, that’s so good. Up until that stage in my life I hadn’t read much Dickens. I’d always had trouble with the saccharine little girls – in Bleak House, for instance. Much easier to watch on television for me. But after reading Said I thought, I better read Dickens. I was astonished that I enjoyed The Pickwick Papers. I found in Great Expectations a perfect book, and not a lot of saccharine little girls either. Then I started to read about Dickens. That’s how I got to Jack Maggs.

James Baldwin:

I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight or intensity.

William Faulkner:

“My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp – a cruel, ruthless woman, a drunkard, opportunist, unreliable, most of her character was bad, but at least it was character; Mrs. Harris, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Quixote, and Sancho of course. Lady Macbeth I always admired. And Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio – both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with life, didn’t ask any favors, never whined. Huck Finn, of course, and Jim. Tom Sawyer I never liked much – an awful prig.”

Robert Stone:

Many writers of my generation, which was spared television in its youth, grew up with their sense of narrative influenced by the structure of film. And you can go back much further to see that. Joyce, for example. Interestingly, Dickens seems to have anticipated the shape of the movies – look at the first few pages of Great Expectations.

George Orwell wrote an essay on Dickens, a fascinating vigorous and scoldypants analysis. Orwell was not noted for his sense of humor, and Dickens, above all else, is FUN. He should be FUN, George, remember? Still, it’s a must-read. Here are two excerpts:

The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband’s head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracta while her children fall into the area — and there they all are, fixed for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he “chose to work in a circle of stage fire”. His characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smolett’s. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival. By this test Dickens’s characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist.

And here Orwell writes about Dickens’ gift for writing about childhood:

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.

Christopher Hitchens wrote, in a book review of Peter Aykroyd’s biography of Dickens:

So I find the plan of my original enterprise falling away from me; I must give it up; there is something formidable about Dickens that may not be gainsaid.

Martin Amis:

When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t yet there, I sometimes think, How would Dickens go at this sentence, how would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence? What you have to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire. I was once winding up a telephone conversation with Saul Bellow and he said, Well you go back to work now, and I said, All right, and he said, Give ’em hell. And it’s Dickens saying, Give ’em hell. Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.

Editor Robert Gottlieb:

The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me – you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expectations. I don’t want to know that!”

Jeanette Winterson, in her essay “Writer, Reader, Words”:

Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the aerial power of words.

David O. Selznick, independent movie producer, was a huge fan of Charles Dickens. He said later on in life that he could point out punctuation errors in new editions of Dickens’ novels, so well did he know all of those books. Here are two memos from Selznick in re: film adaptations of various books by Dickens:

To: Mrs Kate Corbaley
June 3, 1935

It is amazing that Dickens had so many brilliant characters in David Copperfield and practically none in A Tale of Two Cities, and herein lies the difficulty. The book is sheer melodrama and when the scenes are put on the screen, minus Dickens’s brilliant narrative passages, the mechanics of melodramtic construction are inclined to be more than apparent, and, in fact, to creak. Don’t think that I am for a minute trying to run down one of the greatest books in the English language. I am simply trying to point out to you the difficulties of getting the Dickens feeling, within our limitations of being able to put on the screen only action and dialogue scenes, without Dickens’s comments as narrator. I am still trying my hardest and think that when I get all through, the picture will be a job of which I will be proud – but it is and will be entirely different from David Copperfield.

My study of the book led me to what may seem strange choices for the writing and direction, but these strange choices were deliberate. Since the picture is melodrama, it must have pace and it must “pack a wallop”. These, I think, Conway can give us as well as almost anyone I knew – as witnessed by his work on Viva Villa! Furthermore, I think he has a knack of bringing people to life on the screen, while the dialogue is on the stilted side. (I fought for many months to get the actual phrases out of David Copperfield into the picture, and I have been fighting similarly on Two Cities, but the difference is that the dialogue of the latter, if you will read it aloud, is not filled with nearly the humanity, or nearly the naturalness.

As to Sam Behrman, I think he is one of the best of American dialogue writers. Futhermore, he is an extremely literate and cultured man, with an appreciation of fine things and a respect for the integrity of a classic – more than ninety per cent more than all the writers I know. He can be counted upon to give me literacy that wiol match. On top of this, he is especially equipped, in my opinion, to give us the rather sardonic note in [Sidney] Carton.

Here is another memo from David O. Selznick:

To: Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
October 3, 1935

I should like also to call to your attention the danger of treating this picture [Tale of Two Cities] as just another [Ronald] Colman starring vehicle. Granted that Colman is a big star; that any picture with him achieves a good gross; A Tale of Two Cities, even badly produced, would completely dwarf the importance of any star … The picture is beautifully produced. If I do not say this, no one else in the organization will. It has been splendidly directed by Jack Conway; and Colman is at his very top. Further, bear in mind that the book of A Tale of Two Cities would without Colman have a potential drawing power equaled only by David Copperfield, Little Women, and The Count of Monte Cristo among the films of recent years because only these books have an even comparable place in the affections of the reading public. This is no modern best seller of which one hundred thousand copies have been published, but a book that is revered by millions – yes, and tens of millions of people here and abroad.

Tens of millions. And counting.

dickens-at-desk

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