Briar Kit Esme

Hathaway - Eight Arias For A Bardic Life Briar Kit Esme

'Hathaway-Eight Arias For A Bardic Life' is a plaria (play-opera aria) script, written and first performed in 2016 to mark the quatercentenary of William Shakespeare's death in 1616. Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare and mother to their three children, sits in the parlour of New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire-the family's home for the last nineteen years. Her only son, Hamnet, has been dead some twenty years. Her two daughters, Susanna and Judith, have both married and fledged. Her husband, England's greatest ever dramatist, hasn't written a play for three years. And now, he never will. It is 23 April 1616. St George's Day. And William Shakespeare is dead. Anne has stripped and washed William's fifty-two-year-old body. She has tied his hair. Combed his beard. Bound his cadaver from head to toe with a simple white sheet. Laid him to rest on the refectory table that stands next to her. Anne Hathaway is alone in the world. She speaks into the blackened silence...