Auden’s ‘Thank You, Fog’

“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain,” quipped W.H. Auden. Indeed, by the age of 60, Auden’s face looked like the most-read library book in the most popular library; it exhausted any adjectives thrown at it—it was its own adjective. His friend Hannah Arendt said he looked “as if life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the ‘heart’s invisible furies.'”
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Today in History: April 20

Dr. Simon Forman was a doctor and astrologer in Shakespeare’s time who would be forgotten except he kept a diary about his day-to-day life in 1610 and 1611-era London. In it, he recounts seeing several of Shakespeare’s plays live in production at the Globe Theater. He describes seeing “Macbeth” on April 20, 1610 (or 1611; opinions differ), in what was one of the first-ever productions of “the Scottish play.”

He only devotes a couple paragraphs to describing the play (excerpted above), and he crams several acts into this (below the fold):
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Where Dreams Come Not-True

There is a big difference between living a life story about which people say, “That ought to be a movie,” and possessing a life story about which those same people will pay real money to buy the book or sit in a theater to view that movie.
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