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For the attention of: television editors and arts correspondents
20 October 2005 [PR5075]
Rupert Graves stars as love-torn Shakespeare in A Waste of Shame
As part of the BBC’s Shakespeare season in November 2005, the Open University in
partnership with BBC Drama are dramatising the story behind the creation of the Love
Sonnets.
A Waste of Shame will be broadcast on Tuesday 22nd November, 9pm on BBCFour.
Shakespeare (played by Rupert Graves) is in his troubled middle years. Short of
money, separated from his wife and grieving the death of his son, he accepts a
commission from Countess Pembroke (played by Zoë Wanamaker) to write a sonnet
sequence for her son, the androgynous, charming Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert
(played by Tom Sturridge). A passionate and destructive love triangle begins between
Shakespeare, “the fair youth” William and the prostitute Lucie – “the dark lady” (played
by Indira Virma) which inspires Shakespeare to write the most celebrated love poems
ever composed.
A Waste of Shame, which takes its title from Sonnet 129, offers a plausible and, some
might say, controversial reconstruction of real-life factors behind Shakespeare’s
motivation and inspiration to pen the Sonnets. It weaves into the tale his competitive
relationship with playwright Ben Jonson, his unhappy marriage to Anne Hathaway
(played by Anna Chancellor), his compulsive sex-drive and the notion that he
contracted the pox, which caused his death. This powerfully dramatic mix is set against
a background of Jacobean promiscuity and a London consumed by outbreaks of the
plague.
Literary and biographical interpretations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets have provoked
extensive and fierce critical debate and for this production the Open University and the
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BBC have the academic support and input of Katherine Duncan-Jones, editor of the
comprehensive Arden Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Gill Stoker, an OU
academic and tutor.
Gill comments: “This gritty and hard-hitting drama will throw new light on Shakespeare
for most viewers. It's daring, even shocking at times, but not gratuitously so, for every
situation is more than plausible, and can be backed up by historical evidence. If
anything, this approach will make us more, rather than less, sympathetic towards
William Shakespeare the man.”
Author and novelist William Boyd brings to life the inner thoughts of the world’s
greatest wordsmith. He presents Shakespeare to us as a man, not a myth.
Boyd adds: “I wanted to come up with a film that made us re-think Shakespeare in quite
a radical way — to de-mythologise him, to make him human, flawed, understandable —
and therefore real”
Boyd’s first novel A Good Man in Africa won the Whitbread award and he is widely
recognised as being one of the UK’s best living novelists. He has written ten
screenplays, including Chaplin for Sir Richard Attenborough, adapted his own Armadillo
for a critically-acclaimed BBC 2 series and penned the feature film Man to Man, that
opened this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Editor’s Notes
A Waste of Shame is a BBC/Open University co-production, produced by Chrissy
Skinns, directed by John McKay and written by William Boyd. The executive producers
for BBC Drama are Sally Woodward Gentle and Richard Fell. The executive producer for
the OU is Catherine McCarthy. It will be broadcast on Tuesday 22nd November, 9pm on
BBCFour.
The Open University and BBC have been in partnership for over 30 years providing
educational programming to a mass audience. In recent times this partnership has
evolved from late night programming for delivering courses to peak time programmes
with a broad appeal to encourage wider participation in learning.
Resources
Related courses:
Shakespeare: An Introduction
An introduction to the Humanities
Approaching Literature
Shakespeare: Text and Performance
The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry
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