Written in 2019, “Derby Day” was once considered by an Academy Award-winning producer. “As comedy, kisses and chaos ensue, and this race blends into a live viewing of the actual Kentucky Derby, guests will be treated to a few intriguing surprises.” “This ‘living movie’ of ‘Derby Day’ will have actors, costumes, props, and an exciting horse race of its own,” said Sterritt, who has been the recipient of the 2nd Place award at the South Coast Repertory Play Contest and was a finalist at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. The story examines the romance and rivalry between three syndicates competing in the “Run for the Roses”: an all-female team (including the horse) looking to make herstory at the Derby the last of the Kentucky bluegrass breeders dependent on a jockey who blew a past race to get them out of financial trouble and the most famous trainer ever in Derby lore, who is touting a horse whose record is “Infinity and Zero”. The event will also be streamed live behind a paywall for an additional fee. It will be followed by a live viewing of the actual Kentucky Derby at 6 p.m. Presented by SPQR Stage Company, the raucous rom-com is set against the backdrop of – what else? – the Kentucky Derby. “Derby Day” is a live production based on a film script by Cape May’s award-winning playwright Bill Sterritt. Instead, his "French English" contributes an example along the continuum of English, both then and now.Event includes mocktails, hat contest and TWO horse racesįans of the Kentucky Derby have a different way to watch andĬelebrate this year’s “most exciting 2 minutes in sports” – as part of an interactive “living movie”. If 'Hamlet' is a translational act, then Shakespeare’s "Englishness" can be somewhat decentralised. Furthermore, the Renaissance printing industry is testament to the ways in which dialectical aspects of English were not limited to Shakespeare’s work. English worked – and perhaps still works – as a language between languages “based on a system of double derivation…at once Germanic and Romance” (George Watson, ‘Shakespeare and the Norman Conquest’, 617).
In light of Ardis Butterfield’s extensive work on Chaucer’s multiple vernaculars, this paper conceptualises Shakespeare’s English as a French dialect of the language. Only a hundred or so years earlier, Anglo-Norman was still a widely-spoken dialect on English soil. Putting aside any questions about an ‘ur-Hamlet’, the Shakespearean "translation" of this tale exists in multiple iterations that appear to respond to a second francophone source: the 'Essais' of Michel de Montaigne. This is most likely to have reached Shakespeare via a French translation of a Latin collection of tales by a Danish academic: 'Les Histoires Tragiques' by François de Belleforest. Beneath the question of this play’s three texts and their chronology is a question of origin, which is made more interesting in light of the play’s narrative source, the Amleth myth.
This paper considers Shakespeare’s use of non-Anglophone sources and dialect within 'Hamlet'. Presented as part of 'Playing With Source Materials: Alterations and Shakespeare's Creative Fabric' at the NeMLA 'Global Spaces, Local Landscapes, and Imagined Worlds' conference, Omni William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA, April 12, 2018. Please contact me if you wish to read any of this work directly.
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