Pittsburgh Current: Here’s what I know: In 1988 British writer Peter Ackroyd published Chatterton, a multi-layered work using, as it’s starting point, the life and death of 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton. If we know him at all it’s because of two things – He killed himself at 17 and 100 years later the Romantics took him up as a symbol. Poems were written, praised were sung and someone named Henry Wallis painted a famous portrait of him lying, just dead, in a garret. Wallis used a poet named George Meredith as his model for Chatterton and, just to prove that men are pigs no matter the century, he ran off with Meredith’s wife whom he then abandoned when she got pregnant.
1 comment:
Reading this article was very interesting because I had read a few days ago another article about Chatterton. It is interesting to compare the two reviews because the two authors had such different experiences. This article describes Chatterton as a somewhat nonsensical but very funny and enjoyable experience while the first author, who was on a different track, described some of the more somber and complex elements of the show. Reading these two articles was very compelling and definitely made me want to see the show even more. Even though it was the same show, these two people saw completely different productions. Both articles described some pitfalls that the show had but I have always been drawn to shows that change depending on where you sit or where you go and, even if this was not executed perfectly and the disjunction between scenes may have subtracted from the end result, I think the experience is still worth it.
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