Hathaway—Eight Arias For A Bardic Life

Hathaway—Eight Arias For A Bardic Life is a plaria (play with opera arias) 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…


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

London-born author Briar Kit Esme is best known for the prescient and allegorical novel The Twenty-Five Deeds of Hanson Drake. Published in 2013, the story follows the enigmatic songwriting starman Hanson Drake—a fictionalised stand-in for the late David Bowie (1947–2016)—during the final weeks of his life. Through critical and popular acclaim, Hanson Drake has attracted favourable comparisons with a number of award-winning novels, including Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, for its simple feel-good narrative; Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, for its epigrammatic literary style; and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, for its wide-ranging philosophical ideas.


Briar Kit is also the author of the operatic plaria Hathaway—Eight Arias For A Bardic Life, written to mark the quatercentenary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Commissioned as a co-production for Helios Collective, Buxton Opera, and Copenhagen Opera, Hathaway received its much-lauded world premiere at Buxton Festival in 2016.


Briar Kit now publishes under noms de plume, while also working as a scriptwriter and librettist for opera, music, theatre, film, and television companies, and as a ghostwriter, editor, and consultant for world-renowned authors.


Contact via Briar Kit’s website at briarkitesme.wordpress.com