Snow Glass Apples: A Play For Voices Read Online Free PDF Page B

her
lips, more red than blood, her skin, snow-white.
    (A beat. Then she whispers, finally, ending
it all,)
    Snow-white.
     
    SFX: AN ECHOING SILENCE. CLOSING MUSIC,
CRYSTALLINE AND DARK.

     

     

THE ARTIST’S NOTES

    When first exploring the task of creating
this book we imagined a work like the first Gaiman Play for Voices
we created, Murder Mysteries . Plays are not the easiest
things to read and always present a design challenge. However after
a careful study we began to believe we could do a better job of
creating a text that was easier to follow and had a little more
life to it on the page. We tried a number of different layouts and
designs before we settled on what my wife Michelle came up with.
“Why not centre the text and change the colour of the type for the
Queen’s voice so that the reader gains a better sense of the change
from the past and present voice of the Queen.” We tried this and I
think you’ll agree that it has a natural flow that is easy to read
and makes for a lively rubinicated page design.
     
    The early monk scribes described their pages
as textus meaning cloth they saw ‘thought’ as a thread, and
the narrator as a spinner of yarns and the true storyteller, the
poet, as a weaver. Our goal in creating a fine book is to create a
cloth for the story so fine that you forget the cloth altogether
and are immersed in the story. Of course it is especially alluring
when we get to work with a master weaver.
     
    The Snow White Fairytale has a rich history
of famous illustrators such as Walter Crane (1882), Arthur Rackham
(1909), and Maurice Sendak (1973) to name a few of my favourite
artists and their Snow White book publication dates. Their vision
of the delicate girl has shaped the visions of thousands of young
minds and set the story of Snow White into the collective
unconscious of popular culture. In the forward to this book Jack
Zipes has pointed to a plethora of elaborations on Snow White’s
Grimm origins. These permeantations provide a wealth of opportunity
to envision the complexities of this story which at first may seem
as innocent as air. It is always wise to hear both sides of a story
before we cast judgement: this is something that is greatly lacking
in our culture of one sided views. Snow White always appeared to me
as unbelievably innocent and naive. Consequently, I relished the
thought of exposing the myth in pictures from a new direction. I
leapt at this chance to tell the story through the medium of wood
engraving, which seemed fitting since the first attempt on Snow
White’s life takes place in the forest. My second goal for the
artwork was to free the Queen from the injustices and biases that
have dogged her. I wanted to empower her so that she could reclaim
her humanity as Gaiman has artfully woven into the text.
     
    I’ve been asked why I don’t use colour in my
wood engravings. It’s simply because I prefer the stark truth of
black and white. Let the colour be in the fabric of the story and
I’ll cast dramatic shadows with bold blacks and thin white lines.
Black and white has a rich tradition in relation to storytelling as
the wood blocks of Albrect Durer, John Tennial, Frans Masereel and
Lynd Ward can prove. Alfred Hitchcock’s black and white films are
another example of the black art that I admire.
     
    Barbara Walker writes in Feminist Fairy
Tales , “Snow White’s stepmother seems to have been vilified
because (a) she resented being less beautiful than Snow White, and
(b) she practiced witchcraft.” Barbara Walker also sees the
injustice the Queen receives when she is labeled ‘witch’. She
states,“As for witchcraft, the last bastion of female spiritual
power fell when the church declared its all-out war on witches, the
name they gave to rural mid-wives, healers, herbalists, counselors,
and village wisewomen, inheritors of the unraveling cloak of the
pre-Christian priestess. A queen who was also a witch would have
been a formidable figure, adding political