Lis's little touch of Shakespeare
Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak

 
Posted by Lis at 9:59 PM | link

So, we rented both Olivier's and Branagh's Henry V to watch Thursday night.

Or, at least, we tried to watch Olivier's. We shut it off in the second scene. It was staged like a play in Elizabethan England -- a bad play, with actors missing their cues. They seemed to to be playing the serious scenes for laughs, so we ejected the tape and put in the Branagh.

Beautiful lighting, beautiful music, but (aside from Katherine's scenes) they cut all the comedy. Even the comic relief characters are portrayed as "thieves and cut-throats with no obvious futures, living in boozy poverty with no hope left."*

For those interested in more on Henry V, a few sites I discovered after we finished:

• I already mentioned FilmShakespeare.org in an earlier journal entry, which displays the script and highlights the editing choices.
• I also found someone's dissertation comparing the two films in essay format.
• Agincourt.net has details on the historical battle

We'll probably try watching the Olivier again sometime this weekend, but I don't have terribly high hopes for it.

A little while later, I pulled out our video of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, which I hadn't watched in ages. We watched the first hour or so (until Benedick and Beatrice were tricked into falling in love) but took about two hours to do so, as we kept the lights on and a copy of the play in front of us, reading along with Beatrice and Benedick and pausing the tape whenever Branagh cut a line or simply to marvel at his interpretation. [During Benedick's monologue after overhearing that Beatrice loves him, Shakespeare writes: "Love me! Why, it must be requited." Branagh delivers it as: "Love me! WHY!? It must be requited."]

That scene is a comic masterpiece; I'm really developing a love of Shakespeare's comedies. I'm also enjoying watching movie interpretations.

Afterwards, I logged in and found the Kenneth Branagh Compendium, a site with photos and articles and reviews of Ken's work. Now, I had heard that Ken decided to drop or postpone his plans for several other Shakespearean movies after the box office failures of his unabridged Hamlet and musical Love's Labour's Lost (both of which we saw on the big screen and loved). However, I hadn't heard which plays he intended to film -- until last night. He intended to stage Macbeth in a modern Wall Street Rupert Murdoch mold. And then he planned to use a Japanese setting for As You Like It. Noooooo! As far as I can tell (from IMDB and elsewhere) there are no good filmed versions of AYLI, which is rapidly growing into one of my favorite plays. I want to see this movie. I hope he's able to film it soon.

Meanwhile, there are so many Shakespearean films that I want to see: Titus, Ethan Hawke's Hamlet... Now, there's an idea for a theme night at the Brattle Theater -- recent Shakespeare adaptations. There have been a lot of good ones lately.

There's much more I want to say, so expect this page to be updated later...

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Friday, August 5, 2002

Much ado about Shakespeare

I've come to realize that I really love Shakespeare, despite what I was taught in school. Maybe I'm not up on the latest in teaching methods, but I think that way I was taught Shakespeare in the 1980s wasn't the greatest (and I'm regretting the college-level Shakespeare class as well). There's so much conveyed in performance that you can't get reading the plays slowly privately or in a classroom setting. I think students would be much better served by watching the plays and then reading and discussing them, rather than the other way around. Teach the kids more about Elizabethan/Jacobean England, so they can recognize the resonances, and teach them some of the period slang so they'll get the in-jokes (any mention of horns (which seem to appear in every play) are puns referring to cuckolds)

There seems to be a common belief that Shakespeare is suitable for all ages (see the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's FAQ, which only warns about the fight scene), when there's some pretty raunchy humor in there. I was frankly shocked at how many small children I saw at the Publick's As You Like It -- that play is raunchy! For example:

Act III Scene II
	Rosalind:	"I prithee, take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings."
	Celia:	"So you may put a man in your belly."
Act IV Scene I
	Celia (to Rosalind, who's wearing male drag):	"You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate: we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest."

I mean, what do you think those lines refer to?

And once you know that Ganymede, the "male" name that Rosalind assumes as her disguise, is period slang for "young gay male," it adds a whole new resonance to the scenes where she asks Orlando to pretend (s)he's female and woo her.

But there's this public perception that Shakespeare is high-brow and family friendly (except perhaps for Titus) so parents bring their kids to the shows without any advance explanation and bore them to pieces, furthering the perception that Shakespeare is out-of-touch. I don't know what the answer is. Maybe we should treat Shakespeare as forbidden fruit -- "you're not old enough to understand this" -- and give kids the subversive thrill of self-discovery. Or maybe, instead of teaching kids the tragedies in public schools -- Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar -- start kids on the comedies. Delight the children with Bottom wearing a donkey's head and Pyramus & Thisbe. Or even skip the reading of entire plays, and just pick out some of the more entertaining and accessible scenes to engender a love of wordplay (the tennis puns in Henry V, for example).