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

 
Posted by Lis at 12:00 PM | link

Sometimes, it pays to be a packrat. I just found the syllabus for the meta-Shakespeare class I took in Spring 1991:

I believe we watched the Moonlighting episode for Shakespeare's birthday.

 
Posted by Lis at 8:15 AM | link

This probably should've been one of my first posts, but thoughtful, thorough introductions take time to compose and there have been other, more immediate things I've wanted to say in the meantime.

My background with the Bard:

Based on a vague sense of deja-vu when I read some of the plays in HS and college, I know that I read some collected Shakespeare edited for children before I was ten. This was not for school, but something I got from the library bookmobile as pleasure reading. All I know for certain is that it wasn't the Lamb's Tales, because these were written in a script format so they could be performed as plays. However, they were also very edited down, without many of the minor characters and side plots.

When I was in high school, we read a Shakespeare play for three of the four years (in 11th grade, we studied American literature to accompany American history). The plays were (in order): Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. We were taught the plays by reading them together, slowly, over the course of several weeks. After we finished reading R&J, the teacher did spend a week (50 minute periods) showing us the Zeffirelli video (and fast forwarding past the nekkid bits). Pretty dull for the most part.

In college, I took the basic Shakespeare survey course; I forget which plays or how many we covered, but again, it was reading and lecture/discussion, although the BBC versions were available on reserve in the library.

My senior year, I took a class called meta-Shakespeare, which I do credit as one of the more interesting classes in my academic career. This course studied how later authors reinvented Shakespeare, and included such works as:

• Bowdler's Antony & Cleopatra (yes, I've actually read something bowdlerized)
• Verdi's opera Otello
• Tate's 1861 King Lear (because, that play really needed a happy ending)
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
• many other works whose names escape me at the moment (I'll try to compile a list later),
• and, one memorable day, the Sandman Midsummer night's dream (my first exposure to Sandman) and the "Atomic Shakespeare" episode of Moonlighting (which I would love to get on video, BTW)

For that class, I frequently found myself reading thru Shakespeare's plays very quickly in order to read the later interpretations we were actually assigned. Again, not the best way to learn Shakespeare, but I did gain exposure to many more plays that way.

I did see Branagh's Henry V in the theaters while in college, and since then have tried to see all of Branagh's movies (I haven't seen his Othello, but then he just starred in that and didn't direct). Despite their box office drubbings I loved his Hamlet, which really needs to be seen on the big screen. And I adored Love's Labour's Lost -- it had me singing and dancing my way out of the theater.

As far as the scholarly debates are concerned, I'm what the New York Times calls a "passive Stratfordian," believing that William Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the plays. It largely comes down to Occam's Razor, although I follow the authorship debates with some amusement. I like the idea that Kit Marlowe's death was faked and he went undercover to write as the Bard, but the historical record doesn't seem to back that up. Marlowe was too well-known to have stayed in London, and the plays are too tied to the makeup of the cast for them to have been written abroad and sent back...

For a good source on the debate, including all contenders for the title of "Bard," take a look at Shakespeare Authorship. The site's authors are Stratfordian, but they show evidence from all sides and let you, the reader, judge for yourself.

So, that's where I stand, and where I came from.

Welcome.

 
Posted by Lis at 1:30 PM | link

Yesterday, I stopped by a library and picked up Shakespeare for Dummies. It'll probably never end up on my pages of "Books Read" because I don't intend to read the summaries to plays I haven't seen, but it's a surprisingly good book.

It starts with a few chapters on Shakespeare and Shakespeare's world, particularly focused on elements that will help one understand the plays (such as the ranks of the nobility and beliefs regarding natural order). Then, three chapters on Shakespeare's language: first explaining the period pronouns and common words. Then (and here's what I love) an entire chapter on Shakespeare's sense of humor and what kinds of jokes you can expect to find, with a few examples. That's as far as I've gotten so far.

The book also includes act-by-act summaries of every play, with scorecards one can photocopy and bring along to the theater to help follow the page. It's a really cute idea, and I may bring one along for my mother-in-law when we see As You Like It tonight.

I really recommend it for a good introduction to Shakespeare. I'm working up a much longer article for this journal on how I believe Shakespeare should be taught in the schools, but it isn't yet ready to post. However, this book manages to hit several of the points I believe should be covered.

I also checked out Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the invention of the human and found it to be one of the more pretentious pieces of ... that I've read in a long time. I know that he's much respected as a Shakespearean scholar, but he lays it on way too thick. Shakespeare was the first writer to really create complex characters that weren't unchanging archetypes? I don't think so. And he seems to be far too much in love with certain characters (Hamlet, Falstaff and Rosalind of AYLI), to the point of comparing characters in all the other plays with those three. I read a little of his introduction and conclusion, and tried to look at his points about plays that I've seen, and it's just too much. After trying to wade through it, I hopped onto Amazon and took a look at some of the user reviews. Although some people really like it, I'm not alone in this assessment.

 
Posted by Lis at 7:21 AM | link

Checked out from the library a 1990 video titled Discovering Hamlet. Narrated by Patrick Stewart, it examines the play by filming the four weeks of rehearsal in a performance directed by Derek Jacobi and starring Kenneth Branagh.

Not only do I prefer seeing the plays performed over just reading them (although having a script in front of me while watching is also good), I also really like reading/hearing what actors have to say about Shakespeare. They seem to have such an intimate knowledge of the text because... well... they have to in order to give a good performance. Listening to Derek Jacobi in that video, reading Ian McKellan and Branagh (such as this one on Fresh Air) -- that conveys much more of a sense of why Shakespeare is so highly praised and prized than any analysis I've read in any book.

 
Posted by Lis at 10:25 PM | link

Although I initially posted this as a standard web page, I soon realized that I wanted to update content more frequently, and a Blog-like format would be more suited to the task. I hope nobody's gotten lost along the way...

Since my last post, we finished watching Much ado about nothing. I remember reading somewhere that Shakespeare's tragedies were just like the comedies only without a Fool. That certainly seemed so with Much Ado. Without the presence of Benedick and Beatrice, the Hero and Claudio romance nearly veered into Othello, as Claudio became irrationally jealous after some malicious prompting (Act II, Scene 1), and then Romeo and Juliet, dealing with a faked death.