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

 
Posted by Lis at 12:01 PM | link

Nobody's ever commented upon this journal. Since YACCS only allows comment boxes for 2 blogs, I'm removing the feature from this blog, and cannibalizing the code for my lifeandliberty.info planning

 
Posted by Lis at 9:35 AM | link

Last summer, I/we saw several excellent outdoor performances of Shakespeare, so I thought I'd check what these theater companies are up to this year:

• Commonwealth Shakespeare will be showing Macbeth free at the Boston Common from July 18 -- August 10, and their tour of the parks will be showing Midsummer Night's Dream.
• The Publick Theatre will also be playing Midsummer Night's Dream (starting this Thursday) and Twelfth Night starting in mid-July.
• The New England Shakespeare Festival will also be running Twelfe Night (I know Shakespeare only wrote 33 plays, but what's with all the repetition?)
• And if I could manage to get out to the other side of the state, Shakespeare & Company in Lenox will be performing Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado and King Lear
• Oh, and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge is performing Pericles thru June 27th. [They're deferring Midsummer Night's Dream until next January.]

Don't know if I'll see any or many of these, but consider this a public notice for Shakespeare aficionados in the Boston area (as well as a personal reminder for myself).

PS: As long as I'm thinking about Shakespeare, I have to remember to bookmark Actors From The London Stage. They're a five-man theater troupe who perform Shakespeare with minimal props and each actor assuming multiple roles. Patrick Stewart's an alum of the troupe, so if you think of what his one man rendition of Christmas Carol, you'll get the idea. I saw their "Midsummer Night's Dream" back in college and it was excellent. The acting was so good and the story so engaging, I didn't have problems even when actors were portraying two characters in the same scene. [They try to minimize that, but it's not always possible.]

Anyway, it doesn't look like they're playing Boston this year, but every time I think of them I have to struggle to recall the troupe's name and website, so I may as well make note of it here. And if you have a chance to see them perform, whereever you are, I highly recommend it.

 
Posted by Lis at 8:30 PM | link

Found an interesting article today about Shakespeare in fantasy. The author has written a few fantasies involving Shakespeare -- books I'll have to find somewhere.

I replied to the author via e-mail, making several points.

• I think there's a lot more "Shakespeariana" in general than she mentioned, and told her about my meta-Shakespeare class.
• Although there hasn't been much fantasy about Shakespeare, he does feature in many mystery novels, such as the Simon Hawke's Shakespeare & Smythe series or Faye Kellerman's Quality of Mercy. Speaking of Shakespeare in fantasy fiction, he's a character in Neil Gaiman's Sandman and in Melissa Scott's Armor of Light, where Marlowe plays a larger role.
• I've noticed that while writers may be overawed by The Bard, Kit Marlowe does seem to be a popular character in fantasy fiction, with a portrayal ranging from doubting Thomas to casual magic user.
    I've been toying with writing an essay of my own about his portrayal in modern fiction, though since I haven't been able to get into Garrett's or Burgess's books (probably the most famous fictional portrayals of him) I've been holding off).
    Why is Marlowe more popular than Shakespeare? He seems to be an Elizabethan James Dean, who lived fast, died young and left not just a good-looking corpse, but also an air of intrigue and mystery. His probable homosexuality seems to fit with modern tastes for diversity. And, since he wrote the fantasy Dr. Faustus and was believed to associate with the School of Night, it gives authors a hook to associate him with other fantastical elements.

I also asked her for other books she recommends.

I've already gotten a response back (you know, authors are generally quite good about writing replies to emails), which I don't have time to fully answer at the moment. Still, interesting article, and I haven't posted enough to this journal yet...

 
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.

 
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...

---

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).