Search And Destroy - Shakespeare

Search the Tempest. Shakespeare knew he was dying, and wrote about his bookishness at last.

Destroy the Tempest. I have never seen a production which doesn't drag the singing out to the most tedious degree.

Granted, the main reason I like Romeo and Juliet is the film version from 1968 where Olivia Hussey flashes the camera rushing to the window. I'm glad my 9th grade English teacher didn't preview that tape before showing it...

If I was writing my A-Level English exam again I would possibly remark that Keanu Reeves casting is a masterpiece. Don Pedro the character he plays is after all the villain. This is a Shakespeare comedy and as such the villain is written in a laughable pantomime way but also written clumsily: (Witness the line "Any cross, any bar, any impediment" - which would have worked so much better if it was "Any impediment, any cross, any bar"). The reason is that - this being a comedy - everyone gets off scot free. If Don Pedro was successful in being an evil character the ending would appear to lack justice. Hence by writing him like a fool, and having him played by an idiot, such a situation does not occur.

Sir Ian's Richard III is overblown but worth it merely for the shot of St Pancras as the Houses of Parliment. My Richard III was better ("Baran as King Richard possesses the comic touch of a young John Sessions": Borehamwood Times. I've not acted since.) And Antony & Cleopatra kicks ass - though I've never seen it performed particularly well.

Search: The film of Macbeth which features none other than (I'm not making this up) child actor Keith Chegwin playing the little boy/minstrel. This lightened up my GCSE English class considerably, I seem to remember. (The gratuitous lopping off of heads helped as well, probably.)

Bill

Search: Robert Lindsay as Benedick in the BBC production of Much Ado About Nothing, Robert Lindsay as Richard III (RSC), Robert Lindsay as Citizen Smith. Also search my GCSE exam paper on Macbeth which I wrote with zero revision and without even having read the thing. Wish I could get my hands on it - must be hilarious.

If you mean I've got to be joking about liking it, then, no, I did quite like it, but not hugely. I had heard that they had changed it between inception and the performance I saw, and I think the reviews were, ahem, mixed. Nice plot, though.

If you mean I've got to be joking about the awol snake, I am delighted and astonished to offer this proof:

http://members.tripod.com/~emma_on_line/cedric.html

Search: Hamlet. It actually IS his best. By a margin so big it ain't funny. Brannagh's film is also great *despite* Brannagh RUINING so much of the text with his mannered reading - especially where his voice goes all squeaky. God, I hate that. - and the 'What a piece of work is a man?' speech is totally thrown away as Ken climbs some stairs and distractedly blurts it out. GRRRR! How *could* he? The film is saved, however, by three brilliant performances by Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie and Kate Winslet - her Ophelia is still, apart from her Sue in Jude, her best work. And her singing is genuinely haunting.

Oh yeah, also Destroy Stratford, *especially* the RSC theatre - an ugly, squat, charmless 70's-nightmare building.

Troilus And Cressida is excellent, or was the one time I saw it. Thersites is one of his best characters, and the play as a whole is remarkably clear-sighted (read: immensely cynical) in its approach to romance. Yes, there are a billion characters though, and I had a kind of advantage from knowing who they all are anyway.

Measure For Measure is another underrated one - a nasty judicial thriller nestling inside a comedy.

The jealousy scenes in Winter's Tale are nerve-rackingly horrible (in a good way). The hippie scenes in same are pretty awful though.

I used to know one of the sonnets off by heart. Cant even remember what number it was now.

All round greatness award to Lear, I think.

Subsequent school trips, I was always hoping for maximum floor-wave action, but got none. I also saw Twelfth Night there (Judi Dench as the twin sister?): I was perhaps somewhat stirred by all the girls-as-boys cross- dressing (to be honest I can't remember, so perhaps not) but afterwards baffled my English teacher when he asked which character we liked best: the Sea Captain, I piped up. Why? I knew not how to answer, and just mumbled: actual ans = because (all hulking and dressed in dark grey leather and fabby black thigh-boots) he totally Had Pash on redhead Sebastian, which is why he promises to wait for him at the seaside. I didn't understand analytically why I so took to him: but def.intuited in blurry yet strong way the whatever of this bearish smitten Daddy so doting on his slender boyish- girlish charge (charge who was in fact IN charge: rowr). The sea captain I still remember. All the comedy stuff with Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch: gone, pretty much.

Saw Lear open-air at Ludlow in mid-teens. Fell in love with Cordelia of course (Hopey Glass for Jacobeans), considered Edmund the Bastard v.hard done by, and delighted that — when [who? Kent?] has eyes pulled out, the puller threw actual meaty blobs INTO THE AUDIENCE!! (No, maybe only onto the stage: but this was still First-Class Entertainment)

The part I actually always liked best on these school trips was chicken-in-a-basket, a type of food that now seems as medieval as salmagundy...

Search: Hamlet; King Lear; Measure For Measure ('underrated', Tom? Not among Shakespeareans); Richard II; Henry IV (both, but especially Part I); Henry VI Part II (now THAT's underrated: intriguing comical representation of peasants' rebellion, c. 1450).

I'm not particularly keen on (The Rape Of) Lucrece, Othello, Macbeth, or even everyone else's fave Antony & Cleopatra. Henry V has moments but is quite bad as a whole. I can't stand Richard III, either.

Interesting: The Merchant Of Venice.

Search also: Stephen Dedalus on Shakespeare, though not for clarity or plausibility.

My favourites: I love loads of the sonnets, plus Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello.

I'm working on a paper on how Falstaff gradually takes over the plays and how supposed hero Hal becomes gradually less sympathetic, so I'd like to hear any insights you might have into that.

Have you ever seen Orson Welles's film of both Henrys (plus some of the others), Chimes at Midnight?

What is the nature of this paper you're working on?

I might have more thoughts later. (In fact - I already do.)

Reading HIV1+2 again is strongly reminding me of both Blair *and* Bush, in their different ways. Issues of politics, strategy, presentation (Blair), and of ways to secure the appearance of legitimacy when it has initially been doubted (Bush). Such 'presentism' sounds crass and insensitive. But in this case... it isn't.

You might get along better with Graham Holderness on the histories, if you don't already know his work.

For all their qualities, the Henry plays are dispiriting.

The Bush/Hal parallels are eerily obvious:

"Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days."

Or perhaps I mean: how can we reconcile Shakespeare's 'support for war' in HV with those lines at the end of HIV2?

They really are the Smoking Gun; or perhaps the Discharg'd Pistol.

Other major issues:

1) does HIV as a whole seem to legitimate the Henries as Kings? If it wants to do so, why insist so often on their illegitimacy, as usurpers? (Empson said that usurpation was the secret theme of the Henriad.)

2) How facile is it that HIV tells HV: "I was never seen as legitimate, cos I was a usurper; but you'll inherit from me, so you'll be seen as legitimate"? (This is what gets me thinking of Bush: not the father-son succession, but the way Bush will find later ratifications of his initially bogus legitimacy.)

3) How about the trickery and treachery of the royal forces in HIV2, Act IV? Unbelievable! The King's party is Machiavellian through and through.

4) Note the utter callousness, with a strong class edge, of Hal in HIV1. Not so much the famous soliloquy in which he dissociates himself from Falstaff et al (bad enough), but the dreadful scene in which he 'humiliates' the Drawer Francis ('Anon, anon!'), then has the cheek to mock Francis's lack of verbal range! It is insupportable to read of this character being endorsed as 'mirror of English kings', 'ideal form of the monarch' (see the astoundingly bad finale to Maynard Mack's intro to Signet HIV1).

Although Henry V is commonly portrayed as a hero-king (see Olivier's film) I don't think many people in any audience feel that way by the end of HIV Part 2.

What do you make of the epilogue to that play? It seems baffling to me: I can't think of another play Shakespeare felt the need to apologize to the audience for. It also seems odd that he promises to bring Falstaff back in the next play, and doesn't (not that he could have had any place in it, without ruining the patriotic bombast).

Very strange. Empson again (Kenyon Review, Spring 1953): Falstaff's 'food for powder' speech says to HIV: "that is all you Norman lords want, in your squabbles between cousins over your loot, which you make an excuse to murder the English people".

C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959) on folk tradition and carnival (and cf also Bakhtin, Rabelais And His World)

Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom For A Stage (1972), on history and Shakespeare's aesthetic play with it in the histories

Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives (1988), on rituals of violence

Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (1985), on politics of Shakespeare's epic drama

question for debate: who was the Hal/Henry V of Orwell's day?

one day I will change this.

did Edward Bond do Early Morning, the one about Queen Victoria having an affair with Florence Nightingale, and her heir being half of a pair of siamese twins?

Surely, in its way, Angels In America fits this criterion.

just watching this again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xHlngY6Bgk

as a result of reading this
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/03/ian-mckellen-10-best-shakespeare-roles-on-film?CMP=fb_gu

proper chills.

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/misquotesfaq.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08b2cgm

Released On: 21 Apr 2020

Khalid Abdalla, Matthew Needham and Cassie Layton star in Shakespeare's tragedy. This version is staged in an imagined near future, in which a power-hungry Turkish president attempts an attack on Cyprus. The western forces rush to Cyprus' defence, under the command of the fearless General Othello. But can an Arab-born, Christian convert ever be truly accepted by the people he serves?

Shakespeare our contemporary. pic.twitter.com/fxFi5WijMy

— Stephen Unwin (@RoseUnwin) January 25, 2023