When Is Too Much Shakespeare?
I’ve spent a lot of my life around the works of William Shakespeare. As
a double major (English-Speech/Theater) in college, I took all the intro
to lit courses. I still remember Dr. H.O. Grauel’s classes and how he introduced
a roomful of sophomores to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Measure for Measure,
King Lear, and other plays. That’s when I really began to start to
get what Shakespeare was doing. I was working primarily on an intellectual
level, of course, so when I took beginning acting and did my Shakespeare
scene (from
Two Gentlemen of Verona), the teacher (College Theatre’s director)
had only one comment: “Barbara, you have personally set the art of Shakespearean
acting back a hundred years!” Yeah. I was that bad. (But my scene from
Molière was marginally better, and so was my modern drama scene.) I have
no acting talent at all, but I’m a very good audience because I pay attention.
I read Shakespeare and his contemporaries in graduate school, too. My
M.A. thesis was a comparison of the Aristotelian unities of time, place,
and action in four plays each by Shakespeare and Molière. Aristotle said
that the action of a play should be in real time, that it should take place
in a single setting (no scenery in those classical Greek amphitheatres),
and that there should be only one plot (no subplots). That’s how the tragedies
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are constructed. Because neoclassicism
didn’t arrive in England till long after his death, Shakespeare ignored
Aristotle, whereas Molière, who was writing during the reign of Louis XIV,
followed the unities in his comedies. My Ph.D. dissertation was also partly
Shakespearean. I inflicted literary criticism on the plays about Cleopatra
of Egypt written in English between1592 (Mary Sidney) and 1898 (G.B. Shaw).
One thing I learned is that
Antony and Cleopatra is the closest to actual history.
So…..a couple years ago, when I received a nice big check from one of
my authors, I spent some of it on the BBC Shakespeare. All thirty-seven
plays in a big, black box. I’d already seen most of the plays (I’d been
renting them from Netflix), but even though I own thirty-three DVDs of
nineteen plays, I lusted after that box. I have five
Hamlets, including the French opera in which Hamlet gets drunk with
the players and pours wine over his head. Three
Much Ado About Nothings, including the splendid new one by Joss Whedon,
none of whose actors I recognized.
Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony (with crisp diction!).
Othello with Lawrence Olivier, who painted his whole body black and
walked around with his tunic open—Lord Larry was gorgeous when he was young.
Al Pacino rehearsing
Richard III. A 1936
Romeo and Juliet with Norma Shearer (age 34) as Juliet (age 13),
Leslie Howard (age 43) as Romeo (age 18), and John Barrymore (age 54) as
Mercutio (ditto). The acting is wonderful. I also have the Baz Luhrmann
version, which I like. And two Julie Taymor productions.
Titus Andronicus is weird no matter who directs it. The only thing
wrong with Taymor’s
Tempest (with Helen Mirren as Prospera) is Russell Brand.
Beyond those, I also have a DVD called
Silent Shakespeare (silent movies with bits of blank verse on the
intertitles).
Shakespeare Behind Bars (murderers in prison doing The Tempest—it’s
spell-binding).
Slings and Arrows, a series about a Canadian company that is
only slightly like the Stratford Festival. Although it’s mostly about the
actors and directors, we get terrific scenes from
Hamlet,
Macbeth, and
Lear. A bunch of documentaries.
Anonymous, a ridiculous movie about the Oxfordians, who believe the
17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays because “the man from Stratford” was
an ignoramus who couldn’t possibly have written a single word.
Shakespeare Retold (four plays without the blank verse),
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
Shakespeare in Love, and the
Reduced Shakespeare Company. They do the complete works in an hour
and a half.
As soon as the box arrived, I printed the
Wikipedia article, which is twenty-two pages long. It’s generally
accurate, though some characters’ names are misspelled and some of the
cast lists are incomplete. I made notes on those twenty-two pages while
I was watching the plays.
Then the box just sat there. And sat there. Finally, last month, I said,
“I’m gonna watch ’em all!” I figured it would take me about six weeks,
which is basically one long play (2 ½ to 3+ hours) nearly every night.
The producers and sponsors of the BBC Shakespeare (filmed between 1979
and 1982) prescribed a traditional, conservative, Elizabethan/Jacobean,
approach in setting and costuming. This meant Romans with beards. For some
reason, it apparently also meant lots of bare-chested men (yummy!). There
are a few exceptions.
Othello is costumed and set to look like the paintings of El Greco,
All’s Well That End’s Well looks like Vermeer,
The Comedy of Errors is vaguely commedia dell arte, and
Love’s Labour’s Lost is set in the 18th century.
As I watched the plays, I began to recognize members of what I came to
think of as the BBC repertory company: Michael Hordern, Claire Bloom, Ron
Cook, and Trevor Peacock (five plays each), Helen Mirren (three plays),
Derek Jacobi and John Gielgud (two each), and many others. I was especially
impressed by Paul Jesson (eight plays) and the range that all the actors
show. But I disagree with some casting choices. Jacobi played Hamlet as
a hysteric, though he’s not nearly as operatic as Richard Burton. He was
so melodramatic that I kept yelling, “Hamlet, shut up! Get on with it!”
Nicol Williamson played Macbeth like he did Merlin in
Excalibur: he practically sang his lines. Plus, the Wyrd Sisters
looked like Muppets and there was no dumb show. Some years ago, I saw a
production of
Macbethat Stratford that left me speechless. The BBC version did
not.
When is too much Shakespeare? Probably the Sunday I started at noon and
watched the second half of
Richard II(Jacobi was a splendid Richard), then
Othello (Anthony Hopkins in suntan makeup and a fright wig and Bob
Hoskins as a convincing, conniving Iago), then
King John, then half of
The Merry Wives of Windsor (such a stupid play I watched only half
of it), then half of
Troilus and Cressida, by which time it was 11 p.m. and I was prostrate
on the couch.
During the day, I’m reading Jane Austen, which I have not read since college.
I was standing in a bookstore and found a volume of four of her novels
for $7.98. Who could resist? And I’ve just finished
Nashville Chrome, a fascinating sort of novelized biography of
the
Browns, a famous country music trio of the 1950s and 60s that I’d
never heard of before. And having finished Shakespeare, I put a couple
Fred and Ginger movies in the DVD player. There’s no tapdancing in Shakespeare,
except maybe in Kenneth Branagh’s musicalized
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Six weeks of Shakespeare plus Jane Austen plus 1950s country music plus
Fred and Ginger. Imagine what the voices in my head sound like.
