October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.482 Monday, 19 October 2015
From: Anna Kamaralli <
Date: October 16, 2015 at 8:16:02 PM EDT
Subject: Re: Claudio
This is a very late response to Neema Parvini's question about Claudio's plea to his sister in Measure for Measure - I'm afraid I am only now catching up on all my SHAKSPER back-reading.
Neema, there is a long history of sympathy with Claudio’s behaviour, both from critics and from directors who create staging that encourages the audience to pity him (see Paola Dionisotti’s description of Barry Kyle’s production in Carol Rutter’s Clamorous Voices p.35). Though few are willing to argue that he is in the right, very few are not prepared to be understanding of the human weakness that would prompt his behaviour. On the other hand, Shakespeare actually modified his sources to make Claudio’s position less easily justified in his version, by making Isabella Claudio’s sister instead of his wife, and making her a novice nun.
There is, however, also a long history of judging Isabella outrageously harshly for her (perfectly legitimate from the point of view of a believer in the eternal soul) response to him. I can offer you a pretty detailed overview in “Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority”, which is in Shakespeare Survey 58, and a bit more in the Isabella section of my book, Shakespeare and the Shrew.
Best,
Anna Kamaralli
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.481 Monday, 19 October 2015
From: Charles Weinstein <
Date: October 16, 2015 at 10:48:29 AM EDT
Subject: Cumberbutcher
The production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch is barely coherent, and I left at intermission. Cumberbatch himself is all shallow emoting and empty gesticulation, unsupported by any depth of feeling or intellect. The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to include seeing productions like this.
--Charles Weinstein
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.480 Monday, 19 October 2015
From: Stuart Manger <
Date: October 15, 2015 at 3:15:44 PM EDT
Subject: Shapiro Book
The Year of Lear is currently being serialised on BBC Radio 4 this week. Should be available on
Religion, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, Book of the Week - BBC Radio 4
Stuart Manger
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.479 Monday, 19 October 2015
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: October 11, 2015 at 4:13:26 PM EDT
Subject: From TLS - Shapeshifters
[Editor’s Note: I have been catching up on my reading and discovered that in the past few weeks TLS has had a number of Shakespeare and Early Modern reviews. I will provide excepts; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at
Shapeshifters
Charles Shafaieh
Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Pearl Theatre Company, New York, until October 31
Published: 7 October 2015
In his surreal and raucous five-person production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Eric Tucker discards the traditional opposition of the ordered Athenian court and carnivalesque forest. The artistic director of the Bedlam Theatre instead turns the entire play into an extended dream, and channelling Puck’s love of chaos, infuses every scene with uproar and confusion.
The opening exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta is reworked as an overture of sorts, in which Tucker introduces the dream-logic that governs his interpretation. After an announcement welcomes the audience to a production of Uncle Vanya, a man bounds into view at the back of the room, grunting like an ape. He is chased onto a rectangular stage marked by a neon pink border and covered only by a synthetic material resembling sand. Enclosed in this playpen-cum-prison, it’s clear that he is trying to communicate, but “solemnities” is the only discernible word he utters – it’s also his last, as a mimed gunshot silences him just after it crosses his lips. Without a moment’s pause, the quintet (all clad in 1980s-style jumpsuits) changes into a group of hillbillies straight out of Deliverance who take Hippolyta hostage. Language is sacrificed again, drowned out by a cacophony of screams and shouting that ends almost as soon as it has begun. Yet another collective metamorphosis follows, although this time a second actress flexes her muscles and pushes herself to centrestage. She speaks with a ferocity befitting an Amazonian queen and, as if by sheer force alone, propels the narrative forward.
This manic, childlike compulsion to switch roles as quickly as possible echoes Bottom’s desire that Peter Quince cast him not just as Pyramus but Thisbe and “the lion too”. Even after accepting Quince’s decision, he cannot stop himself from imagining a variety of Pyramuses “in either your straw-color beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow”. Puck shares this desire for multiplicity; while making mischief in the Duke’s oak, the trickster proclaims “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound / A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire / . . . / Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn”. In terms of self-perception, these two have “no bottom”.
It’s unsurprising then, that in this wild production, the dextrous Jason O’Connell plays Bottom and Puck (in addition to Egeus), and that he often signals the shift between characters with no more than a “turn” of his head. The rest of the company (Mark Bedard, Sean McNall, Joey Parsons and Nance Williamson) also adopts Puck’s quick-changing abilities and, as a result, reinforces the promiscuity that runs through the play. Directors have long made use of the four lovers’ interchangeability as well as the way in which each character is intimately linked, structurally if not also sexually, to the others. Tucker takes this to the extreme, however, by making literal their dense interconnectedness. The actors repetitively fuse together, forming a many-headed monster whose collection of limbs represents the forest one second and Oberon’s attire the next, before they burst apart and each assumes one of their numerous roles.
[ . . . ]
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.478 Monday, 19 October 2015
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: October 11, 2015 at 4:12:39 PM EDT
Subject: From TLS - Fusillades of Sound, Fury – and Fun
[Editor’s Note: I have been catching up on my reading and discovered that in the past few weeks TLS has had a number of Shakespeare and Early Modern reviews. I will provide excepts; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at
Fusillades of Sound, Fury – and Fun
Katherine Duncan-Jones
Macbeth
Bill
Various cinemas
Published: 7 October 2015
Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies; the screenplay created for Justin Kunzel’s film is shorter still. I wasn’t counting, but my impression was that fewer than 50 per cent of the 2113 lines that appear in the Folio text are spoken, and many of those are barely audible against the blaring music, of which I became extremely weary. For my taste, less would certainly have been more in terms of noise. In the closing sequences, above all, theme and narrative were almost entirely jettisoned in favour of blockbusting special effects, both auditory and visual. One staggeringly unsubtle device was the blood-red wash drenching the whole screen during the final battle scene, rendered even more in-your-face by the over-extended staging of Macbeth’s duel with Macduff. This looked like being impossible to resolve as both combatants were wielding absurdly long, heavy broadswords. A neat dagger-thrust by Macduff would have finished the job much more efficiently. I pined for the reassuring phrase “Fights by Terry King” that heralds brilliantly elegant swordplay in Stratford. As for the prophecy that Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) was invincible by any man of woman born – like the “Birnam Wood/Dunsinane” prophecy, it was virtually inaudible. Viewers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play will miss a lot. Another major scene in which clear narrative was largely sacrificed to sound, fury and special effects was that of the grand banquet at which Banquo’s Ghost appears. Dialogue was minimal, and I couldn’t see a single goblet being sipped or piece of bread or meat being consumed.
Yet there is much that is both highly original and stunningly beautiful. The Scottish Highlands are recognizable and yet entirely unfamiliar, furnishing glorious vistas of horses and exotically clad Dark Age soldiers traversing mountain passes. Visually, we could almost be in ancient Mongolia. Impressive in a quite different way were the full-on Scottish accents valiantly mastered by the actors. The effort required of a Sassenach in decoding speeches to some extent justified the ruthless reduction of lines delivered. But in the case of the key scene in which Lady Macduff and her children are slaughtered, the liberties taken with Shakespeare’s narrative were a grievous loss. We glimpse them only as corpses. Given the paucity of female roles in this play, it was particularly disappointing to be denied Shakespeare’s enchanting cameo of a family that is both fruitful and loving.
However, female strength and significance figure both powerfully and beautifully elsewhere. One of the inventions that I have described as a “liberty” could be read as a novel response to that celebrated question: “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” The implicit answer is: “None living”. Pre-credits, we see Macbeth and his Lady perform tender, flowery funeral rites for a small dead girl-child, plausibly Scandinavian in appearance and dress, and apparently their sole offspring and last hope. The essential weakness of the tyrant Macbeth – his lack of an heir – is thus made visible, and his savagery is even to some extent condoned, insofar as it’s clear that neither parent can ever get over this loss. Grief, notoriously, readily mutates into rage – as it does here.
The “Weird Sisters” appear as three quietly prophetic veiled women standing on a misty ridge. They bring with them an aura of ancient and irrefutable wisdom, along with what C. S. Lewis called “Northernness”. The “double, double, toil and trouble” scenes (written partly by Thomas Middleton) are no loss. Accompanying the trio of sybils is that single girl-child, whose presence ensures that the anguish of childlessness is never forgotten. Original and effective use is also made of Fleance, also shown as a child, and the crucial survivor from the tyrant’s wrath: a lovely cameo performance by Lochlann Harris.
[ . . . ]
If a single scene could have been retained uncut, or at least, less radically trimmed, it would, for my taste, be the one that editors call Act Five, scene i – the “sleepwalking” scene. But I suppose, with its supporting Doctor and Waiting Gentlewoman, it was just too domestic and too literal for this movie’s grand style. The little that remains is very powerful. The scene that has often been most enjoyed by playgoers – that of the drunken Porter and the knocking at the gate (of Hell) – is entirely missing. Modern comic performers have often introduced topical allusions here, as well as embarrassing addresses to individual audience members. But that wouldn’t have suited this version. Magnificent and original as it is in so many ways, this Macbeth is a joke-free zone.
Not so, however, in the case of Bill; while the Kurzel/Fassbender Macbeth adapts and re-invents a single Shakespeare play, Bill glances at many. The film chronicles the progress of the failed musician and apparently talentless small-town hick Bill Shakespeare (Mathew Baynton) towards play-writing success at court and in London. There he eventually outstrips the silly, over-dressed, and perhaps plagiaristic “Earl of Croydon” (Simon Farnaby). Bill smuggles in a surprisingly large number of true features of the late Elizabethan world along with much charming idiocy, and clashing and clanking of unseen swords. By no means all the impressions that a young viewer takes away will be mistaken. In 1593 – the last so-called lost year of Shakespeare’s life – there were indeed continuing fears of Spanish aggression and Catholic conspiracies. And though we can’t be certain that “Chris” Marlowe (Jim Howick) truly was Bill’s best friend in London, the latter undoubtedly owed quite a lot to the former in his early plays. Filmgoers will also encounter a playful fusillade of allusions to and lines from Shakespeare during the film’s last fifteen minutes. These are funny, silly, fast-paced and tremendous fun.
I, for one, didn’t much relish the clichéd depiction of Queen Elizabeth (Helen McCrory) as a powdered harridan; and though I did like the inclusion of Anne née Hathaway (Martha Howe-Douglas) as Bill’s slightly older and entirely sensible wife, I couldn’t help wondering (in my literal-minded way) what happened to her three children left adrift in London when she is taken captive. But overall, this cinematic Horrible History is a thoroughly Good Thing.