scene individable, or POLL unlimited: works of william shakespeare

Hamlet 2 was pretty dope tho

I didn’t care for Polonius: A Hamlet Story

Voted for Lear. Macbeth and Tempest, though!

King Lear (Peter Brook, 1971)

I also liked Joss Whedon's film of Much Ado About Nothing as well. Those are my two fave Shakeys on film.

Throne of Blood might be my fav Macbeth

Always feeling it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNhGhVvUcu8

Macbeth.

I mean..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Y7xxnMiXg

for repeat entertainment value, Macbeth (murder, horror, tight running time) just edges Hamlet (murder, horror, smartmouth emo lead, but tl;dr)

For repeat entertainment value, little beats Richard III. For depth and wisdom, maybe Lear, or in some ways, maybe The Tempest, which is his most self aware and a fine sendoff.

Someone should poll all the different radical "Richard III in space" or whatever adaptations of Shakespeare.

The Tempest is easily the strangest of his great works. It works fantastically as an insubstantial pageant, but the allegorical elements are insufficiently meshed together to withstand scrutiny, which weakens it.

I've heard it described as sort of a Shakespeare's greatest hits: magic and mix-ups, romantic entanglements, father and daughter stuff ... missing the history, I guess. And Prospero's final monologue is like the Bard taking a bow.

t/s reading vs watching/listening

read a lot of the plays through school / undergrad but i'm not sure i really began to love Shakespeare (or even that i necessarily "got it" to any great extent) until i found torrents with the complete sets of BBC tv performances and Arkangel audio versions (god bless these latter-day Robin Hoods, whoever they are). the BBC performances are a particular treat cause they're full of performers who were all over Radio 4 in the 70s and 80s so you'll be sitting there watching e.g. Julius Caesar and you'll suddenly realise that the bloke playing Cassius was also the voice of Legolas in the Brian Sibley radio adaptation of LOTR and it's like unexpectedly meeting an old and cherished friend and i just love it

the answer to the poll is probably Lear but i'm going to throw a vote to Julius Caesar because it's in my head now and i get quite sentimental when i think of Brutus

Got my bedtime reading for the next couple of months sorted then!

Every time I reread Anthony and Cleopatra I'm gobsmacked by the number of speaking roles -- is it his largest cast of characters? I mean, fuckin' Taurus gets a line.

I bet one of the biggest casts is one of the Henry plays.

I know most words is Hamlet (the character) by some fair amount.

i have only been exposed to half the work (if that), so i would probably yield a very predictable top 5.

also best not to mention how much i like Taming of the Shrew

post completely in character: i like hamlet the best

Ophelia is such a lovely name, it's a shame it's tough to name someone after her. Same with Desdemona, to a slightly lesser extent.

trying to imagine all the theatre criticks paying heed to his each new play like idk kendrick lamar albums or something nowadays

like, he drops a midsummer night's dream and everyone looks at each other - the 'richard iii guy' is legit, fucking legit

Anthony & Cleopatra is the one that I've read the most and feel like I know the best. But I love The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream.

I've only seen Hamlet staged twice, well over 25 years ago, but guess who played the lead both times?

http://www.lortel.org/Archives/Production/1814

http://www.lortel.org/Archives/Production/1253

ha!

Not to mention pre-Niles Crane as Laertes in the first one.

I've never seen a live Lear, but James Earl Jones as Othello is the greatest Shakespeare performance I've seen (1982, with Christopher Plummer as Iago).

caught antony sher as iago as a schoolboy - really quite something

Sher is bringing his Lear to New York in the spring.

Cymbeline

Iago as schoolboy sounds interesting

Christ, is this a POO? Gah. Fuck that. I might be up for a PO5.

If pressed, I might bypass the greatest hits in favor of later, weirder stuff, but I am still a sucker for a lot of pretty famous bits.

My non-obvious faves right now are: Measure for Measure, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night.

I saw Mark Rylance as Henry V in a Royal Shakespeare Company production in summer '97 -- every girl was swooning.

he still had hair!

I just saw The Tempest directed by Teller (of Penn and Teller) with music by Tom Waits, was neat.

I wish I'd seen the reverse-cast Othello with Patrick Stewart. My wife saw it and said it was solid.

While Derek Jacobi is probably my favorite Hamlet, I grudgingly admit that I thought Mel Gibson was... not bad?

Hamlets are always too old is the problem.

Andrew Scott, who I saw recently, was pretty good. Not wildly good like the reviews would have you believe. Also the director stole every staging idea from Thomas Ostermeier's Richard III which, incidentally, is the best Shakespeare production I've seen and includes Richard singing Tyler The Creator's "Goblin". A fucking walking paradox, indeed.

watch from here if you want to see that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsOtCIpi-M0&t=46m57s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsOtCIpi-M0

46:50 ish

I have no idea how translation works. Like, how does Shakespeare get translated to French and stay Shakespeare? It's some sort of strange alchemy. Like, with Shakespeare, how does alliteration and wordplay and puns and stuff translate? Its Englishness seem innate.

I read a good translation of Dostoyevsky and same thing, think, man, this must be just an approximation of what it says in the Russian, right? How is it even done?

The Tempest is easily the strangest of his great works.

I've heard it described as sort of a Shakespeare's greatest hits

for me these are both A+C. the tone is so odd, the canvas is so huge, alfred otm that literally everyone gets a moment (like in tolstoy), it indulges in luxurious showstoppers like the barge speech (right after macbeth which is so brutally lean), it lets cleopatra rip weird holes through it all over. like falstaff she possesses an ego bigger than history but unlike falstaff she is apotheosized rather than diminished. prospero's monologue is justly meta-famous but for me the really mindblowing artist's farewell is when cleo issues her orders to the snake. also there is a scene where everyone gets drunk on a pirate ship

t/s reading vs watching/listening

performing imo; nothing gets you closer. partic in the meta moments (always frequent), to be standing inside the text is so weird and ravishing. and at the 20th rehearsal actors will still be coming in talking to each other like, hey did you ever notice that he uses this image twice but it's inverted the second time and blah blah... the level of attention everyone pays is by necessity so much higher than in any class, and everyone works together revealing the patterning

i have never seen a profesh cast do shakespeare tho lol, can be pretty good i guess? it's the sitting there that whole time i'm not sure about.

For repeat entertainment value, little beats Richard III.

richard iii the character is terrifically fun and well-written obv except when he's not, but richard iii the play's kinduva slog imo. the pulpy mckellan movie wisely takes several machetes to the text, but then all that's left is this pupal iago and a lot of scaffolding. also it's frontloaded: does it peak again after "was ever a woman in this humor wooed"? maybe it does.

will maintain for the rest of my life that Hamlet is a deliberate spoof on revenge tragedies

of course! existence as hack play you're trapped in. hero as dramatic automaton cursed with consciousness. we'll teach you to drink deep, ere you depart.

fave shakespeare movies: chimes at midnight and the mason/brando julius caesar. i actually watch the branagh hamlet a lot just because it's complete (and pretty); i skip around in it and use it as text. it has some fascinatingly dreadful performances in it. (it also has charlton heston, who brings the house down. weird.) the max reinhardt midsummer's night dream adam mentions above is variable i think-- cagney as bottom is must-see because it's cagney as bottom, but tbh i think he's turned up too high on the (impossibly beautiful) wakeup soliloquy. (normally of course it's a category error to complain that cagney's turned up too high. maybe it is here too.) i don't remember the lovers being much cop. joe e. brown's good. mickey rooney is annoying (another error?). the spectacular-pageantry stuff is pretty draggy to actually watch but good to get high and take screenshots of. i have a lot of fondness for the whole project tho cuz i love how game reinhardt is to make a Sophisticated Theatrical Spectacle out on the coast with the yokels, how committed the movie is to being a movie, with joe e. brown and jimmy cagney, yet how it is also a natural extension of early 20c theatrical experimentation blah blah blah-- it's a neat artifact.

Like, with Shakespeare, how does alliteration and wordplay and puns and stuff translate?... How is it even done?

glib answer is it isn't; glibber answer's in klingon

Twelfth Night is perfect.

Cosign

Have yet to see the Fully Queer Twelfth Night of my dreams, maybe someday

Good. I'm glad we're discussing the comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream and esp As You Like It rule. Is Rosalind the most alluring woman in literature? Fine. She is.

i was watching attack of the clones the other day, and there's that unfortunate digression where threepio's head gets switched with the head of one of the useless battle droids, and he flails around a while ruining the otherwise pretty good battle of geonosis set piece, and then artoo restores him and he stumbles to his feet and says "i've had the most peculiar dream!" and i was suddenly like, wait a second

the comparison is lucas' greatest crime

Voted Tempest on purely selfish grounds, it's the one I can rewatch or reread over and over. (I even like Peter Greenaway's admittedly aggravating version, becz Gielgud.) Caliban is one of my favorite characters in anything. So many great plays though, so many indelible characters and lines. The speculation about authorship has always seemed beside the point to me because somebody wrote them, and that's the actual unlikely thing.

otm

I know most words is Hamlet (the character) by some fair amount.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, January 20, 2018 9:35 PM (two days ago)

apparently there's two legit answers to this question: hamlet has the most lines in a single play, prince hal/henry v the most if you count the lines from every play a character is in

i know all the major stuff pretty well but seeing this list makes me realize how many of shake's works i haven't read yet, or even heard much about: pericles, two noble kinsmen, henry viii, cymbeline.

i havent read or seen tempest or lear

always loved Midsummer Night’s Dream. and I am quite partial to Henry V

Lear

title kind of a fakeout, like julius caesar

Shakespeare scholars, is there a consensus critical view on where Richard II sits in the hierarchy? i have found myself returning to it often recently but it's not one you (or at least i) hear much about.

i guess i could see people maybe finding it overly fussy? a little too pleased with its own cleverness? you've got the the formality of the structure and the prettiness of Richard's wordplay. then there's the thematic focus on the transition from medieval to modern, the nature and origin of kingly authority, not exactly the timeless and universal themes you find elsewhere in the canon.

but for all that i find Richard a pretty compelling figure with a certain timelessness of his own (at least if you set aside the particular macro-historical context and view him as an individual) - a foolish, unworldly, privileged brat who finds himself completely baffled in the face of the harsh realities (ugh) of the real world (double ugh) which turns out not to operate at all as he imagined.

and even then there are moments where he breaks out of the helpless reverie and is able to address the cynicism and bad faith with the contempt it deserves ("No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man!"

seems like a great role for a talented actor to stretch their legs a bit. as is Bolingbroke tbh (is he a crafty player of the game? is he a fundamentally decent man who, feeling himself justified as having been unjustly wronged, gets swept up in events beyond his control? is he a willing pawn who allows himself to be manipulated by more cynical peers for their own ends? a bit of all of them?!)

good play imo

i read somewhere the other day that the reason Henry IV never gets to go on the longed-for pilgrimage is because that right is reserved to the true medieval Plantagenets and not usurpers. Bolingbroke's part is to spend the rest of his days mired in interminable domestic squabbles - a lesser role for a lesser man.

i dunno if i fully agree with that (at least not the final judgement - as a plot point i think it's hard to argue against) but i enjoyed thinking it over

richard 2 is major. at work rn but looking forward to not being.

bolingbroke announcing at the end that he’ll clear all this moral and existential fuzziness up with a quick pilgrimage is v funny imo. instead his past eats him.

i’d like to play northumberland.

that were some love. but little policy.

Bolingbroke of course being a Plantagenet but a usurper for all that.

i think that I prefer a reading of Richard II as a standalone play rather than as the first part of the Henriad

xp yeah Northumberland is a great dickhead role. Mowbray also super fun i'd imagine. "i do defy him. and i spit at him!" fuckin come at me bro

he’ll clear all this moral and existential fuzziness up with a quick pilgrimage

a quick crusade i should say. even funnier

yeah it's major but its focus is fascinating and weird

i guess i could see people maybe finding it overly fussy?

its formality works imo because the fussiness is aesthetic+structural analogue for the ordered toy-history (and toy identity) richard discovers isn't real. thus the shift in style between it and henry iv is freighted with a lot imo-- but yeah of the henriad r2 def stands alone the best. (probably even if you take h4 as a piece.)

then there's the thematic focus on the transition from medieval to modern, the nature and origin of kingly authority, not exactly the timeless and universal themes you find elsewhere in the canon.

lol i love this theme for itself (+ its development in the Hs) tho yes it is now niche-- but (as u also suggest) i don't think it is unconnected to much deeper ones (hamlet's problems after all are also kingly-authority-related). richard after the breaking-the-mirror scene (the crux of the X) is assembling or discovering a naked self he's never known. the crown has always explained him to himself and now it's gone. on some level he has only just finally been born. talking thoughtfully to himself in a locked room for two acts then suddenly getting burst in on by assassins is a little like what happens to the whale in hitchhiker's guide-- but again it's also like hamlet, who in his last minute alive says dying is like getting arrested. and richard's final soliloquy-- "thus play i in one person many people"-- anticipates jaques!

meanwhile, bolingbroke, trending upwards, has sealed himself into an ominous new identity he doesn't fully control. lackeys pile heads at his feet. exton is convinced he's pulled a turbulent-priest move and subliminally ordered richard's death; of course when it's accomplished bolingbroke does the elegant machiavellian thing and disclaims it. but is that really what he meant? or all he meant? "have i no friend will rid me of this living fear? / was it not so? these were his very words. / have i no friend? quoth he. he spake it twice." bolingbroke will spend the rest of the cycle fearing and fighting his alleged friends. "they love not poison who do poison need." the question he's repeating has to mean more to him than a euphemism.

is he a crafty player of the game?... is he a willing pawn who allows himself to be manipulated by more cynical peers for their own ends? a bit of all of them?!

otm-- and what if these don't have secret answers but are the questions on his own mind at the end? ones he thinks might be answered-- or better, made irrelevant-- in jerusalem? it's a pr move of course, but is it only for his subjects? does he want to go there to close a gap he feels between himself and the crown? or himself and god? has he no friend will rid him of this living fear? does he even know who he is anymore?

lol @ the scene where everyone throws down their gages at everyone else.

(the return of the repressed!)

have (temporarily) run aground on troilus+cressida (also started a new job so project has suffered).

julius caesar-- about people-as-crowd more directly than anything since henry vi. (long to stage the death of cinna .) used to assume this was much earlier but it's rly just kept under v deliberate control as befits its classicism and (i now confidently announce) you can totally tell it's from the psychedelic period. similarly (synecdochially) i had never thought of brutus as amongst the shakespearian prometheuses but obviously he is; in his soliloquies shakes is not holding anything back he gives to hamlet or rosalind. it's just that brutus is comfortable with Fate, and thus w his role in this play, in a way they can't be. (which does him p much exactly as much good as being uncomfortable does hamlet.)

hamlet-- "if i were informed that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, but that his life might be saved by permitting him to expound his theory of hamlet, i would instantly reply: let him die, let him die, let him die!"

twelfth night-- you know, i don't love this one. i mean the orsino/viola/olivia stuff is staggeringly beautiful and the genderplay is deeper, more disorienting, less resolved, than as you like it's. (imo tho even with its holiday structure as you like it still only resolves things, "restores order", on the surface. rosalind has learned she can do magic.) would also allow that feste > touchstone-- as character if not as clown. but i still just cannot find a way in to the malvolio / sir toby stuff. prefer the mean pranks in taming of the shrew. prefer the bourgeois antics in merry wives. maybe seeing a good one would help.

speaking of which i saw actors from the london stage do macbeth last month, a nice treat for one of the remoter islands of my remote archipelago. inspirationally minimal. you rly don't need much huh. banquo/porter/lennox/macduff-jr in partic slayed (+ was slain).

Love to see Twelfth Night, Malvolio is a delicious part and his denouement can be wrenching

yr right of course; his exit is rly something.

My Shakespeare updates: I read R+J last year and I was like yknow what Romeo and Juliet rules. I read Hamlet this year and I decided Hamlet is the villain of Hamlet

it's me, hi

Someday I will see the fully queer+trans Twelfth Night of my dreams

Love to see Twelfth Night, Malvolio is a delicious part and his denouement can be wrenching

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby)

Bryan Ferry played him iirc

xp i remember you posting that actually and often think of it! i am the same w AYLI (hence parenthetical defensiveness above).

island-hopping this weekend to see a friend's production of his own translation of 12N into hawaiian actually. confidence fairly high on the queer front.

actually.

romeo and juliet is absolutely amazing; juliet is an i n c r e d i b l e part, one of the geniuses; the scene where the wedding musicians are implied to be playing cheerfully underneath an entire prolonged scene of the capulet family screaming in grief is one of the wildest things in shakespeare (when i directed we used a muzak instrumental of "all i have to do is dream")

friar laurence is a dangerous idiot tho

Do you rate Baz’s movie? I also watched that for the first (proper) time in the past year sometime and I really liked it

It overcame my distaste for Leo

honestly i prob haven't seen it recently enough. some vivid childhood memories for sure tho (what satisfaction canst thou have tonight?) all i have in the way of semiadult critical thoughts are i remember thinking leguizamo and postlethwaite were A+ and that everybody could maybe have shouted less. i don't remember paul rudd in it but that is perfect casting so presumably he was great.

once i would have said they cut up the text too much but nah cutting up the text is great, especially in movies obv.

bind me. or undo me. one of them.

opened in much ado tonight. "kill claudio" was like firing a gun: i hadn't moved an eyelid muscle in response when the laugh came. as a laugh partisan this was a thrill, like volunteering for a 400-year-old magic trick. backstage a minute later beatrice dabbed her lipstick off me and whispered "why did they laugh?" he's still got it folks.