scene individable, or POLL unlimited: works of william shakespeare

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

teaching Lear to teenagers right now and am so intimidated by how huge it is.

sometimes I feel like everything is in Lear. it looms like nothing else I’ve experienced.

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

― difficult listening hour, Monday, 22 January 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its like this interview says:

http://www.bookforum.com/pubdates/19116

“I’ve heard people say, ‘I just want a translation that tells me what the original says,’” Wilson tells me in her office at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught for fifteen years. “Obviously that’s never going to happen. If you want to read the original, spend the time, learn Greek. Any translation is going to be shaped in some way by the translator and is going to include the translator’s whole self. People assume that if you’re doing something totally different, you must be doing something illegitimate, imposing your own agenda. That the way it was translated thirty years ago must be the way it always had to be. That is not the case.”

Nevertheless what that is (as the interview goes on) can be just as valuable as merely saying give me the exact text. Its always amazing what is not only able to survive in different languages -- but also what prospers, too.

Well like Throne of Blood, which I don’t know if it even makes any attempt to replicate the language in Japanese — certainly none of it in the English subtitles. But it’s still a great rendition of MacBeth that captures not only the plot but the spirit of the thing.

I'm fine with 'old' Hamlets around 40; few young actors have the chops. (ditto R&J, usually) Wish i hadn't been a toddler when Richard Burton did it on Broadway.

The speculation about authorship has always seemed beside the point to me because somebody wrote them, and that's the actual unlikely thing.

Most fascinating thing I learned way back when was about the differences between the quarto and folio editions of Lear. There are big chunks of text in one but not the other, which means either a) someone else could write as well as Shakespeare or, more likely, b) despite Shakespeare's usual brilliance someone simply cut a huge hunk out!

Here's what wiki says:

The modern text of King Lear derives from three sources: two quartos, published in 1608 (Q1) and 1619 (Q2) respectively, and the version in the First Folio of 1623 (F1). The differences between these versions are significant. Q1 contains 285 lines not in F1; F1 contains around 100 lines not in Q1. Also, at least a thousand individual words are changed between the two texts, each text has a completely different style of punctuation, and about half the verse lines in the F1 are either printed as prose or differently divided in the Q1. The early editors, beginning with Alexander Pope, simply conflated the two texts, creating the modern version that has remained nearly universal for centuries. The conflated version is born from the hypothesis that Shakespeare wrote only one original manuscript, now unfortunately lost, and that the Quarto and Folio versions are distortions of that original. Others, such as Nuttall and Bloom, have identified Shakespeare himself as having been involved in reworking passages in the play to accommodate performances and other textual requirements of the play.

As early as 1931, Madeleine Doran suggested that the two texts had basically different provenances, and that these differences between them were critically interesting. This argument, however, was not widely discussed until the late 1970s, when it was revived, principally by Michael Warren and Gary Taylor. Their thesis, while controversial, has gained significant acceptance. It posits, essentially, that the Quarto derives from something close to Shakespeare's foul papers, and the Folio is drawn in some way from a promptbook, prepared for production by Shakespeare's company or someone else. In short, Q1 is "authorial"; F1 is "theatrical". In criticism, the rise of "revision criticism" has been part of the pronounced trend away from mid-century formalism

The thing about translations of Shakespeare is that people have been doing it for hundreds of years, and some of it has entered foreign languages as well. 'At være eller ikke at være, det er spørgsmålet'

that's what I said to my Lyft driver last week!

I wrote 'Frederikke B' as a hilarious linguistic zing, but then realised I was colonising the Danish language, but I'm posting it anyway

I went to high school with her.

I think errors is hilarious

for me the really mindblowing artist's farewell is when cleo issues her orders to the snake.

Totally, and there's something uncanny about the clown in that scene: "for, indeed, there is no goodness in worm."

"If thou and nature can so gently part, the stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, which hurts, and is desired."

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

― difficult listening hour, Monday, January 22, 2018 3:25 AM (nineteen hours ago) Bookmark

Tom Stoppard did some uncredited (shockingly) script work on the prequels

performance vs. reading is always a tough one w/ shakespeare. lear is so crushingly dark at the end, feels like no performance could do justice to that. the whole thing feels, not epic exactly, but expansive, like it's somehow taken in the whole of human experience. the end of the play feels like the end of everything. the only thing i can think of that makes me feel similarly is moby dick, tho of course that's self-consciously epic.

there are a few roles in shakespeare that seem almost beyond performing. hamlet is one -- i've seen good productions but never saw a guy doing hamlet and thought, that's the guy i imagine when i read the play. always find myself thinking that the best performances were probably from the pre-film era.

I love the romantic atmosphere in Tempest, which is probably what I'll vote for -- though I'm a bit surprised that I'm the not the first to mention Cymbeline! It's kind of action-adventure with, IIRC, a female action(y) lead (Imogen!). If I'm misremembering, then she at least gets to do a lot of cool stuff.

Favorite stage performance was a college production of Coriolanus. Favorite film adaptation is a tie between Ran and Taymor's Titus. (Wish I could see her old stage Tempest -- the clips look amazing.)

(I guess I like violent spectacles.)

I have never seen a satisfying performance of Lear...the ending always destroys me even when the production is terrible, though.

Timon of Athens is missing :-(

Not that it'd win, like.

that's a pretty sad one! it has more of a processional, o.g. greek feel to its tragedy (as you'd imagine) and no women. good play though

How is it possible this has never been polled before?

Another good poll would be fave secondary characters. Yr Falstaffs and Calibans and Bottoms. (Falstaff may or may not count since he got promoted to lead of his own play.)

What's secondary tho

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.