scene individable, or POLL unlimited: works of william shakespeare

We'll be in Ashland, Oregon this summer during their epic Shakespeare fest, but I forget which play might be going on on our exact date. Twelfth Night, maybe?

Oof, Rylance as Iago. Have booked a couple of yard tickets. Thanks for the heads up.

Timon of Athens was nicely performed but really weird, I get the sense WS wasn’t in a great place when he wrote (or co-wrote, I guess) this one. There’s a strange lack of drama to the entire thing, Timon doesn’t seem to be particularly important or notable even when he’s rich, and his character arc is just cheerful——>hate u all with nothing in between and no moment of greater understanding. Artimaeus’s endless shit-talking is pretty fun but i was a little puzzled as to why anyone invited him to their parties.

From this (as usual, v funny) Thomas Bernhard play:

http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/an-alternative-translation-of-minetti.html

It was a real conquest
to get me to play Lear
one more time
and also a crowning moment
Just one more performance madam
then never again
I’ve sworn it
never again
just one more performance
Thirty years I’ve shunned the stage
thirty years of nothing
I have renounced all classic literature
except Lear
Now just one more time I’ll play Lear
in Ensor’s mask
My nerves are frayed
it’s this appalling climate you see

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We'll be in Ashland, Oregon this summer during their epic Shakespeare fest, but I forget which play might be going on on our exact date. Twelfth Night, maybe?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, February 1, 2018 2:09 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd want to see this there - https://www.osfashland.org/productions/2018-plays/manahatta.aspx

I'm not certain what my favorite is, but probably would have voted for As You Like It on the correct assumption it would get relatively little attention from others

Whoa @ 4 whole Cymbeline voters!

that play is trash xp

manahatta I mean

surprised to see the tempest so high and the dream so low

i think i voted hamlet, corny but that's where my head's at rn. v happy with the hamlet/macbeth tie, a deadlock

wish i'd thrown tony+cleo a vote tho jeez

No shame in Hamlet stanning.

My favorites are probably Measure for Measure, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Hamlet.

I had a friend in college who lit into me about preferring Ham to Lear, saying "Hamlet is the 19th century man's play. Look to Lear. The problems of Lear are the problems we're concerned with in the 20th century."

It was 1990 then, so the play of the 21st century had yet to be determined.

Starlight Express, maybe?

hamlet again

(nah it's macbeth obv.)

Is Rosalind the most alluring woman in literature? Fine. She is.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, January 21, 2018 5:14 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm: she is a chameleonic demiurge of the kind shakes usually reserved for tragedies and AYLI was robbed here. harold bloom iirc likes to imagine falstaff escaping history to arden; likewise i wouldn't turn down rosalind/hamlet slash, fraught as it'd get.

exhilarating to see such a character go undoomed. even iago ends in silence.

jaques, tho, is my boy

I'd want to see this there - https://www.osfashland.org/productions/2018-plays/manahatta.aspx

― Moo Vaughn, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:04 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not certain what my favorite is, but probably would have voted for As You Like It on the correct assumption it would get relatively little attention from others

― Moo Vaughn, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Whoa @ 4 whole Cymbeline voters!

― MarmiteGrrrl (Leee), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:18 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that play is trash xp

― YouTube_-_funy_cats.flv (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

manahatta I mean

― YouTube_-_funy_cats.flv (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:30 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

Currently teaching Macbeth again. I should probably whisper it but this is the first time it's felt, I don't know, a bit two dimensional. Maybe it's me.

feel u, but macbeth's two-dimensionality seems both deliberate and aggressive after the swelling tesseracts of AYLI/hamlet/lear

in the end it's one-dimensional: a collapsed point

yeah Macbeth knows where it’s going and doesn’t really make any bones about it and to me that’s one of its strengths

Apparently Manahatta is good now

The sheer tragic focus of Macbeth, the dark hand of fate and all that, is pretty ruthless. Just utterly doom-laden.

I saw a National Theatre production of Macbeth recently. It was pretty ordinary, partly through some weird casting choices (Malcolm was as camp as a row of pink tents - to the point where it almost seemed pantomimic; Macbeth was lacklustre, at best), but mostly because of the vague 'post apocalyptic' setting, which really lacked any sense of focus.

I really like that idea that Macbeth is actually single-minded and bone sharp as opposed to two dimensional. I'm teaching it again at the moment and it's Act V and the pathos of Macbeth's weariness at his mistakes that's really hitting me.

the vague 'post apocalyptic' setting, which really lacked any sense of focus.

ha before posting last night i was having a weird vision of a postapocalyptic as you like it-- fleeing a tyrant-run city to an improvised community in a forest everyone conveniently keeps calling a "desert". pastoral doesn't have to mean lush imo. postapocalyptic macbeth is of course a lil on the nose.

saw As You Like It for the first legitimate time last night, my previous exposure being to a version performed by middle schoolers when I was like 10 and which I remembered nothing of. All superlatives about Rosalind are probably correct. Lots of emotional juice wrung out of the surprisingly-briefly-appearing and superficially ridiculous Jacques. All the comedic episodes of the Forest are gentle delights. Production I saw set lots of poetical interludes to music which was great, music in Shakespeare is great.

The songs are in the original -- well, their lyrics, anyway.

Most of Shakespeare really needs a lutenist along with the actors. Few productions can afford the extra expense.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/

his contemporaries, who knew Shakespeare, who socialized and worked with him, had no trouble believing he wrote the works attributed to him. they never seem to have questioned his authorship. there are no sly hints, no furtive winks, no challenges, no puzzled doubts in evidence.

also worth noting how much Elizabethan authors, because they were officially heavily censored, loved to bury clues in their writing, using puns, acrostics, double meanings, and other kinds of wordplay. I didn't read the article in full, but to be convinced, I'd expect at least several instances of Emilia Bassano inserting puns or hidden clues to her authorship into the plays or poems.

i support this. we need a couple hundred years of assuming shakespeare is a woman so that the jobbing journalists of the future can pitch "reviewing the plays, i was shocked to find that othello is written with incredible, even subversive empathy for male experience-- perhaps shakespeare was a man?" pieces. also maybe people will get into shakespeare

i'm playing hamlet this summer lol

Don't rush your lines! Speak them feelingly.

you should see me saw the air w my hand

vanity unexpectedly demanding this post: (not really)

http://i67.tinypic.com/2coiekp.jpg

Branagh's new film is a hit job from a man who loathes Shakespeare.

1. recommendation for an edition of WS's complete works ? i'm in USA and it seems as if THE NORTON SHAKESPEARE is a safe bet ?

2. any thoughts on isaac asimov's two volumes on shakespeare ? i've never thought much of asimov, rightly or wrongly, but peeking at a .pdf that's available online, seems like it might be fun ? i haven't read much shakespeare crticism / commentary outside the BIG THREE (empson, hazlitt, and dr. johnson)

I bought the newest Oxford edition like a year ago, seems pretty rad (lots of additional online content) except that there's two additional weighty volumes of commentary I didn't buy and now I feel like I'm missing out on something (or will be when I start digging in).

tbc that's the 2005 second ed. yeah ?

It's the New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition (2018).

I have/had a copy of the Riverside Shakespeare (edited by my old Shakesbeard prof) which was solid but which has apparently evaporated into mist or something since my undergrad days.

I've been watching this series of John Barton masterclasses. There's something kinda fusty about them (like Barton's cardigans) but I've found them captivating tbh. For all his obvious learning, Barton keeps things relatively simple. And what a line-up of actors: David Suchet, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-MPmoQ_s18

yeah i luv these too. lol in that one @ suchet's "naturalistic" salerio.

This looks cool, thanks for the hint.

directing ilx's second-favorite shakespeare play this summer. had previously always been nonplussed by its inert single-agent surface but as usual preproduction immersion has given me more than enough to get obsessed with. the drama is there. ("mine would, sir. were i human.") outrageously difficult to edit tho: so gnarled, impacted, dense; so intricately enjambed. i cut romeo & juliet down by a third last year and it was like disassembling lego in comparison.

There’s a strange lack of drama to Timon of Athens

I've been fascinated by it since I saw the BBC version as a kid. Everything said upthread is true; Timon himself is too shallow to be tragic, and once he throws his revenge party, he sits in his cave until the play ends, like he's looking forward to Beckett.

I've tried to imagine what it might be like to play Lear every night for weeks on end and have concluded that it would kill a superhuman to give it its full due that often. Yikes!

I've been watching this series of John Barton masterclasses.

Obviously a lot of talent there, but Ian McKellen easily outshines the rest. Even reading snippets he always presents an integrated performance that incorporates facial expression and gesture with an apt tone, pace and emphasis. Damn, he's an actor down to his very bones.