scene individable, or POLL unlimited: works of william shakespeare

I did, yeah! Most of what I read is largely true (Faulconbridge yea, title character nay)

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.