Month: March 2013

Hamlet’s Plan

~ duane ~ 9 Comments

Somebody help me walk through the timeline in Hamlet’s trip to England.

1) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been assigned the task of accompanying Hamlet to England.

2) R&G have in their possession a letter that says, “Dear King of England, please kill Hamlet.”

3) Neither Hamlet nor R&G know the contents of the letter.

4) Hamlet steals the letter, opens it, and learns what it says.  So he alters it (writes a new letter?)  suggesting that, instead, “the bearers should be put to death.”

5) The pirates attack, and Hamlet goes off with them  (to later be released).

6) R&G,  having lost Hamlet and never knowing what was in the letter in the first place, continue on to England and their ultimate demise.

So here’s my question.  Hamlet didn’t know the pirates were coming, right?  So then what was his plan with the altered letter?  Did he plan to go on to England and stand in front of the king when the letter was read, only to laugh at the expression on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s faces as they are hauled off to the chopping block?

The reason I ask is that I’m left wondering why he so almost gleefully sent them off to die, and whether there were other options.  When he rewrote the letter he assumed that he was basically a prisoner of Claudius’ mercenaries and that he would be brought all the way before the king of England.  Therefore he needed to alter the letter to say something different.  That makes sense.  Couldn’t he have had them imprisoned?  Or something else?

What do you think, does this act (and his subsequent dismissal of his guilt) show that Hamlet’s gone off the deep end at this point?  Remember that his treatment of Polonius wasn’t much better, dragging his corpse through the castle.  Is Hamlet just doing what it takes to survive?  Or is he killing everyone in his way (except the person he’s supposed to kill)?

Orson Welles’ Screwed Up Macbeth

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

“To lie in restless ecstasy. Restless, restless, goddamnit son of a bitch.”

– Macbeth, Act III, Scene 2
Here’s something that’s going on my playlist!  A YouTube user named “ApeBack” has uploaded a huge set of audio clips from the old Columbia Workshop radio show, including many performances by Orson Welles – Hamlet, Lear, Merchant, Richard III, you name it.   (This link points to all of ApeBack’s videos, from which you can select your favorite Shakespeare play.)
For fun I’ve chosen an outtake where Orson Welles screws up Macbeth – and it only gets worse from there.  It’s fun to hear the man laugh like that.  He’s quite infamous for, shall we say, not being quite so patient with the mistakes of others.UPDATE : Sorry for the confusion, I left out a link in the initial post.  Above, the “outtake” text links to the audio only version of Welles’ screw up.  Below we have the infamous “peas” meltdown that I was referring to above with “not being quite so patient”.  I should have made that more clear.

Adaptation

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

To me, Shakespeare is all about his words.  Take away his words and you’ve gone down an interesting path, but not a particularly deep one.  Doing a Romeo and Juliet story and calling it Shakespeare is like doing a Cinderella story and calling it Disney.  Those are really just cover versions of much older stories.

So if what you want to do is make your own cover version of a story that Shakespeare tackled, the most interesting places are going to be where you decide to go a different way than Shakespeare did.  Let’s look for a minute at this opening scene from A Thousand Acres, which I just watched and reviewed:
The setup for this scene walks right down the expected path — father/owner Larry has decided to split his “kingdom” up into three parts for his girls.  Rose and Ginny both say “Great idea!” but Caroline says, verbatim, “I don’t know. I want to think about it.”  Their father then shuts her down cold, kicking her out of the deal, and later closing the door in her face when she comes to reconcile.
Just in this moment, consider how this is different from Shakespeare’s version (where Lear gives her I count 5 separate chances to change her mind)?  To my mind this makes the character less believable.  He doesn’t even have a moment of confusion at her answer.  It’s like he knew she was going to say that, and he had his answer all ready to go.  But if that were the case why go through the charade of three equal pieces to begin with?
The scene in the movie cuts there.  There is no suitor for Cordelia to try and make it right, no loyal Kent to beg the king to reconsider.  As a Shakespeare geek I obviously would like to see those characters, but I don’t think they’re crucial to the story the movie wants to tell.  I think what this scene does is to paint Larry/Lear as an entirely unsympathetic character, and that’s unfortunate.  You feel for the real Lear.  You know that he loves his daughters and is crushed at Cordelia’s seeming betrayal.  But this guy?  Larry?  This guy is awful, and you wonder how it is that all of the townspeople love him so dearly.

Review : A Thousand Acres

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Bardfilm and I have been discussing “modern adaptations” lately, and I asked for the distinction – did he mean modern setting but original text, or modern language?  For this particular context he meant the latter.  Since I don’t normally seek out such movies I went out and found one – the King Lear adaptation of the book of the same name, A Thousand Acres.

Jason Robards plays our Lear (“Larry”, as it becomes apparently quickly that the author’s gone with a whole first initial thing) to his daughters Michelle Pfeiffer (as “R”ose), Jessica Lange (as “G”inny) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (as “C”aroline).  From that point it’s harder to tell who is who because unless I’m missing something the first initial game goes out the window as Colin Firth’s Jess is plainly the bastard Edmund.  As you can see, though, the cast is first rate.

For any “modern adaptation” of this sort that’s clearly only taking inspiration from Shakespeare and not trying to tell his story, I look for a couple of things.  How much direct homage to Shakespeare is there?  How much of the original story remains?  How much new material does this story provide?

In other words does the end result produce something standalone, while still showing respect for the original?  It’s very tricky to strike a balance, because every time you diverge from the source material you’re going to have audience like me asking, “Oh, really? So you think you’re about to tell a better story?” and you need to bring it.  Safest not to change the story too much, but instead to bring new elements that Shakespeare never touched upon.

How does A Thousand Acres do?  It’s not bad.  The connection to the source material is clear, and  more than minimal.  Larry runs the farm, and wants to retire and divide it up amongst his three daughters.  R and G find this a great idea, but when C so much as says “Let me think about it” he disowns her on the spot.  I mentioned Jess as the bastard character who does all the bastard things, sleeping with the sisters, getting into a fight with his father (Pat Hingle as this sort of Kent/Gloucester combination character), but he’s not really the architect of all the bad that happens.  There’s even a nice big storm for the daughters to send their father into.

Other than those story elements the similarities are few and far between.  In this story, R and G (makes me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when I say that :)) are actually the good guys, if you can believe it. It’s a very complicated story.  Nobody in town likes them because the people think the daughters conspired to steal the farm from their father.  Meanwhile the daughters have both got some deep dark secrets that reveal their father is not the nice man he seems, and is well deserving of their hate.

I found the story too confusing to follow in many parts, and that’s one of the reasons that I often dislike modern adaptations.  You try to add your own material, but then to really develop a foundation in that material you have to stray farther (further?) from the original, and eventually you hit walls where you can’t go more in any direction.  Same here.  There are some obvious places where R and G are talking and it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do is for them to go talk to C…but they can’t.  That’s not how the story went.  In fact we never really even get C’s side of the story – this is Goneril’s movie, if I have to pick a central character.

The whole thing is additionally complicated with the addition of husbands and children, alcoholism and terminal illnesses.  There’s a whole lot going on in this movie besides the Shakespeare.  And it’s all set in this weird sort of Tennessee Williams sounding world where full grown women still call their parents “Mommy” and “Daddy” which, when coupled with the deep dark secrets that we learn, is all the more uncomfortable.

See it if you get a moment, if for nothing else than to have something to talk about the next time somebody trots out one of those lists that contains nothing but Lion King, Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s The Man. But don’t go out of your way for it.

 

Collaborating with William Shakespeare

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If you’ve ever used Google Docs you might be familiar with the idea of multiple people viewing, and possibly editing, a document right before your eyes.

Well Google’s decided to have a little fun with that, and made a demo where the likes of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and yes our dear friend William Shakespeare all watch you as you type … and offer up their edits.  I keep trying to force it down certain paths, but detecting plagiarism is not its thing.  You can’t just start typing “To be or not to be” and expect Shakespeare to jump in.

The idea is cute.  I’ve always loved natural language generation and computer assisted personality.  I wish they did more with it — like if you edit someone else’s edit, they get all mad and start fighting with you or something.  Who knows, maybe they’ll do some more with it.  Love to get a look at the source code behind the idea.

Each colored vertical line represents an edit by a collaborator. Here, Charles Dickens is offering a writing prompt.