Month: April 2013

I once wrote, “All Shakespeare is cover songs.”  That post is sadly overlooked, I really which it had gotten more traffic.

My analogy has grown, however, and I’d like to bring it back up for discussion.

When you perform Shakespeare (and by that I mean using the text, not writing your own adaptation), you have no choice but to interpret it through your own creative vision.  Shakespeare had his, you have yours.  This is the essence of a cover song.  You both start with the same instructions (recipe?) but then within those constraints you can go in whatever direction you can imagine.

Adaptation is different. Adaptation is more akin to sampling, where you look at an original and think, “I like a piece of this. I will use a piece of this to make my creation more powerful.”  Sometimes you take the underlying beat of the entire song and just put a shallow new layer on top of it (the Vanilla Ice / Queen controversy comes to mind).  Sometimes, though, you find a piece of one original work that comes and boosts your own work, producing an entirely new thing.  Consider Primitive Radio Gods’  Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand, which everybody knows for the B.B. King sample.

In the second case everybody said, “Wow, that’s a great song!”  In the first everybody said, “Dude, you completely ripped that off.”  Big difference.  You have to bring enough of your own stuff to the party, and you have to acknowledge the contributions from the original, or you’re going to get busted trying to ride somebody else’s coattails.

Covers and samples are entirely different things with different points to make.  It drives me nuts when people make lists that combine the two, putting She’s the Man next to Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Please stop.  Each can be artwork in its own way, but they are two very different things.

A little while back I saw a conversation on Reddit started by someone who’d directed Julius Caesar.  He’d chosen to cast a … what’s a good word … corpulent gentleman as Cassius.  His motivation was probably 90% practical (i.e. the big guy was the only choice) but he’d convinced himself that the casting really drew attention to Caesar’s famous “yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look” line, making people think that well duh obviously Caesar doesn’t really mean he wants to be surrounded by obese dudes.  You can have a “lean and hungry” look that has nothing to do with whether you are undernourished.

I’m into a book right now that looks to be painting Gertrude as an alcoholic (at the very least, she enjoys her wine a little too much).  That’s not the first time I’ve seen that, by a long shot.  I wonder if somebody’s ever played a tea-totalling Gertrude who won’t touch the stuff?  What if we took the whole wine thing right out of Hamlet and had the final bottle of Gatorade poisoned instead?

I’ve been thinking about typecasting in Shakespeare.  Some roles seem like they have to be cast a certain way.  Does Cassius have to be a beanpole?  Does Gertrude have to demonstrate her fondness for wine before we get to the final scene?  Does Hamlet have to dress all in black? Does Don John have to hold the cape up to his face and twirl that handlebar mustache?

Ok, I’ve never seen that last one, but it’s what I always think of when I see that play.  “There’s to be a WEDDING?!  I must RUIN it, because I am so very EVIL!!!  Grab the girl, tie her to the railroad tracks!”

Does anybody know what I’m talking about?  What character interpretation has become such a go-to move that you’re left wishing somebody would stand the idea on its head just to shake it up a bit?

I’ve been thinking about adaptation lately, and not just because Bardfilm keeps dumping homework in my lap.  This idea has been a recurring theme here on the blog all the way back to the Lion King / Hamlet debate.

(For the sake of terminology, when I speak of “adaptation” I refer to telling the story using modern language.  Kenneth Branagh’s work, using original text in a modern setting, is what I’d call “interpretation”.   10 Things I Hate About You or She’s The Man or, yes, even Lion King are adaptations.)

When you take this approach, a new telling of Shakespeare’s stories, what you’re really doing is deconstructing the story and building it back up from its elements.  Start with a king, have his brother kill him and take over his kingdom, and the son is left to avenge his father?  Is that all you need to be Hamlet?  What about Lear?  If you start with a powerful landowner and his three assumed heirs, and add a misunderstanding and a falling out with the one good one, do you have a Lear story?

I don’t mind modern adaptation.  When people talk about Shakespeare no longer being approachable or relevant the first thing they trot out is how it’s all about kings and ghosts and swordfights and we don’t have any of those things in any meaningful capacity, so you have to switch it out.  Instead of a king we have the president of a company.  Instead of Montagues and Capulets with swords we have Jets and Sharks with guns.  Lear’s “heirs” don’t have to be his children, and Claudius doesn’t have to be Hamlet’s uncle.  You can work at the edges of those relationships (you want approachable Shakespeare?  How many young people out there right now do you think have to call mom’s new friend “uncle” and it drives them insane?)

So how far back can you take it?  Is there a minimum where, if you don’t take at least that much, you no longer have the story?  You’d think there must be.  If King Hamlet isn’t out of the picture at the start of the play, it’s a different play.  If Macbeth doesn’t make his move on his superior officer, it’s a different play.

Of course there’s no rules for this, so what I’m really talking about it something between being recognizable, and “getting a bump” as they say in political/media circles.  Whether something is recognizable as having elements of X is entirely dependent on your audience’s familiarity with X. Only recently did somebody point out to me that Lion King has elements of Cymbeline.   I don’t think that the recognition factor is something that writer/directors can control.  They can hope, but they can’t control.

It’s the “bump” thing that’s more interesting, and it’s very similar to how people quote random things on the internet and stick “-Shakespeare” at the end.  It makes people think twice, and think better.  Oh you wrote a love story? Big deal, there’s lots of those.  Oh you wrote a Romeo and Juliet story?  I know that story, that’s a great story!  I’ll check out your version.

Did Tommy Boy or Strange Brew ever market themselves as Shakespeare remakes? Maybe if they did, they’d have been more critically received.  Or, worse, maybe they would have been crucified as terrible Shakespeare adaptations.

In the drive in to work this morning I thought of something.  In Lion King, Simba doesn’t realize that his uncle Scar killed his father until the very end.  This is entirely different from the world of Hamlet where his father *tells* him that, and he first has to prove it, and then has to do something about it.  Yet another reason why I will continue to argue down the “Lion King Is Hamlet” theory to the day I die.

Here’s a game.  Let’s pretend that you’re reading a novelization of one of Shakespeare’s plays.  A literary adaptation, if you will.  I’m in the middle of Undiscovered Country, to provide an example.

When you write in this style you need to choose (and I’m sure I’ll get my terminology wrong), a narrative voice.  Will this story be told in first person, third, or other?  The story I’m reading is told from Hamlet’s first person perspective and I found myself thinking, “Is he crazy at this point? Would I the read know he’s crazy at this point, if he doesn’t think he is?”

The closest Shakespeare’s got to this is the soliloquoy, where the audience gets some insight into the inner thought processes of a particular character.  But those are few and far between.  I’m talking about a literary angle on the play where the entire story is told from a single character, to the point where if something happens that doesn’t include the narrator might as well not have ever happened (except second hand, if the narrator is told about it).

So the game is this.  Pick a play, pick a character, and tell us how the story would be told differently if you saw things through that character’s eyes.   It’s not even limited to the big questions from the great tragedies.  What would Dream be like told from Bottom’s perspective?  Or Shrew from the perspective of the Shrew?

It’s been awhile since we did these.  Have some Shakespeare TV Theme Songs!

 A Band of Brothers 

(sung to the tune of “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”, the Cheers song)  

Fighting the Battle of Agnicourt
takes everything you got.
A few of those men lying a-bed in England
sure would help a lot. 

Wouldn’t you like to run away?

Sometimes the fewer men, the greater share of honour:
Harry the king, Bedford, Exeter.
You want to go where Crispin knows
You’re not like all the others.
You want to be a part of a band of brothers.

A New Dane In Town (the “Alice” theme song)

I used to be mad—a really glum guy.
Funniest thing—a rogue and peasant slave am I.
Melting my solid flesh down was my favorite sport.
I gotta grab Claude & start revenging ’cause life’s too short.
There’s a new Dane in town, and I’m drinking blood!
Hell itself breathes contagion to the . . . neighborhood.
There’s a new Dane in town.  Now I’ll do it pat.
And this Dane’s here to say
With a sword and cup revenge is gonna be . . .
. . . so sweeeeeeeeeet!