As I continue through Playing Shakespeare, I’ve come to what Angela called the Battle of the Shylocks. In this episode director John Barton sits down with just Patrick Stewart and David Suchet, both of whom have played Shylock under Barton’s direction, and walks through the whole play with them – starting with look, and then accent, and then how each scene is performed. Truthfully? I give this one to Suchet. The two actors are diametrically opposed on the character.  I can only assume that they harbor no ill feelings toward each other because of this, but there are times when it makes you wonder.  This was no subtle battle of nuance.  Stewart starts out very clearly by saying how he didn’t even want to play the character because of all the “traditional” baggage that comes with him.  Suchet, on the other hand, comes off as if the role is the sort of thing he’s wanted to play all his life.  When Stewart suggests that he found a Shylock who “was an outsider, who was also a Jew”, Suchet counters that his Shylock “was an outsider…because he was a Jew.”  Suchet even has statistics – Shylock is called by name 6 times, but addressed as simply “Jew” 22 times. Merchant of Venice is a controversial play, no doubt about it.  It is impossible to have an objective conversation about some topics.  David Suchet is Jewish, Patrick Stewart is not. So when Stewart feels that Shylock’s motivation is all about the money, it’s hard not to let that slip into “Patrick Stewart thinks that to be Jewish means to be all about the money.”  Since he’s about to play all the sample scenes that way I couldn’t help but wonder whether David found them to be entertaining, enlightening, or offensive. To both actors’ credit neither of them tries to play Shylock like a good, sympathetic character.  Neither one, even if they are living an unfair life, is a nice guy.  Stewart even tells of a version where he strikes his daughter. As they worked through the play I simply could not escape that I was watching Patrick Stewart do Shylock.  Maybe it’s because he was not in costume (which, he pointed out, included a very large beard when he played the role).  Maybe it’s just the uniqueness of his presence and my familiarity with his work. But he deliberately chose almost no accent, and everything he did he seemed to …well, *boom*.  He plays a very loud Shylock who bellows loudly about everything.   When he did slip into a normal voice he tended to speak very quickly, and  I thought I was listening to his Ebeneezer Scrooge. Suchet, on the other hand, seemed more like Shylock to me.  Again I have to ponder, “Am I projecting? Am I giving more leeway to the Jewish guy in thinking that he looks better in the role?” I’d like to think I’m not.  How do you manage to say that the Jewish guy “plays Jewish better” without making it sound awful? His whole approach I just liked better.  He brings an accent, a posture, mannerisms, his whole character just felt better for me. Patrick Stewart’s Shylock was just a businessman trying to get along in the world and work against a handicap he didn’t ask for (albeit a little overly dramatically).  Suchet’s was a man who was burdened with the very nature of who he was, who it just so happens was a very good businessman.

Times are tough for everybody.  The Globe has gone bankrupt, and the Bard of Avon is now trying to eek out a living doing freelance work.  In reality he’ll take whatever he can get – advertising copy, humor pieces, whatever works.  The only problem is that while his command of the language might technically be “modern”, it doesn’t “pop” for today’s audiences like it once did, so he’s having to find his voice all over again. Sound interesting?  Such is the premise of the new blog Will for Hire, a new poetry experiment from Mike Southern. If you’re serious about your Shakespeare, and only the master’s blank verse will do it for you, then you may not want to read on.  But if you like poetry in general and you don’t mind a bit of a laugh at dear Will’s expense, you get to find such gems as this ode to Hershey’s chocolate:

An ode to chocolates dark; I write this day
Of sweetness tinged with bitterness sublime,
Like life itself. You draw my hungry gaze.
Impassioned, overcome, I lust for you.
Despite your grams of fat – in number, twelve,
And of those, seven saturated are –
Yea, burdened though you be with sugared vice,
These you transcend; your soul is naught but health. …

That is not complete, I didn’t want to snip too much of his content. I’m not a big “poetry for poetry’s sake” guy, but I admire the creativity.  I’m sure there’ll be some folks here that get a real kick out of it.

I’m a sucker for lists that might have anything to do with Shakespeare.  Greatest books of all time, books you must read, most controversial, most popular … I see a list, I go scanning for Shakespeare. So when I spotted “The Fictional 100” I was very pleased to see a whole set of Shakespeare characters, including some obvious choices (Hamlet, Romeo+Juliet) and some unusual ones (Troilus and Cressida). Here’s my problem, though, and why you’re not finding a link to it.  The choices don’t actually have any *reason* for why they are the choices.  Each page is just a quote from the character, and then a list of books about the character – all Amazon affiliate links, of course. I *think* that the actual book (yes, there’s an actual book) contains more information.  However, I don’t see any samples of that on the web page.  I think this is a giant mistake.  Use your web site to promote your book, not to try and pick up a few pennies by selling other people’s books. So, I’m disappointed.  I would have liked to see why Falstaff was placed on the list where he was, but I didn’t get that.  So, I don’t see much value on that web page for Shakespeare folks.  You can google for it if you want, but they won’t be getting any link love today.

Here’s something I’ve always wondered.  I can’t remember what made me think of it recently, but what the heck.

King Lear.  Kent.  He’s the only one with the guts to stand up to Lear in his fury, and he gets banished for it.  But his loyalty still won’t let him leave Lear’s side, even after all that goes down.

So here’s my question – how old is Kent?   

I am not looking for a specific age, but rather, are we talking about a Kent who is young enough not to know better when he stands up to Lear? Or someone who has been around for a lifetime and thinks (incorrectly) that he can get away with it?  I totally see either of these working.  An old Kent comes off as Lear’s peer, an old man standing by his friend’s side as his friend descends into madness (Gloucester/Lear?). A young Kent, though, would be the son Lear didn’t have, a sort of Edgar/Gloucester parallel. Who knows.  Just rambling a bit.  Is there evidence in the play to suggest one of these theories over the other?

It’s been an interesting week for the importance of editors.  At the one end we’ve got the maybe-Cardenio, which has been through so many editors hands that it’s probably got little Shakespeare left.  On the other we’ve got Barton and his Playing Shakespeare, where every comma and line break means something in how you build the character so you’d better pick the right version. It’s a distinction I’ve never fully appreciated.  I mean, I have the Complete Works on my iPhone.  Similarly, if I need to lookup a quote while at my PC I will typically hit up the MIT collection.  For my own personal projects I also keep the XML-formatted versions handy (the geek in me likes to process structured files rather than plain text).  In none of these cases could I tell you *whose* version these are, or what that means. When people speak of carrying around a First Folio, what edition are they talking about? I mean, I know what a First Folio is, but somebody point me to it on Amazon or something.  How big, how much did it cost, who did the editing/publishing, etc?