All this recent talk of Double Falshood / Cardenio as Shakespeare’s legendary “lost” play brings up a very different question.  Not whether it is or not, but what if it is?  How would that change our opinion of Shakespeare’s canon of work if we really and truly knew, for sure, that there was a new play to add to the mix?  One that, by most accounts, isn’t very good? I wanted to put it in terms that the modern reader can understand.  It’s so easy to speak of Shakespeare as perfect, Shakespeare as god, that it’s easy to escape Shakespeare as working man.  So instead I want you to think about Robert DeNiro.  Know the name?  You probably do, at least if you’re in the US.  Now, can you quote something from the Godfather II?  I’m willing to bet that you can.  Or how about Goodfellas? Casino?  Maybe Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, for the purists.  You like his comedy better? How about Midnight Run, or Meet the Parents? Now what about Analyze That? Or how about The Good Shepherd?  Oh, didn’t see them?  Maybe something from his earlier work, could you tell me a little bit about Bloody Mama, or Jennifer on my Mind?  What about Stardust?  Surely I have to mention Stardust, I mean come on, the man played a character named Captain Shakespeare. (There may indeed be some DeNiro Geeks in the crowd who can, indeed, speak at length on all the movies I mentioned.  But bear with me here, people, I’m trying to make a point!) Any large body of work will naturally fray at the edges.  It takes time to hone one’s craft, and then eventually time dulls the edge of even the sharpest talent.  Robert DeNiro is quite arguably one of the best actors of modern times.  He’s certainly been a part of some of the best movies.  But does that mean that all of his work was genius?  Not hardly. I think people often forget that with Shakespeare.  We’ve likened the name Shakespeare to the work as a whole when really it’s probably more like a bell curve – we’ll all put Hamlet and Lear and Dream and such up at the top, surround them with Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar and so on…until down at the edges we have the Measure for Measures and Pericleseses….however you say it. So, would a proven Cardenio jump to the top of that pile?  Almost certainly not.  Masterpieces don’t tend to disappear.  Junk is what tends to be forgotten.  Maybe Shakespeare was phoning it in during his elder years.  Maybe he collaborated loosely just to pick up the pay check.  Who knows, maybe he never wanted the burden we place upon him, and his heart just wasn’t in it anymore.  People tend to forget this.  People think we’re going to find the next Hamlet.  We’re not.

Did everybody catch Jude Law, fresh off of Hamlet (and pimping the upcoming “Repo Men”) on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Thanks to the miracle of DVR I did not miss it, although I’m a bit late :). Luckily for us Shakespeare geeks he did a bunch of Shakespeare material! Sorry for the links instead of embedding, but I can’t figure out how to make Hulu go right in the post.  And while the vids are in YouTube, they are loaded up with spam and I can’t stand that. Opening Monologue All about his “impressions” of Hamlet, which for a Shakespeare geek were hysterical.

“These people came all this way, dressed up real nice, and I don’t want to get in trouble like Piven.” “Hamlet is sent to England, and this is my favorite part of the play because I get to go back to my dressing room, maybe play on Twitter, have a biscuit.  … And then I come back out on stage and Ophelia’s dead, I don’t really know what happened there I’ve never read that part.”

Interesting “mistake” there, as he says “Hamlet kills the guy in the hat and is sent to England by mistake.”  Clearly he means, “kills the guy by mistake, and is sent to England.”   Hamlet Auditions Jude waits for his audition spot along with Nathan Lane, Al Pacino, Nicholas Cage (irony!! Oh, the bees!), and Sam Elliott.

“How you gonna play Hamlet? I’m torn between black and Puerto Rican!”

Could have done more with this.  Then again, they could have done the whole thing with Al Pacino, if you ask me. 🙂

Ok, ok, ok, Double Falshood (spell it right!) is in the news this week, what with “new” evidence to support the case that it is indeed Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio. First of all, here’s the text of the play, something I first wrote about back in May 2007.  You can also read it at Google books. Likewise, in June 2007 the Royal Shakespeare Company did a project in Spain that also played fast and loose with whether it was Double Falshood or Cardenio. Additionally, Shakespeare expert Gary Taylor came out in support of the Cardenio theory in April, 2009. So, what exactly is this week’s news? 

Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.

Next summer Double Falsehood will become more embedded in the canon when the Royal Shakespeare Company mounts a production based on it as part of the first season back at its revamped Stratford-upon-Avon home.

So, there you go.  More support for the Cardenio argument, but proof?  Compelling evidence?  Who knows.

So this morning the phone rings at 5:30am, an automated call telling us that school is cancelled due to flooding.  Awesome.  Wife and kids don’t need to wake up.  However this also means an hour and a half for me sitting in a dark house trying not to make any noise. iPhone and headphones to the rescue, and I finally sit back to enjoy some Playing Shakespeare.  For those not in the know, this is a series of actor’s workshops with John Barton, dating back to apparently 1982.  Cast includes Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley and a whole host of others that I have to admit I do not recognize. All I can say so far is that the people who told me I’d love this, were right!  Hours and hours and hours of real actors and directors talking about how to speak the lines, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue? How not to saw the air thusly?  I use that example on purpose, because it’s how the show opens, you see. The show is wonderfully dated – the fashion choices are very interesting, everybody smokes freely throughout, and many of them give off this sort of, I don’t know to say it, this overly dramatic, “I am an actor! I have my method, this is my art!” sort of vibe.  Hard to explain.  You’ve got this one lady who admits to coming to Shakespeare late and is clearly nervous about her portrayal compared to some others, sitting across from a younger woman who so exudes “I am an actress!” that you can’t help but see her as the type who’ll scream at the director for being an idiot and then storm off to her trailer the minute somebody looks at her cockeyed, accusing them of breaking her character. Let me put it another way, I think I like to watch actors, but I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with them. :)  Lots of “Well, I think it is *this* way,” always followed by lots of “Yes, yes, Judy has said a brilliant thing there, did you all see it? Let’s go with that…”  I suppose it’s a normal day at the office for actors. As an American I have a hard time not seeing it as the Ian and Patrick show, though.  This show is nearly 30 years old, but yet I get a kick out of the fact that Sir Ian is the first to interrupt the professor/director (whatever he is) and say “This distinction you’ve been making for the last 10 minutes, between naturalistic and heightened language, I disagree, I think that what you’re talking about is the difference between good and bad acting.” (Not in those exact words, though the latter half is pretty much a direct quote).  When Barton tells McKellen to deliver a line “sad”, any other actor might have just thrown on a sad voice and done it but McKellen has to ask, “What, you mean just paint it with a broad brush of sadness?”   I suppose it’s like grabbing your nearest Nobel prize winning physicist and asking him to do a simple math problem deliberately incorrectly.  You have to stop for a minute and make yourself do that, since you’ve just been asked for a very alien thing. Then there’s Patrick Stewart.  30 years ago and still no hair.  And sweet Jesus does he have an actor’s voice.  The minute he opens his mouth he’s a Shakespearean.  There’s a funny bit where he does a scene with an actor, then Barton tells them to do it “wrong”, adding pauses where there should not be any.  The fellow actor says, “We did it that way once, in rehearsal,” and then quickly puts his hand on Patrick Stewart’s shoulder and says, “Not with you, Patrick, because I know you wouldn’t do it like that.” I thought that was strangely telling, since he was speaking of a rehearsal, so why wouldn’t somebody be willing to play around with the lines a bit, for creativity? Could it really be the case that, even back then, people like Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian had already risen above their craft to the point where fellow actors were separating themselves?  Or am I just reading into that? I’m only maybe an hour and a half or so into it, but definitely enjoying.  I’m finding an interesting distinction of my own, however.  I love the Shakespeare, let’s be obvious.  Everytime Barton says, “Now let’s hear a scene…” I perk up. I was going to write “even when” it’s a scene I don’t know, then changed it to “especially when”, but then left it out altogether because I’m not really sure which I like better. But what I don’t like? I don’t like when the actors say, “Here’s how I think of this” or “This is what I think.” Everytime I hear that I’m left thinking “Shut up! I don’t care about you, get back to the text!’”  I want to hear how it *is* done, not how this one person would do it.  Know what I mean? Somebody expressing an opinion on this stuff sounds very bold to me, I don’t want your opinion, I want what Shakespeare wanted. I do realize the error in this thinking, since of course it is often the actor’s interpretation that gives us everything.  So I do appreciate the end result.  I’m just not watching the DVD to hear them pat each other the back, if that makes sense.  See earlier bits about not wanting to hang out with actors :).  I’m no actor (obviously), but my favorite quotes from and about actors are often the ones that say (and I first heard Anthony Hopkins say this), “I’m the actor, I do what the director tells me.” It’s easier for me to get in my head the idea that a single person has a vision for this particular production, rather than a dozen people all off doing their own thing and then just kinda sorta coming together mutually. I may be totally far afield here, and just imagining things, but I notice that when Stewart gives a reading he’ll pause and say, “Now, there’s a few different ways I can do this.” To which Barton seems to typically say, “The right way is the way that you feel is right.”  There are many enjoyable bits.  I love when Barton makes his actors do a scene several different ways, you quickly see the strength of the text when he does that.  Or when one actor is demonstrating from Tamburlaine and has to keep coughing because the delivery is killing his throat (he even curses Marlowe at one point for it). I’ve only seen a bit so maybe it’s too early to go on and on, but since there’s so much content I think I’ll probably end up doing a series.  I also don’t want to end up pissing off my actors by misrepresenting them :). 

It’s just been pointed out to me (Thanks, JaneFan!) that I had inadvertently spammed the living heck out of my readers by dumping about a dozen ad blocks on the page.  Sorry about that, that was most definitely a mistake.  Blogger (where I’ve always hosted this site) introduced some new templates over the weekend, and I was playing with them.  Some folks may have even noticed downtime I think it was Friday night while I tried some out and quickly reverted. At one point I discovered that I’d lost all my “gadgets”, and was trying to put them back.  I do remember trying to put in an AdSense link and having it not work, no matter how hard I tried. Looks like it was working and somehow I just wasn’t seeing it, and I ended up adding a whole bunch more than I intended. Sorry once again!  There are adsense links on the page, don’t hate me for that (would you rather I beg for PayPal donations?), but if you run ad-block you won’t see them anyway :).  But no, I never intended to turn the site into ad central like that.  No point in it!