Playing Against Type

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

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?

Deconstructing Shakespeare

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

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.

A Game! Novel Perspective

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

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?

Theme Song Shakespeare : And The Rest!

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

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!

Review : Undiscovered Country by Lin Enger

~ duane ~ Leave a comment


It’s always an amazing experience reading a Hamlet adaptation.  How much of the original story will be kept?  What will be cut, and what new material will be added?  How will the author make the transition from Shakespeare’s world to the new setting? Will the final result be little more than a “modern language” novelization of Shakespeare, or a legitimate literary work?

All of these questions floated through my mind when Bardfilm recommended Undiscovered Country to me. Jesse Matson is hunting in the woods of Minnesota when his dad, Harold, dies from a seemingly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.  That is, of course, until Harold’s ghost appears to Jesse and claims that Jesse’s uncle Clay is actually the one that pulled the trigger. Uncle Clay, of course, quickly makes the moves on Jesse’s mom Genevieve and we get the whole backstory about jealousy between the brothers, Harold’s position of power over other men in the neighborhood (he’s some sort of local politician?  I lost that thread in listening to the audiobook).

There’s a girlfriend character, but is she Ophelia?  Her dad is certainly not your normal Polonius if this is the case.  What about Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?  There are a variety of supporting players but I couldn’t draw you a map.

Once upon a time (bear with me for a moment) Stephen King wrote two books pretty much simultaneously – The Regulators and Desperation. These two books are in a parallel universe to each other, where all of the characters appear in both stories, just in completely different context.  Steve is a sheriff in one who dies in the first few chapters, but in the other book Steve is a married insurance salesman with kids who ends up the hero (I made up all of that, as a non-spoiler example).

Reading Shakespeare adaptations like Undiscovered Country always makes me think of that King experiment.  Jesse’s girlfriend Christine shows up and I spend the rest of the story thinking, “Ok, is she going to betray him? Go crazy and kill herself?  What about her father, where is the Polonius character?”  The great thing is that all or none of that might be true, and I have no idea.  None of it *has* to be true.  I haven’t actually finished the book yet, so I have no idea which parts are and are not.

One interesting angle leaps right out at you from the first chapter — this story is written in the voice of Jesse from ten years down the road, writing about what happened to him when he was younger.  So, right off the bat, you know that whatever’s about to happen, our Hamlet survives.  How does this change the story?  DOES this change the story?  I haven’t finished it yet, so I have no idea whether the rest is silence for our narrator or not.

Completely outside all of our Shakespeare baggage, this book works as the story of a young man coming to terms with the death of his father.  By telling it from his perspective we see that *he* thinks he’s the one in complete control while everyone else either falls to pieces around him (his mom), is just an innocent who doesn’t understand (his girlfriend), or is in on it (uncle Clay).  There are several great scenes where the author manages to knock Jesse entirely off his game and make him question just how much control over his situation he really has, and I love those scenes.  At one point he bursts in on the sheriff with some “evidence” of Clay’s guilt.  The sheriff calmly hears him out, then asks patiently, “Do you feel better just getting that out, or do you need me to be the sheriff now?”  When Jesse informs him that of course he needs to be the sheriff now, he learns very quickly that he’s not the one making the rules here, and that everything is not going to go his way.   The famous “Hamlet and Gertrude bedroom scene” also plays out similarly, where Jesse barges in with complete confidence about what he’s going to say and what’s going to happen next, and gets another that he is a child dealing with adults.

I’ve not finished the story, as I mentioned.  So far I love it. I love that I have no idea how closely we’ll follow the Hamlet story – whether Ophelia will go insane, whether her father will play a role, whether our Hamlet is still going to end up dead even though he’s narrating the story.  I can’t wait to find out.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world.   In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!