Over the weekend a director asked for my opinion on his staging of an upcoming Tempest.  Cool!  If he’s listening he can jump in, but I’m not going to identify him without his permission because it’s for a competition and I’d hate to leak any surprises :). I’m no director, as I’m sure we all know. I’m no actor at all.  I just don’t have the visual imagination for it.  I have to put myself more in the “Shakespeare as literature” group when it comes to that stuff.  Doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions on what makes a good story, though! This director and I spoke mostly about how to open the play, and whether you can get away with moving the shipwreck scene (later Ariel will describe the scene anyway, so is that enough?) Could you act out Prospero’s story of how they came to arrive on the island, show Prospero as Duke, sitting in a library, surrounded by his politician brother (and his cronies) becoming angry that he’s not paying attention to him, and so on? Maybe a little dumb show right at the start? There might well be good theatrical reasons *not* to do some of these things.  Personally I prefer a big opening, something attention grabbing. So, here’s the game.  Whether you’re a theatre pro or not, director or not, pick a scene and tell us how you’d stage it.  We don’t need to get into every last nuance of how you want the actors to *play* the scene (though you can give it a shot). I’m more interested in the off the wall stuff, like the dude who SETS THE TEMPEST IN NAZI GERMANY.  It can be something you’ve done, if you’re a director, but it’s not as fun if it’s something you saw somebody else do.  This is your chance to show *your* ideas, especially if, like me, you’ll never get a chance to direct in real life.

We all know that Shakespeare is best learned by experiencing it.  Well, what does that mean? It’s not like your average student can just head out and find a production of any given play at any given time.  So the next best thing is the movie, right?  Movies are tricky for classrooms, who have to get the appropriate rights to show a movie like that.  And they are not very conducive to working as study guides, when the student might want to bounce around the text a bit.

So what about Shakespeare In Bits, a project that attempts to fill this gap by offering a Flash animated movie of the play, integrated with the text and a browser?  It’s an interesting idea.  The people are computer drawings, of course, but the voice over is real people.  So sit back and watch as the computer reads Romeo and Juliet to you.   Each scene also comes with a synopsis of what happens, and some notes about what to look for.  I like that.  The typical synopsis / “modern translation” doesn’t ever attempt to break out of that line-by-line translation and just say “Look, her’es what happens, here’s what’s important, here’s what to watch out for.”  This version does.
Even more (that I literally just discovered while doing this review) there are character sheets with profiles, a character relationship map (people often forget that Mercutio is related to the Prince!), and analysis of themes, imagery, language and all that other good stuff.  It really is attempting to be a valid classroom companion text for the play and not just a quickie “flash version”.

Made for the classroom setting, the trial model is a little unusual (and I’ve spoken with the author, who by the way is in Ireland).  You can watch a portion of Romeo and Juliet (just the first scene, really), but only for a limited time.  This being a very easily copied product they’re still working out the optimal model that will allow a classroom full of students to experience Shakespeare without necessarily buying just one instance and copying it 30 times.  I can’t fault them for that, business is business.

I know I’ve got some teachers out there, so you might be interested in giving it a spin.  Certainly innovative in its methods from bringing Shakespeare to life without having to go license the latest movie rights.

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.