Ok, posting about As You Like It reminded me of this.  Why the excitement over the crossdressing?  I mean, sure, I get the whole thing with Shakespeare and boys playing girls pretending to be boys.  I’m not talking about that.  I’m talking about the response from the ladies who seem positively thrilled over it.  I hope they don’t mind my quoting them, but in the AYLI thread, Ren Girl says you “can’t go wrong” with cross-dressing, and Angela is “all for any play that involves a pants-role for a female.”  But I’ve seen similar responses at other times which often come down to a near-giddy “Hooray, a girl gets to play a boy!” excitement. What’s up with that, exactly?  Maybe I’m stupid but I would have thought the exact opposite, that the ladies in the audience would not be so supportive of strong female characters who have to play men for half the story.  Lady Macbeth may say “unsex me here”, but she stays a woman for the whole play.  Somebody want to enlighten me?

During the second season of Slings & Arrows, they perform Macbeth.  The conversation is almost entirely around words like “evil” and “psychopaths.”  I get that they’re going over the top with it.  I understand that in producing this particular play, people really like to go nuts with the curse and the blood and the smoke and mirrors and all that good stuff.  But I’m left wondering if I’ve fundamentally misunderstood the ending to Macbeth all this time.  Is Macbeth a fundamentally good guy who has been corrupted by ambition this whole time, who realizes too late the error of his ways?  Or is he, right to the very end, just a demented psychopath who is too insane to realize that he’s already dead and just doesn’t know it yet? I’ve always thought it the former.  After all, we’ve gotten a glimpse into his character (and his descent) through the whole play, it’s not like we have another good guy to play off of where we get to say at the end “Hooray, the good guy won!”  I mean yeah, we do, but he just sort of shows up at the end, it’s not like the play was one big chase where the good guy is always one step behind.  Most of the play is about Macbeth going nuts, and only at the end do the good guys appear and win the day. I guess I’m pondering the essence of the tragedy in this one.  If Macbeth is indeed a psychotic monster (every time I say it like that I imagine an action movie ending where he keeps getting butchered and just keeps getting up and charging the hero, until finally his head is chopped off), then where is the tragedy exactly?  Doesn’t there have to be that moment of “Oh good, everything’s going to be ok….too late, too late!” for it to be tragic?  Doesn’t Macbeth have to have some awareness of his situation?  I’ve always preferred to think of the ending as Macbeth’s realization that he has not been his own man throughout this whole experience, and that even though Fate has been right so far, he’s going to take control and go down fighting.  He doesn’t expect to win but he doesn’t plan to roll over and let Fate have it’s way with him, either.  Or, that could also be the ravings of a lunatic who is beaten and refuses to realize it, too.  Now I want to go see a Macbeth. 🙂

As mentioned previously, the show on Boston Common this year will be As You Like It.  Truthfully, I know little to nothing about the play.  I’ve never studied it, and only ever really read it during a project I did to read all the plays.  It did not stick in my memory much. So, I’ll open it up.  Somebody tell me what it’s about, and if it’s any good?  Where does it rank, relatively, among the comedies?  Better/worse than Two Gents, Comedy of Errors, All’s Well? The wikipedia page reminds me that this play is the source of one of the more famous Shakespearean quotes, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” and includes it with Much Ado and Twelfth Night among the “great comedies.” Who wants to enlighten us?

Does anybody know anything about this movie version of Macbeth directed by Geoffrey Wright?  It seems unstuck in time to me.  The site is Australian, which at first made me think “Ok, we just can’t get it in the US, I’ll stop worrying about it.”  But today over on Shakespeare Complete I saw reference to the DVD coming out, and a contest that ends April 30, 2008.  But, on the main site (first link), it says right on the top, “On DVD September 10.”  Even IMDB says that it’s been on DVD since May, 2007. What the heck?

Here’s a question that I hope can draw some discussion.  I try to post a wide variety of topics here – interesting links, news items, book/movie reviews, discussion of the plays.  What do you like to read the most? Are you here to discuss the plays?  Or hear news about the latest Shakespeare book or movie?  Do you follow the links when I post them?  Which stories are you most likely to comment on? Just curious.  I looked at my admin console today and saw that I’ve posted almost 600 entries here, but then I realized they spread across a wide spectrum of content, so I’m a bit curious about whether I should focus a little more on something over something else.