Review : WILL, Episode 5

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I actually kind of liked this episode, which starts with Shakespeare’s wife and kids showing up for a surprise visit in London.  This of course throws a real monkey wrench in his plans to swive Burbage’s daughter. But he makes it work, taking them for a tour of town that includes meeting all daddy’s friends from work.

I like this bit.  It’s exactly like you’d expect.  The kids are young and excited and wild and in the middle of things one of them says they have to pee.  Poor Anne Hathaway spends most of her time chasing them around, trying to get them to behave, not losing them in the crowd, all while still trying to be a wife to her husband and not just mother to his kids.

Of course she also learns that her husband is cheating on her in about the first ten seconds, so most of the episode is them fighting over what to do.  Of course he says he’ll break it off, but then what?  Will the family stay in London with him, or return to Stratford? Will he give up writing and come back with them to be a glove maker?

I particularly like the kids.  There’s a scene where Hamnet has written a story about dragons, and tells Shakespeare that it’s for him to use in his work. He reminds me greatly of my son.  They’re kids. They’re oblivious to the problems of the grownups. When Shakespeare enters a room they all yell “Daddy!” and hurl themselves at him in their excitement. It’s exactly what kids do.

As a juxtaposition in this family episode, our head torture guy – Topcliffe, right? – also has a “take your kids to work day.” His does not end so well. He catches his daughter singing a “Mary, Mary” rhyme and explains to her exactly how horrible Mary is. But the teenage son actually gets to see daddy beat some guy half to death, until he (the son) has to yell for him to stop.  Which of course humiliates dad, and son is off to boarding school.

I still hate the street urchin. I hate everything about the story. On the one side, the woman in charge of the prostitutes has seen him in the dress and tells the sister that she’s going to put him to work because there’s customers that like boys dressed as girls.  Great, so we start with the threat of pedophiles. But then he’s caught by the theatre folk for stealing a dress, and immediately declares, “Shakespeare give it to me!” making it clear that he’ll blackmail Shakespeare for the whole secret Catholic thing.  So now we have to pretend that he’s Shakespeare’s distant cousin, and they give him a job at the theatre -a job he promptly quits because he can’t read.  So we’re left with him cutting himself again.  I so don’t care about any of that, it’s all just awkward and uncomfortable and has nothing to do with Shakespeare.

Marlowe’s got this weird obsession with death going on, that ends with him hiring people to bury him alive so he can experience death.  Huh?  I so don’t get what’s going on with him. There’s an appearance by a character that’s obviously very close to him, but I have no idea who it is.

Is there any actual Shakespeare in this episode? Yes – sonnet 116 is recited throughout, which is an interesting choice if we were otherwise following a reasonably accurate timeline.  But we’re to believe that the “two minds” are actually Shakespeare and Alice Burbage, who, whether they’re sleeping together are not, are going to keep the theatre alive.

 

But What’s It Mean, Mooch?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I try not to do politics here because I know it annoys people, but when Shakespeare comes up, it counts as news.  There’s a non-story going around about how somebody emailed the now fired Scaramucci, pretending to be Reince Priebus (that name’s harder to spell than Benderwhal Cucumber) and getting him to fall for it.

What’s interesting to us is where Mooch responds at one point:

Read Shakespeare. Particularly Othello.

I for the life of me can’t figure out who is who in that reference.  I get that this is a story about trust and betrayal and apparently somebody thinks somebody stabbed somebody in the back.  But saying that makes it an Othello story is like saying that the Lion King is actually Hamlet  (oh, wait…).  Who is Othello in this?  Who is Iago?  Is it just a weird way for Mooch to say the Priebus was jealous of him? Should the wives be worried? The wives don’t fare well in the original, if you recall.

I appreciate it whenever somebody drops Shakespeare into a Trump story, I do. It makes my news alerts light up like a Christmas tree :).  But I don’t get this one.  Anybody able to decipher it?

What Will Theatre Look Like In 100 Years?

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What will theatre, and Shakespeare in particular, look like in 100 years?

When people want to talk to me about who they think is a “modern Shakespeare” I always respond the same way: “Talk to me in 450 years and we’ll see if anybody’s still talking about your guy.”

But it does bring up something that we can talk about.  Shakespeare hasn’t remained static for all that time. The words aren’t changing, but everything else is.  Women on stage.  Electric lights.  Film.  Our attitudes toward race, gender, anti-Semitism.  All up for discussion.

What’s happening now that you think will be standard a generation (or two) from now?

I think that gender and race-blind casting is an obvious one.  I think we could debate all day the difference between “King Lear portrayed by a woman” and “King Lear portrayed as a woman” but that’s a topic for a different day.  Just like men played all the female roles at one point, I have no problem with women playing the men’s roles.  But when you change the actual character – making Prospera the mother figure rather than Prospero’s father figure, or making Hamlet the daughter rather than the son – well, then I think you’ve changed the source material and are now telling a different story than Shakespeare did, and creating a whole new thing. Which is fine, but then you shift into “based on Shakespeare” or “inspired by Shakespeare” territory. Don’t tell me I’m going to see Hamlet and deliver me the melancholy princess of Denmark.

Even that much is typically enough to get Facebook mad at me 🙂 and it’s not really the aspect of Shakespeare that most interests me.  I’d much rather talk about technology.

I’ve wanted to redesign the whole idea of the script for a long time. I wrote about my desire to see “Gonzo” Shakespeare back when the iPad2 first came out. This year we saw The Tempest with a completely computer-generated Ariel.  And let’s not forget this story about Shakespeare via portal, where some of the actors “on stage” are actually being broadcast from a thousand miles away.

What’s next?

Something I haven’t seen yet, but I’d love to see?  Interact with the audience’s smart phones.  A day will come, if it hasn’t already when we can just assume that everybody has one.  Imagine telling people that they can download an app to be a part of the show, just like donning 3d glasses at a movie.  Then comes a scene when everybody exits…then all our phones light up, and you see and hear Hamlet, “How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge!”  It needs work, you’ve had to deal with the brightness,

How far we’ve already come!

the volume, etc.. but that’s just one idea off the top of my head as I sit here and write this.  Maybe in 100 years, we won’t even need the device. We’ll just have the sounds and images projected right into our heads.

Moore’s Law tells us that the advancement of technology is ever accelerating.  What’s taken 20 years thus far will take 2 years going forward. So 100 years is a long time.  Can we even imagine?

Almost Forgot – A Midsummer’s Nightmare Tonight!

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

I was wondering what happened to this one, and it dropped in my lap this morning.  Our “summer of Shakespeare on TV” continues tonight with Lifetime’s A Midsummer’s Nightmare, which is going to be some sort of

horror story so I’m sure there’s not going to be much Shakespeare in it at all. The cast of characters doesn’t list any actual character names, excepting “Mike Puck” and “Nick Bottoms”. Everybody knows that I’m in it for the Shakespeare, so if I don’t hear some original text, I’m probably not going to care for it much at all.

Courtney Love is in this, as is Dominic Monaghan, the guy that played Merry in Lord of the Rings.  If they both end up putting Shakespeare on their resume after this, I know which one is going to sound more believable.  (Although I do see that one of the other stars, Daisy Head, who I otherwise would not recognize, is going to be in the upcoming Ophelia movie next year.  So maybe she’s going to be somebody we see more of in the future.)

I suffered through one episode of Still Star-Crossed, though, so I’ll suffer through this one. It’s not on until 11pm, though, so I might end up recording and watching tomorrow.

Enter, Stage Directions

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Today I was asking random people about their thoughts on Shakespeare, and there was at least one expected answer of, “old and hard to read.”  My normal reaction was to go with the “Well, you really need to see it to understand what’s going on, reading is great after you already understand the story and character and now want to get into the details…..” when something occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever considered before.

When it comes to making Shakespeare “easier to read” we always seem to go to “modern translation” at worst, or “easy to access glossary and crazy amounts of footnotes” at best. The latter might give the most amount of information to the reader, but it’s certainly hard to “read” anything when your eye is constantly jumping around the page.

When I need an example I often go back to one that Mr. Corey, my 12th grade English teacher, used when discussing Hamlet. There’s a moment when Polonius says, “take this from this, if this be so.” Which makes no sense unless you can see that he is pointing to his head and then his shoulders, in other words, “have me decapitated if I’m lying.”

In this particular case, there’s often (always?) a stage direction that says, “[Points to his head and shoulder]. So it’s not really the greatest example. But is that part of the problem? The incredible dearth of stage directions? For the most part all we get with Shakespeare is who entered, who exited, and who stabbed or killed whom.  You’ve got to be careful, too, because those that are stabbed often stick around for a few speeches before they die.

Has anybody published an addition that doesn’t touch the actual text of the dialogue, but instead lays out the context in the stage directions?  Modern stage directions, in my limited experience, seem much more detailed.  For some reason True West by Sam Shepard  is what came to mind, and here’s a snippet of those stage directions (I was unsure if the bolding was in the original, I took a screenshot of somebody’s analysis I found online):

There’s a fairly obvious argument against going down this path in that it destroys the infinite interpretation of Shakespeare that has made him so timeless.  To say “Enter Hamlet, and here’s what he’s wearing, and here’s the expression on his face because here’s what he’s thinking…” is to destroy the character. Or at the very least, to lock one interpretation in stone.  But surely there’s middle ground?  How hard is it to write, “Enter HAMLET, still mourning his recently deceased father, dressed mostly in black.”  Now you’ve got context for “clouds hang on you”, “inky cloak,” “nighted color”, and so on.

Maybe this is how Shakespeare is actually performed, I don’t know.  Maybe the director, in trying to document her vision, does something similar where she has to go through and add notes of description to all the various scenes?