Review : Classical Comics

July 1, 2008April 17, 2023 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Karen over at Classical Comics was nice enough to send me some review copies after the announcement of their US publishing deal. Her company publishes “graphic novel” versions of Shakespeare (and other classics). I received two copies of Macbeth (they also offer Henry V) yesterday – one “original text” and one “plain text”. This, I thought, would be interesting – I could go back and forth and compare both! Fun. As graphic novels they are quite good. I showed them to a colleague who is more the comic geek than I, and he was immediately impressed. He did question some of the coloring choices, but we are talking about Macbeth here, so it doesn’t bother me at all to have a heavy emphasis on the darker colors (lots of red and black, but Macbeth himself spends the story dressed in purple). The visuals are what you might expect, lots of violence and blood, plenty of “action”. When we first see Macbeth (as the soldier recounts the “unseamed from nave to chaps” line) I swear he’s actually delivering a flying sidekick to one badguy while skewering another. All it needed was some Batman style BAM! noises. Ok, not really. There is also a massive amount of supplemental material, including a visual cast of characters so you’ll always know whose talking, maps, and a history lesson. There’s certainly plenty to read here once you’re done with the comic itself. I chose to read the plain text version, and did so in less than an hour (two train rides). A few times I thought I found possible mistakes in the translation, and not only consulted my original text version, but also my actual original text that I keep on all my computers, and I was mistaken each time. Heck, I even learned a few things! For instance I’d gotten it into my head that Lady Macbeth said “If I had a child, I’d bash its brains in….” but she does indeed say “I have given suck”, clear evidence that she did have a child. Likewise I’d forgotten all about Malcolm’s argument to Macduff that, ahem, he’s too into the ladies, shall we say, to be king? Unfortunately what I found over and over again is that the plain text version – which is basically a direct translation from the original, as opposed to a retelling – serves merely to emphasize everything that is wrong and hated about Shakespeare to begin with. Some examples:

References still won’t make any sense, only now they stand out more. “They tore into the enemy as if they wanted to cover themselves in blood, or create another Golgotha.” You may understand that line a little better than, “Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, or memorise another Golgotha, I cannot tell” but you either know the Golgotha reference or you don’t. I suppose if you look at it in a more positive way, the plain text version leaves you with just one thing to lookup in the dictionary instead of several. But I found it jarring.
Shakespearean characters talk too much. Seriously. Once you understand what they’re saying a little better it is more painfully obvious that they are not speaking in a way you’d expect any real person to speak. Like after the murder of Duncan when someone (Banquo?) says, “Let’s get together again when we’re properly dressed and investigate this bloody piece of work. We’re all too full of confusion and suspicion now — but I trust in God and for that reason I’m prepared to fight against all hidden treason and malice.” Yes, that’s a translation of what Shakespeare had him say, but if you’re just looking to read a story cover to cover you’re left saying “Who are these people and who talks like that??” (More on this in a bit)
When you translate, you take away the poetry. I learn this when I watch the faces of my kids as I retell Shakespearean stories to them. My 6yr old is starting to give me confused looks that say, “I don’t see what’s so great about that story, Daddy.” In this case, our favorite final lines get translated into, “I will not surrender just to kiss the ground in front of young Malcolm’s feet and to be jeered at by the common rabble. Though Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, and though you’re not born of a woman, I’ll fight you to the end. My shield’s in front of my body. Lay on Macduff, and damned be the one who first shouts Stop, Enough!” Fine fine, yes that’s what he said, but that’s hardly the kind of thing that would make people 400 years later say, “Hey, remember when Macbeth said I’ll fight you to the end? That was awesome.”

These are not failings of this particular edition – I could have made those same three points of any “plain text” translation. Classical Comics also offers a “quick text” version that I did not see, although I suspect that it does away with the first two points relatively nicely since it is not bound to be such a thesaurus-driven translation as the plain text. Having vented about plain text translations in general, let me now turn to the original text version. Now we’re talking. Here’s exactly the kind of thing that I’d read for myself – the real text, backed up with cool pictures. You can’t beat it. Never ask again “What’s going on in this scene?” You’ll know. Oh look, two guys on horseback talking. Cool. That makes sense. I will keep an eye on their offerings and may even snag copies for myself (original text only thankyouverymuch!) of plays I’m less familiar with. Not that they’ll likely ever do a Cymbeline, but you never know. It’s projects like this that make me wish e-books were a thing of the present. The visuals in this book are identical, regardless of what text you choose. So how about an e-book delivery mechanism that defaults to original text, and then only when you touch a dialogue balloon does it translate itself? That way you can choose to read the translations as you need them, or even better go back and forth and tell yourself “Ok, now I understand what happened here, let me look again at how Shakespeare really wrote it….Ohh! Now I get it!” I wonder if they have any plans to do a sort of 3-in-1 binding so that buyers wont have to choose which versions they want? Hint hint? All in all I find these books wonderful. The quality of the presentation is excellent, as I said. And the supplemental material is a complete bonus that I did not expect. My issues are entirely with the plain text translation. But that’s fine, because I’m holding a copy of the original text as well :). Let me put it this way, they tell me that The Tempest is coming out in January 2009. I’ll be getting it. I’ll probably be getting all three versions, actually. That way my kids can grow up with them.

Review : The Master of Verona

April 10, 2008February 11, 2017 ~ duane ~ 1 Comment

There’s a bit of a back story to this review. A long time ago I found this book, billed as “a novel of Shakespeare”, and commented that “I wish I had time to read it.” A year later, as I do the occasional book review, the author David Blixt called me out on it. After all, he hangs out here. Fair enough. So I went about getting myself a copy, and just finished it this week. I review it with the full knowledge that the author is one of my most prolific commenters. I was pretty worried about what I’d gotten myself into for the first 20 pages or so. This is a historical novel, set in the 1300’s around the son of one Dante Alighieri, yes, the one who wrote The Inferno. As a matter of fact this is a major arc of the book, as The Inferno has only recently been published, and Dante is something of a rock star, traveling from patron to patron, discussing philosophy while people secretly make signs behind his back to ward off the devil. I’m not usually much of a history guy. “Speculative fiction”, the near future stuff, is more my thing. I knew that there’d be some Shakespeare to come, as that is what caught my attention in the first place. Apparently within this world of the Alighieri’s, I was to learn what started the feud between the Montagues and Capulets. Whenever I saw that the book started with a family tree (more to the point a “dramatis personae”, just like any of Shakespeare’s work, although this one is organized by family) and a number of maps, I thought I was doomed. That’s no failing of the author – that’s just my relationship to this sort of epic story. My “thing” is characters on stage (or on the page) doing things and saying things, and saying why they’re doing things and doing things to back up what they’re saying. If somebody hates his distant cousin because there was a failed hostile takeover between their grandfathers, I internalize it better if one character says it to another character. Seeing it on a family tree does nothing for me. Anyway, back to the story. I got my action and dialogue soon enough as Pietro, son of Dante, is cast into a battle alongside his new friends Anthony Capecelatro (soon to be Cappuletto), and Mariotto “Romeo” Montecchio, under the charge of the Francesco “Cangrande” della Scala, legendary leader of Verona. From that point on, I loved it. There’s action – lots and lots of action. There’s character development. There’s a good story about a prophecy and a child who may or may not grow up to fulfill his destiny. It is particularly fascinating to watch the development of Pietro, recently knighted, who matures into quite a hero indeed. I also like the child, very much. I do not like at all how the adults treated the child. But as a character I thought the child was written very well, and could only imagine that the author’s own child had something to do with that (although I believe I’m wrong there). Along the way, as promised, we learn the history of the “Montecchios” and the “Capulets”. I guess there I got a little confused, as I do not know all the multiple sources to Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare used. I thought this was supposed to be sort of prequel to the Shakespeare story, the cause of the “ancient grudge” that “breaks to new mutiny.” But one of the characters in the story is in fact named Romeo (although on first introduction he says “Never call me that” and it’s never spoken of again). So perhaps that’s the author’s joke, but it did have me scratching my head trying to figure out if he was supposed to be *the* Romeo. I find, though, that I didn’t end up as interested in that story as I thought. I only ever found this book as “a novel of Shakespeare”, but ended up far more interested in Dante and his son. There are a number of Shakespeare references and jokes, many of which I’m sure I missed. (Update: It just clicked with me that perhaps I do get it, if Romeo grows up to have a son named Romeo, which would be a logical thing to do…..) In the end, I’m not quite sure I understood all of the political twists and turns that were taken. There are characters who seem good that do horrible things, and vice versa. There are several major characters where you’re really left scratching your head, trying to figure out if they’re good people or not. But through it all there’s a certain innocent nobility that follows Pietro. An underlying theme of the story is that of astrology, and Fate, and whether your destiny takes its course automatically or whether you’re expected to take an active role in it. (I love, by the way, the reference to Macbeth right in the middle of all this – if the witches hadn’t told Macbeth that he’d be king, would he have killed the king?) Pietro is a walking example of this question. Does he end up where he does because of free will, the manipulation of others, or just Fate? Or are they all ultimately the same thing? I can’t say that I’m suddenly a fan of historical fiction now. As I said, give me dialogue and action over politics any day. But I can say that I enjoyed this book, very much. I have reviewed books that I felt were a chore, and looked at the end with relief that I could move on. With this one I anxiously returned to my reading each morning and evening (train to work, don’cha know), honestly curious about how it would end. As it seems set up for a sequel, I can honestly say that I’d like to read the sequel. The politics and the prophecy don’t mean much to me, but I can appreciate well developed characters and want to see how their lives turn out.

Review : The Book Of Air And Shadows

March 26, 2008September 25, 2017 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

When I read The DaVinci Code, I thought, “I think I would have enjoyed this more if it was about Shakespeare, instead of Catholicism.” When I read Interred With Their Bones, which had a bunch of Shakespearean actors killing each other to get at the prize, I thought, “Hmmm, maybe thrillers aren’t really my thing. Good Shakespeare content, though.”

I’m happy to report that The Book Of Air And Shadows, by Michael Gruber, fits somewhere between the two. I liked it quite a bit. Which is odd, really, since there isn’t really all that much Shakespeare in it. You probably know the plot without me even having to tell you. Somebody turns up clues to an undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript (and no, actually, it’s not Cardenio). You notice how it’s never the manuscript they find, but always some wild goose chase of clues that may or may not have a manuscript at the end? Same deal here.

Blah blah blah, typically backstory stuff about exactly what a new Shakespeare manuscript would mean to the world, guesses at its value, and so on, and then the race is on for who gets it first, the good guys or the bad guys. Seems innocent, then somebody dies suspiciously and we learn just how far the bad guys are willing to go…you know, the standard stuff.

The first interesting bit is that none of the characters are really all that into Shakespeare. Sure, there are a few token Shakespeare experts thrown in, but they are minor characters. The heroes are actually an amateur filmmaker and his bookbinder girlfriend that work in a rare bookstore, and an intellectual property lawyer. Throw in a liberal amount of gangsters, mostly Russian, and the rest of the story sort of writes itself. Is it legit? Is it all a big scam? Who is scamming whom? How many different groups of gangsters are in on it, and who is the spy in the ranks?

I find it amusing to comment on the book this way, since many times that is exactly what the amateur filmmaker hero does, commenting on how “If this was a movie, the gangsters would bust down that door…” and then they do. The narrative structure of the story is compelling. It starts with the lawyer hiding out from the bad guys, and takes the form of him journalling his story up to that point. This is intermixed with the story of the filmmaker who found the clues to the manuscript, which is told in third person. Eventually the stories cross and you get opportunities to hear two sides of the same scene whenever both men are in the room.

Some parts, I did not love. For instance we get to see the actual letters that are the clues to the hidden treasure. They are mixed between chapters. They are also written in “original spelling”, so you have to slog through pages of stuff like this (opening randomly): “…asking always the favour of almighty God to keep me stricktlie on the path of truthfullnesse as I have muche of the olde Adam in me as thou knowest & mayhap I have told you som of it before nowe, yet you may forget and, which God foirbid, die before oure lad hath reached the age of understand, soe it is better wrote down.” It’s one thing to get maybe a paragraph of that, but when you’ve got 3-5 pages of it in between each chapter, it takes some getting used to. I just keep seeing it as a long stream of typos.

Secondly, it ends as all thrillers seem to do with so many twists and doublecrosses that you may lose track of what just happened. I’m not really sure if writing a character who kept pointing out the cliche’d nature of the story helped or hurt the overall quality. Wouldn’t the idea be to do something different than the typical script calls for, instead of taking the story out to its standard conclusion, all the while going “Yup, this is what happens next, yup, then this….” There’s actually an answer to that question near the end, by the way, when some of the characters engage in conversation about whether movies echo humanity, or whether people define themselves around what the movies tell them is the ideal. Which of course leads back to asking the same question of Shakespeare’s works, a common theme here on the blog.

Lastly, I didn’t love the characters all that much. There is a weird obsession with sex in the story that seemed over the top at times. I get that it is a defining characteristic of our narrator – he ruins his life over his obsession with sex, as a matter of fact – it just seemed a little alien to me in a novel that I thought was going to be primarily about Shakespeare. Which reminds me, the narrator is a pretty lousy person. There’s a whole backstory about why, and you get to decide for yourself whether you forgive him his sins, but in general, he’s a big obnoxious bully. Which makes his parts of the story, told in first person, very interesting.

Summing up? This is, in no way, a cut and paste thriller where the prize is a lost Shakespeare manuscript. It could just as easily have been the Ark of the Covenant for all it mattered to the story (other than some token bits about intellectual property and copyright ownership, that is). It’s also not that much of a thriller. I’d almost put it more in the mystery category. There are very few action sequences, and almost all of them are dispatched in short order. I believe there was only one chase scene in the whole book, which yes, did have the filmmaker character commenting “Oh, and this would be the obligatory chase scene.” I mentioned elsewhere that there are no “dun dun DUNNNN!!!” moments at the end of chapters. Given those things I am actually quite surprised to find that I enjoyed the story very much. The narrative in particular worked very well. It felt more…literary? To me. It did not feel like the kind of random paperback you grab out of a rack at the airport. You know what I’m talking about, the throwaway kind that you wouldn’t otherwise think about if you didn’t need something to do for the next 6 hours. It was not a chore to read. On the contrary I was a little sad when it was over. Not in the sense that I missed the characters, but in that I was enjoying the writing itself. Does that make sense? I think I like this Gruber fellow’s style. Might have to look into what else he’s written, Shakespeare or no. I suppose that ends up as something of a compliment, since I never would have known who he was if he hadn’t written a Shakespeare book.

Review : Sealed With A Kiss

March 11, 2008September 8, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

http://blog.shakespearegeek.com/2006/10/romeo-and-juliet-as-disney-cartoon.html

A long time ago, I stumbled across this animated movie, “Sealed With a Kiss”, which is supposed to be a kids’ version of Romeo and Juliet, only with seals. Well, I tripped over it this week and, true to my word, got it for my kids.

We started watching it last night. It starts well enough, and even better than I might have imagined. There’s a voiceover that paraphrases the “Two households” opening, and basically comes down to “Look, the white seals [Capulet] don’t like the brown seals [Montague], that’s just the way it is.” There is a lengthy battle scene at the beginning where no one gets hurt, and the prince comes in to break it up, just like the story.

I was quite pleased to see that two of the main characters will be Benvolio and Mercutio. And then….the first cardinal sin struck. Mercutio is…mindless. His character does nothing but spout random lines from Shakespeare. Not even from R&J! His quotes include “To be or not to be”, “Double double toil and trouble”, and a couple of others.

He solidifies his place on my sh*tlist in a scene where he and Benvolio are searching for Romeo and actually saying “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” while he’s looking. DAMNIT! Paraphrase all you want but do NOT TEACH MY KIDS INCORRECT SHAKESPEARE. You wonder why kids get into school and think that Shakespeare is hard? Stuff like this doesn’t help. I only have a couple of interpretations of how this could happen, and none are good:

The person who wrote it is an idiot who didn’t know any better. If that’s the case then you’re not allowed to do a Shakespeare movie.
The person who wrote it thinks my children are idiots who won’t know any better. They may not understand it, yet, but that’s no reason to feed them an incorrect answer.
The person who wrote it knew better but just didn’t care. Doesn’t say much for production values.

Anyway. The story continues true to form – they find lovesick Romeo, and convince him to go to the Capulets’ party in disguise, where he meets and falls in love with Juliet.

And then…the second sin strikes. I’m not sure if this is a bigger one or not. I have to put it in perspective. Remember The Prince? Well, in this story, the Prince is the bad guy. He’s sort of a prince, a Tybalt, and a Paris all rolled up into one. Juliet’s dad has decided that she will marry The Prince.

Normally I would say in language as strong as the above, DON’T MAKE STUFF UP! But I’m torn, because it does manage to prune down the cast of characters in a way that makes it more approachable to young kids. They get one bad guy to deal with. Granted, it’s still confusing — in their world of princesses, the prince is always the good guy. They keep telling me that Romeo is the real prince. I tried to explain to them that in the original story, there are two “princes”, Prince Tybalt and Prince Paris, and they said, “Three, Daddy – you forgot Prince Romeo.”

As for the rest of the movie – the sound, the graphics – it is all mediocre, at best. It’s the sort of thing you expect to find for $1.99 in a cardboard display case in the supermarket. Looks like a personal project that somebody did on their PC (which, if I remember the story, it is).

We are only about half done with it, so I have to reserve the rest of my review until the end (which, I checked before ever getting it, is a happy one). It is for my kids, after all, so my final judgment will be entirely based on whether or not they like it. The “wherefore” line bothers me, not them. If they decide at the end that they liked it, if they ask me questions, and most importantly, if it stays with them – if they’re talking about the characters weeks from now over dinner – then I’ll call it a success. That’s all I want, at this age. I want them to know the stories. There’s plenty of time later to fill in the details.

Shakespeare's Wife : A Review

January 31, 2008July 22, 2024 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

http://earmarks.org/archives/2008/01/31/178 But not by me. This is Germaine Greer’s book about Anne Hathaway, and quite frankly I have no interest in reading it. But the reviewer seemed to like it, and others among my readers may like it as well, so here you go. It’s not that I particularly dislike Greer, or Hathaway. It’s just that this looks like a typical biography. Namely, I expect it’ll go something like this: Everything you know about X is wrong. Here, let me show you with evidence that I found to support my case while ignoring all the evidence against it. If one person can write a book that says “26 was an incredibly old age for a woman to be married” and somebody else can write a book that says “26 was the average age for a woman to be married”, and both claim to have evidence, which should I believe? The answer, to me, is that they cancel each other out and I don’t pay attention to either.