Shakespeare

jenks

jenks

thread death
I have just recently finished reading Greenblatt's Will In The World and Shapiro's 1599, two very readable books on the social/historical contexts which created Shakespeare and it got me to thinking about how the dissensians view Shakespeare. After all the mood here is often anti-canonical and Shakespeare is surely the canonic incarnate.

So, is he rated?

If so, which plays/poems?
Which characters?
What lines?

What criticism would people recommend?

just the usual attempt to get some action going over here :D
 
D

dogger

Sweet Virginia
excellent idea for a thread jenks!

for me, shakespeare is probably the greatest writer in english...with joyce losing out only because of his relative lack of range. not everything shax wrote is great, but when he's on form (/lear/, /the tempest/, /as you like it/, /a midsummer night's dream/ (yes quite a few comedies there, tho not for their humour...), /hamlet/, /julius caesar/ etc etc) he's unsurpassed.

the immediately off-putting thing about shax, and the reason i didn't like him until i was forced to spend a whole term at university studying nothing else (by the end of which i was of course completely hooked), is precisely that he /is/ so canonical. it's not easy to appreciate someone so (very very nearly) universally appreciated. and of course, it's impossible to come to him fresh, with no prejudices, and it's impossible to read the famous lines without having their beauty (and, very often, their true sense) spoiled for you by having seen them first on a tea towel or a mug. but that's not an argument against shax's writing, which really is as good as it is said to be....i think when you really understand just /how/ good he is, it kind of makes you not want to read anything else, because he almost does it all...i believe in classical music a lot of people get a similar feeling with bach....

i'm curious to know what /1599/ is like - any cop?
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
I just co-directed a version of The Tempest, and halfway through I have to echo the above statement...I was sitting there one day - and, y'know, I like The Tempest, I was doing it - and I was thinking 'God this fucking shit is boring. What a fucking boring old fucking cunt'. You're really not meant to do that. Lol. But some of his lines really do just kill it.
A one line pitch for Shakespeare?
Bad rapper, killer punchlines.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
I started reading the Greenblatt due to an enforced layoff from work and it just really made me want to go back and read Shakespeare for the fun of it. I spend a great deal of my time teaching him but haven't really read one of his plays for years without the classroom in mind.

The Shapiro is good if you know your texts quite well. He makes a big claim for the political machinations of Elizabeth and Essex (in particular the attempt to quell the Tyrone uprising in Ireland), the fear of another Armada, the building of the Globe and the presence of gifted boys to play female roles. He also reminds the reader that Shakespeare knocked out Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and the first draft of Hamlet in 1599.

I have been spending my mornings in the garden reading a play a day - Tempest, Coriolanus, Much Ado, Julius, As You Like It, Richard III - and what i notice is that, yeah mrsloane, there are moments lost due to fuzziness of lines, lost jokes but for the most part he still really works, is really compulsively readable.

and, swears, i have heard the really boring line from enough kids in my time but these same kids often also are to be found gripped by Macbeth saying
"I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

an image any gangster rapper could connect with (to use sloane's analogy).
 
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dogger

Sweet Virginia
jenks said:
I started reading the Greenblatt due to an enforced layoff from work and it just really made me want to go back and read Shakespeare for the fun of it. I spend a great deal of my time teaching him but haven't really read one of his plays for years without the classroom in mind.

The Shapiro is good if you know your texts quite well. He makes a big claim for the political machinations of Elizabeth and Essex (in particular the attempt to quell the Tyrone uprising in Ireland), the fear of another Armada, the building of the Globe and the presence of gifted boys to play female roles. He also reminds the reader that Shakespeare knocked out Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and the first draft of Hamlet in 1599.

not a bad year, eh? all of those factors you mentioned are of course significant in different ways...tho i would certainly refute the overly political/contextual reading of /JC/ that is often made (i.e. that it is a - necessarily - veiled metaphor for contemp. events). that really falls down when you start to work it through....

re: sloane, swears and the "boringness"/inaccessibility of shax: he's only boring when you don't understand either the language or the theatrical context he was writing in. i mean, obv it requires more work than a contemp playwright, and in that sense he is inaccessible. and no, the jokes really are not funny any more (with the possible exception of the artisans' very amateur performance of Pyrrhmus and Thisbe (SIC!) in /AMSND/ - one of the few scenes i've noticed consistently makes modern audiences laugh (and there was an interesting article about this in The Shakespeare Survey a few years back)) BUT anything worth reading demands working at; it's just a matter of degrees....
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jenks

jenks

thread death
Rambler said:
Sure, he writes pretty, but Marlowe was the better dramatist.

;)
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Really, why? Certainly an innovator but better? Dr. Faustus creaks like an old boat at times and whilst I like Tamburlane, it's not Lear.

No doubt Shakespeare owes much to Marlowe and Kit was probably his only real rival but by the time of 'the great reckoning in a little room' Shakespeare had surely surpassed him.

then again, i've not read all of Marlowe and would like to be pointed in the direction of evidence of his greatness. He did, of course, write the great Passionate Shepherd with one of the best openings of any poem:

'Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove'
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
OK, I admit some of this is provocation coming to me second-hand, but in my limited experience you can't really read Marlowe, it's just not very good on the page. But on stage, the theatre of it blows pretty much anyone (except poss Webster ;) ) away - at least, that's the wisdom I've received. The power of Tamburlaine isn't coming from the lines (although there are some corkers), but from Marlowe's talents as a dramatist. I mean, riding round in a chariot drawn by the kings you have conquered is pretty powerful theatre... Although I admit to a fondness for a sledgehammer approach to most things.

Disclaimer: this opinion was largely formed on the basis of seeing the RSC's outstanding Tamburlaine last year, and following it in the same week with Kevin Spacey's horribly turgid Richard II; the contrast couldn't have been greater.
 
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rewch

rewch

Well-known member
from a rather different & commercial perspective i saw the first folio in a contemporary binding sell at sotheby's the other day for £2,500,000 hammer... there aren't any other writers who can achieve that kind of auction price... guttenberg maybe... certainly not marlowe...
 
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dogger

Sweet Virginia
Rambler said:
OK, I admit some of this is provocation coming to me second-hand, but in my limited experience you can't really read Marlowe, it's just not very good on the page. But on stage, the theatre of it blows pretty much anyone (except poss Webster ;) ) away - at least, that's the wisdom I've received. The power of Tamburlaine isn't coming from the lines (although there are some corkers), but from Marlowe's talents as a dramatist. I mean, riding round in a chariot drawn by the kings you have conquered is pretty powerful theatre... Although I admit to a fondness for a sledgehammer approach to most things.
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actually, reading marlowe's plays as texts is highly rewarding, and there is a growing appreciation of them as such, as part of a wider change of approach to elizabethan drama.

in tamburlaine, marlowe's use of 'the mighty line' is just as important as his use of striking, overblown stage images (e.g. the chariot being drawn by the defeated kings) - the physical might of tamburlaine is mirrored by the might of his rhetoric.

there are more interesting linguistic games being played in faustus and to an extent in the jew of malta. take a look at the prologue to [/I]faustus, compare the subtle differences between the a and b texts (famously, there is a crucial difference of emphasis re: calvinism between the two versions) and you'll quickly realise that the text is so dense as to resist a full understanding when heard performed, no matter how talented the actor.

the most interesting lines are:

Till, swollen with the cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did rise above his reach,
And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted more with learning's golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;

...essays can (and have been) written on the possible variations of punctuation here, and the effect this has on the text's meaning....none of which can be appreciated in the theatre.

there's no doubt that shax is the better playwrite tho, although marlowe (with all that homosexuality and his violent and early death) is definitely the hipster's choice....
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
dogger said:
the immediately off-putting thing about shax, and the reason i didn't like him until i was forced to spend a whole term at university studying nothing else (by the end of which i was of course completely hooked), is precisely that he /is/ so canonical. it's not easy to appreciate someone so (very very nearly) universally appreciated.
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It's a remarkable phenomenon - is there anyone else, in any field, who is so universally admired?

dogger said:
i think when you really understand just /how/ good he is, it kind of makes you not want to read anything else, because he almost does it all...i believe in classical music a lot of people get a similar feeling with bach....
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I think there is a certain amount of that feeling surrounding Bach. Certainly there is enough in his music for more than a lifetime of admiration, but I think the lack of range criticism you invoke against Joyce applies also to Bach. He had range, for sure, but he never touched comedy, and even in his lightest works what is most seductive about them is their seriousness and profundity. If range is a criterion, Shakespeare's only musical rival is Mozart, who mastered everything he touched. And I think also with Mozart there is that same suspicion because everybody else loves it (I have it myself, and each new bit of Mozart I fall in love with feels like a confession). So Bach tends to pull in the musical connoisseurs a little more - for whom humour is often a sign of weakness anyway - because he appears slightly darker, edgier, more serious, more intellectual.

I think a lifetime of just Bach - whilst pretty good - would be more one-dimensional than a lifetime of Shakespeare.
 
O

owen

Well-known member
excellent thread, this...

Rambler said:
It's a remarkable phenomenon - is there anyone else, in any field, who is so universally admired?
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welles? (if just for kane) the beatles? (Ignoring maxwell's silver hammer, etc) apart from that am stumped.

as an aside, as have a phobia of theatres, what shakespeare on film do people rate? as there is that horrible problem derived from olivier of yelling everything...what is there that avoids this (NOT counting baz lurhmann) or is it a form that you have to be in the same room as the protagonists to properly 'get'?
 
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dogger

Sweet Virginia
Rambler said:
It's a remarkable phenomenon - is there anyone else, in any field, who is so universally admired?



I think there is a certain amount of that feeling surrounding Bach. Certainly there is enough in his music for more than a lifetime of admiration, but I think the lack of range criticism you invoke against Joyce applies also to Bach. He had range, for sure, but he never touched comedy, and even in his lightest works what is most seductive about them is their seriousness and profundity. If range is a criterion, Shakespeare's only musical rival is Mozart, who mastered everything he touched. And I think also with Mozart there is that same suspicion because everybody else loves it (I have it myself, and each new bit of Mozart I fall in love with feels like a confession). So Bach tends to pull in the musical connoisseurs a little more - for whom humour is often a sign of weakness anyway - because he appears slightly darker, edgier, more serious, more intellectual.

I think a lifetime of just Bach - whilst pretty good - would be more one-dimensional than a lifetime of Shakespeare.
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interesting - i take your point re: greater diveristy of mozart over bach.

as to whether shax is universally admired...i would say yes, with the caveat that there have been a very few (unsuccesful) attempts to fundamentally criticise The Master. (sorry, the names of the critics in question elude me....) Although these were unsuccesful, in so far as they were refuted, it's still vital that such radical questions are asked; otherwise critism becomes hair-splitting, and moribund.....
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Rambler said:
It's a remarkable phenomenon - is there anyone else, in any field, who is so universally admired?
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I was up at the National Gallery yesterday and saw the Rembrandts and thought maybe he falls into the universally admired category - i'd happily live in those three rooms!!!


Owen asked: what shakespeare on film do people rate?

I haven't seen many that match the theatrical - Polanski's Macbeth (yeah, complete with Keith Chegwin); things like Ran - a japanese retelling of Lear but i am still trying to track down a copy of Welles' Chimes At Midnight - his mashing of both Henry IVs.

Still interested in what plays people actually like.

btw bought a selection of Marlowe to test out Rambler's assertion above
 
O

owen

Well-known member
jenks said:
but i am still trying to track down a copy of Welles' Chimes At Midnight - his mashing of both Henry IVs.

Still interested in what plays people actually like.
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you'll be lucky- whoever owns the print is so stingy that the bfi couldn't use it for their welles season a few years ago...hopefully it'll turn up on the internet eventually...

in answer to your question...well- i like Lear a hell of a lot, despite it being an ungainly, cumbersome mess- the political complexity, the tendency to outrageous bombast, the general mockery of the pompous and powerful all very enjoyable
also Hamlet obviously, it being the original troubled yoof play and a philosophical treatise at once (also the madness or is it tendency in both plays is compellingly unclear, esp in latter with an inititally feigned psychosis becoming increasingly convincing) both are also good for declaiming

he did have a terrible pacing problem though, no?
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Act IV is often a problem for me - in a theatre it is usually post-interval, time for a surreptitious look of the watch (add 2hours and that will be the earliest you'll be at home if you live in the sticks).

Also it's the bit before all the big stuff happens - deaths etc. (I've just finished Richard III and if ever a play needed an edit!_ {Strangely it's one of the three set texts for 14 yr olds in this country, the other two being The Tempest and Much Ado}

Saying that i think plays like Macbeth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It are so fantastically paced. Plays so lean and compact that there is no Act IV droop.

I've always found Hamlet badly baggy but loved Lear for the same excess - maybe I'm just more predisposed to the plight of a mad old git as opposed to a mad young whippersnapper.

For the record I love The Winter's Tale because I think it gives us another Shakespeare - a genuinely inventive dramatist prepared to go out on a limb and try his hand at forging forward with a new genre.
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
Julius Caesar all the way... there aren't really any saggy clock watching bits, the way it lifts off into almost a different play in the last third... fantastic... great film as well, btw... and plenty of gore... The actual poetry of the thing escapes me, (omens lots of omens and augeries I seem to recall)...
 
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