Best on a bigger screen. Owes a lot to the 1948 Olivier version but (to me) it's more interesting stylistically.
Does anyone have opinions here of the Kenneth Brannagh vehicle "All is True"? There seem to be a good amount of Shakespeare scholars here and I'm interested in other perspectives of this time in his life. I enjoyed it as a movie though the beginning was dreary. I'm not sure how accurate it is.
I felt it was a Branagh vanity project. But check out this group discussion on the film (just discovered it, myself):
Thanks for the link. I will definitely check it out. I agree about it being a vanity project but it's a good one. I especially liked Dame Judy Dench's performance against him. She brought some fire to his dourness. I liked the film but I felt he was struggling to act through the makeup.
Absolutely. Dench is the brightest spot. Instead of the lugubrious paternity guilt theme they might have emphasized the "get-even" motivation with the disgraced father of Shakespeare. After all, it was a fact that some of the same Statford people who held Will's father in debt later borrowed from the successful son. People forget that Will Shakespeare was a money lender, lobbying for a coat of arms as well as a playwright. He had every intention of returning to Statford on Avon as a man of clout. The filmmakers chose the guilt-ridden father of the dead Hamnet route. But if you take away anything the revenge angle makes the Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens that more fascinating to consider!
I enjoyed this film when it came out - I'm a Pacino fan and I liked his scenes in Looking for Shakespeare. Not every actor I admire does Shakespeare well but he does. Andrew Scott (Moriarty in the current Sherlock series) does a fantastic rendering of the ugliness and outrage of the character in an audio play version at the podcast The Shakespeare Sessions. I might have shared this before but I thought it bore repeating for anyone interested in the play.
That's a good one, strong Isabella! The Globe Theater's M4M is very lively, fabulous Lucio and Angelo:
Here's a terrific focus on the pivotal IV, ii scene, the sexual harassment/ quid pro quo, with David Tennant as Angelo: I'm a life-long Shakespeare freak, host readings at my house, have read all the plays and sonnets, currently reading Venus and Adonis, the best-selling long poem that made his reputation, written while the theaters were closed because of the plague. My group is about to do our first Zoom reading, of our postponed Measure For Measure. I think my notes and those of the group are a little too geeky for this board, but if you're interested one of our members hosts the web's largest Shakespeare site, and they're available there. These are my notes of Measure for Measure: PlayShakespeare.com Forum: Measure For Measure, first notes (1/1)
Yea, M4M is a toughie, like Winter's Tale. It doesn't go down easy. It's a play that doesn't ring with the metoo movement
Isn't it one of the oldest storylines (son makes good getting even with enemies of failed/disgraced father) in the world?
Oh no, it's a play very much of the me-too movement. It's clearly an anti-sexual harassment play. Two Gents is the one that gets the feminists, with its nonchalant rape.
"If it's the last thing I do!" The point is one of The Bard's lifelong motivations is the rectification of his disgraced namesake.
There is still nothing to beat a great live production of Shakespeare: The best version of "Hamlet" I have ever seen was the Robert Lepage directed one-man adaptation he called "Elsinore." The best "Merchant" was a bilingual version I saw in Madrid a few months ago with the great Greg Hicks of the RSC playing Shylock's lines in English with a young, and superb Spanish cast. I thought McKellen's last go at "Lear" was dreadful: he was far too campy in the lead role, and the production was wretchedly misconceived on so many levels; I only gave a good review to the Fool. Having said that, I love McKellen and want to see the other production he did a few years before. "Macbeth" has been well served by onscreen versions over the years.
Absolutely! The more you know about the play, the richer your experience will be, but there's no question that live theater is where you really experience Shakespeare. Greatest performance of a play I've ever seen was As You Like It, with Pippa Nixon as Rosalind in Stratford
Here's a heavily trimmed version of my e-mail to my Shakespeare group about the long poem Venus and Adonis. The full geeky version is here: PlayShakespeare.com Forum: VENUS AND ADONIS -- worth more respect than it gets (1/1) I was going to use our every-day-is-Sunday plague-time to revisit the Sonnets, but my detour into the early poems is proving fruitful for me. I'm using the Oxford edition of the complete poems, and its editor, Colin Burrow, is a passionate advocate for the view that "the poems are foundational to his oeuvre." Shakespeare's early long poems are now considered peripheral to his canon. That style of writing has long since gone out of fashion while the theatrical community continues to infuse new life and ideas into the performances of the plays, keeping them fresh for contemporary audiences. Venus and Adonis was likely left out of the first Folio because of its popularity, because it was still in print and making money under rights held by a rival publisher. It was written and published in 1593, while the theaters were closed because of the plague, and the poem made Shakespeare famous. It was reprinted sixteen times before 1640 (Hamlet was reprinted five times in that period). And yet by the early 1700s it had been marginalized and was largely ignored by the literary community, a situation that continues to this day. The poem is a relatively easy read, which I'm sure was one of the reasons for its initial popularity. It is essentially one scene, with Venus hitting on Adonis and Adonis telling her he would rather go hunting. Late in the poem he rides off, and (offstage) is gored to death by a boar. The language is beautiful, the only surprise there being that none of the phrases from the poem are in common circulation. The contemporary purchasers of Venus and Adonis would most likely have called it a "pamphlet" (rather than an epic or Ovidian poem), or would have referred to the "honey-tongued Shakespeare." The backstory to Venus and Adonis is among the most bizarre in Roman mythology. . . . As Burrow writes, "From that incestuous union between the grandchild and great-grandchild of a statue, Adonis is born, and he enters the world by ripping through the bark of the tree into which his mother has been transformed. Venus, the goddess of love whose metamorphosis of Pygmalion's statue began the whole dynasty, then falls in love with Adonis, and, in Ovid's version, wins him." Here's one of the more striking seductive passages from the Goddess of Love: ' . . . I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. Within this limit is relief enough, Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, To shelter thee from tempest and from rain Then be my deer, since I am such a park; No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.' Adonis pleads that he is not ready, and forcing him into love before his time would hurt him: 'The colt that's back'd and burden'd being young Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong. . .' . . . Before I know myself, seek not to know me.' Eventually she comes to terms with his death: "'Wonder of time,'" quoth she, "'This is my spite, That thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'" Too many beautiful lines to be as badly ignored as it is! Looks like 15 for our Zoom reading of M4M next Wednesday! Steve
Just a brief note on the authorship question: when you boil them all down, the argument of anti-Stratfordians is essentially, "How could this common, country boy have written all these great plays and poems?" A legitimate question, but the wrong question. The question is, "How could anyone have written all these great plays and poems?"
I think your question is actually legitimate, yet not the first, more famous one: which tends to derive, ultimately, from English class-based prejudice. Of course, there is also the phenomenon that adulation of Shakespeare over the past couple of centuries disguises the fact that he is not utterly unique in his greatness as a dramatist or writer. It's a bit like how fame has led people to think, for instance, that Einstein or Stephen Hawking were uniquely special among physicists. I do not deny the greatness of Shakespeare - I adore him more and more as each re-reading and performance is experienced by me - yet Sophocles, Robert Browning, Homer, Dante, Toni Morrison, Charlotte Bronte, John Milton, Euripides, Virgil, Miguel de Cervantes,John Keats, Joseph Conrad, Dostoevsky, Aeschylus, Mary Shelley strike me as his peers (along with others).
