Month: April 2016

My kids were in a Shakespeare mood at dinner last night (yay!) and wanted to discuss the “best” of the plays.  But, I quickly learned, their definition of that word was different than mine when I said, “Favorite? The Tempest.  Best? King Lear.”  My oldest looked at me and asked, “Why is it different?”

I have very specific and personal reasons why I consider The Tempest my favorite of the plays.  It is the first one that I explained to my children, thus introducing them to Shakespeare and (hopefully) changing their lives because of it.  If that play did not exist, everything would be different.

But I acknowledge that this doesn’t make it the best.  I consider King Lear to be the best, because my criteria lies primarily in how much and how well the play “holds a mirror up to nature” and reflects what it means to be human.  When I stop to think about it I feel like I waited half my life to understand King Lear, and only now do I feel like I’ve reached the base of the mountain and that I could spend the rest of my life still trying to understand it.  I say that with awe, not frustration. My son (my youngest) asked me to explain it to him, and I told him that I would not.  I told him that it is a story so sad that when he was younger and I explained it to him, that not only did he cry for the characters, but the strength of his emotional reaction made me cry while telling it.  Sitting in a nice restaurant is not the time for a replay of that scene.  (But astute readers can go searching in the blog history, because I did write about it!)

Neither being my favorite nor what I consider the best necessarily correlates with the most well known or most often produced play.  I think that Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet has to take that honor.  Both have their iconic scene (the balcony, or the skull), where whenever you see it, you immediately think Shakespeare.  Both have their iconic line (Wherefore art thou, Romeo? / To be or not to be) although I think Hamlet gets the edge there.  Can any other play rank on that criteria? I think maybe Macbeth might be a distant third for the witches around a cauldron, but while many people recognize “Double double toil and trouble,” it tends to make you think halloween, rather than Shakespeare.

How about you?  What do you think is the “best” play (whatever your personal criteria might be)? The most popular?  Your favorite?  Do they overlap? I noticed that mine don’t. 🙂

This is a surprise!  “Opening Night”, which looks to be opening in early May (opposite Captain America?  It’s doomed…) tells a story we’ve heard before : drama teacher with a heart of gold has to deal with teachers who don’t understand him and administration who keeps cutting his budget, and the only way to save everybody’s eternal souls is to put on a killer Shakespeare production. Or some variation thereof.  Check it out:

For a change of pace, this one apparently also includes Shakespeare.  That’s different.

I don’t recognize any of the cast, except for Anthony “RENT” Rapp. I wonder if he’ll sing?

I can’t tell from the trailer if this is going to be Get Over It or Noises Off or Hamlet 2, but regardless I’ll almost certainly end up figuring out a way to see it.  I don’t expect it to get a wide cinema release, but maybe it’ll be streaming?

And I mean that literally. My daughter is about to start studying the play in school (she’s been doing sonnets and Shakespeare bio for the last week or two).  I’ve tried to sit down with her and look at the original text.  It’s difficult.

I’m not talking about the prologue.  I think that’s pretty self explanatory.  I mean this part:

SAMPSON 

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.

GREGORY 

No, for then we should be colliers.

SAMPSON 

I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

GREGORY 

Ay, while you live, draw your neck out o’ the collar.

SAMPSON 

I strike quickly, being moved.

GREGORY 

But thou art not quickly moved to strike.

Somebody please explain to me how you open a play with the “carry coals” / “colliers” wordplay and make it interesting and entertaining to a bunch of 13yr olds, instead it being about as interesting as Shay’s Rebellion, the French and Indian War or any other number of “Trust me, you have to learn this because I said so” lessons they’re so used to?

Shortly we can get into it a bit and have fun with the “I do bite my thumb at you” scene, and the action picks up.  I’m specifically asking about the above bit.  Without simply just skipping it, or otherwise giving it ye olde “modern translation”, how do you explain why it’s there?

Well, this is amusing.  I  just googled “collier carry coals” because I wanted to get some idea of the working definition fresh in memory — and my own post is the first thing that came up!  I honestly had forgotten about that post (written in 2008!) but it’s nice to see that I’m consistent.  When explaining it to my daughter off the top of my head, I explained it now like I was apparently doing back then – this is Elizabethan “I don’t take crap from anybody” bragging to get the play started, with associated puns and wordplay to make banter out of it.

I tried to show my daughter the Zeffirelli version of the play, but it actually doesn’t start on the text. So then we went with the Luhrman version, which is closer to the text, but basically starts at “I will bite my thumb.”

So I’m curious how we’re dealing with this in the real world.  Teachers, you out there? Do we skip it?
(I’m reminded of the schoolteacher friend of mine who once told me she skips Queen Mab, but that’s a whole different sacrilege…)

Happened to hear something on NPR last night that is probably one of those, “Oh sure, everybody knows that” things, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually discussed it here on the blog.

Desdemona, early in the play, talking about a daughter’s obligation to her father:

DESDEMONA 

My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

You know what I’m going to put it up against, right?  Cordelia, early in the play, talking about a daughter’s obligation to her father:

CORDELIA 

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

I’d never noticed how nearly identical those two speeches are.  (As the NPR host noted, Othello productions are often so focused on the Iago/Othello relationship that Desdemona comes across as a “nothing” character, and I think I’ve typically felt the same way.  And only now that I write it do I realize the irony in putting a “nothing” character up against Cordelia :))

I actually think that Desdemona scores a stronger point with “I’m only doing the exact same thing that Mom did when she married you.”

Maggie Smith as Desdemona to Sir Laurence Olivier’s Othello

Have there been other echoes of this passage in his other, even earlier works? There’s nobody really to give that speech in Macbeth or Hamlet, and I think it speaks volumes that Juliet is not in a position to deliver such a speech in her play.  What about the comedies? Neither Beatrice, Rosalind or Viola have a father figure to rebel against. I suppose Hermia might have had a shot at it, but she has to deal directly with Theseus, which isn’t really a fair comparison.

Have I  missed anybody?