scene individable, or POLL unlimited: works of william shakespeare

Hamlet (1602)
Measure for Measure (1603)
Othello (1603)
King Lear (1605)
All's Well That Ends Well (1605)
Macbeth (1606)
Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

look fuck off

Richard II (1595)
Romeo and Juliet (1595)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

v lyrical stretch here. trying new things

Henry VI, Part 1 (1592)
The Taming of the Shrew (1592)
Titus Andronicus (1592)

hilariously hacky year: a prequel, a meanspirited sex comedy, and gorn

then coming off that: richard iii. about how it plays imo.

if henry iv were one play i might vote for it over whichever of that absolutely absurd 1602-06 sequence of tragedies i end up at. as it is, dark horses include midsummer's (presages hamlet's trippiness), julius caesar (protip for your modern production: less vulgar winking about trump, more theater of cruelty-- cinna the poet should make them carry out the sobbing toddlers they shouldn't have brought), okay 2 henry iv still (i like not such grinning honour as sir walter hath) and uh lol romeo and juliet actually (sexy potboiler for teenagers lowkey about death and time). i have v 8th-grade taste in shakespeare. if you are more sophisticated, consider richard ii or something.

King Lear, every day of the week

Twelfth Night in the comedy subdivision

yeah voted lear w/o much debate

hamlet-othello-lear is an amazing crescendo and poss even a dialectic (psychedelic deconstruction of human experience ---> okay again, BUT EVIL ---> BOTH AT ONCE??? idk) but sometimes i think (fear?) the only point to any of it is to pass thru it so as to report from the nihilistic horizon of macbeth. to return would be as tedious as to go o'er.

(but you get to return anyway, to tony+cleo the hangover movie: lush, languorous, camp, full of sex talk and slapstick, in the end wholly commandeered by as alive an egomaniac as hamlet or iago and carried away into death to leave us to live with bureaucracy. love's like an astronaut: it comes back but it's never the same)

(and antony, enthroned in the marketplace, did sit alone, whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy, had gone to gaze on cleopatra too, and made a gap in nature)

A & C is generally underrated, but not quite at the top o' the heap. Lear nips in ahead, as does Hamlet. Midsummer Night's Dream in the comedy subdivision. Richard II among the English history plays.

this reminds me i need to watch the 1935 version of Midsummer Night's Dream. i've only really read Macbeth and R&O and that was back in high school. at any rate i still need to read most of these.

fwiw i actually spent last in a wikipedia hole reading about one of the texts that influenced King Lear, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-declaration-of-egregious-popish-impostures-by-samuel-harsnett-1603

this lead me to read about what "popish" mean, leading me to read about the Popish Conspiracy, etc., etc., on and on and suddenly it's 2am lol

Lear or Tempest, probably the latter cos everybody loves Lear

will maintain for the rest of my life that Hamlet is a deliberate spoof on revenge tragedies

Macbeth for me I'm a simple man of simple terrors

i have to think on it but i think macbeth maybe for me too

My Shakespeare prof at college made a really good observation (he may have been quoting someone else) that had Shakespeare's plays had not been easy for him to write they would have been impossible. The rate he cranked them out, the difficulty of revision, the consistency and quality, writing with quill, by candlelight ...

I read Titus Andronicus and watched the Anthony Hopkins film recently and actually loved it. Something intense about the sheer hate and brutality. Answer is probably Hamlet rn.

Torn between, oh, 11 or 12 of these.

Lear is the best but also the hardest to go back to, especially as I and mine get older

for repeat entertainment value, Macbeth (murder, horror, tight running time) just edges Hamlet (murder, horror, smartmouth emo lead, but tl;dr)

Is this a dragger etc

Tempest has the best words I don't know what else matters

I'm pretty sick of Hamlet atm. Seen too many in the last few years.

Hamlet 2 was pretty dope tho

I didn’t care for Polonius: A Hamlet Story

Voted for Lear. Macbeth and Tempest, though!

King Lear (Peter Brook, 1971)

I also liked Joss Whedon's film of Much Ado About Nothing as well. Those are my two fave Shakeys on film.

Throne of Blood might be my fav Macbeth

Always feeling it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNhGhVvUcu8

Macbeth.

I mean..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Y7xxnMiXg

for repeat entertainment value, Macbeth (murder, horror, tight running time) just edges Hamlet (murder, horror, smartmouth emo lead, but tl;dr)

For repeat entertainment value, little beats Richard III. For depth and wisdom, maybe Lear, or in some ways, maybe The Tempest, which is his most self aware and a fine sendoff.

Someone should poll all the different radical "Richard III in space" or whatever adaptations of Shakespeare.

The Tempest is easily the strangest of his great works. It works fantastically as an insubstantial pageant, but the allegorical elements are insufficiently meshed together to withstand scrutiny, which weakens it.

I've heard it described as sort of a Shakespeare's greatest hits: magic and mix-ups, romantic entanglements, father and daughter stuff ... missing the history, I guess. And Prospero's final monologue is like the Bard taking a bow.

t/s reading vs watching/listening

read a lot of the plays through school / undergrad but i'm not sure i really began to love Shakespeare (or even that i necessarily "got it" to any great extent) until i found torrents with the complete sets of BBC tv performances and Arkangel audio versions (god bless these latter-day Robin Hoods, whoever they are). the BBC performances are a particular treat cause they're full of performers who were all over Radio 4 in the 70s and 80s so you'll be sitting there watching e.g. Julius Caesar and you'll suddenly realise that the bloke playing Cassius was also the voice of Legolas in the Brian Sibley radio adaptation of LOTR and it's like unexpectedly meeting an old and cherished friend and i just love it

the answer to the poll is probably Lear but i'm going to throw a vote to Julius Caesar because it's in my head now and i get quite sentimental when i think of Brutus

Got my bedtime reading for the next couple of months sorted then!

Every time I reread Anthony and Cleopatra I'm gobsmacked by the number of speaking roles -- is it his largest cast of characters? I mean, fuckin' Taurus gets a line.

I bet one of the biggest casts is one of the Henry plays.

I know most words is Hamlet (the character) by some fair amount.

i have only been exposed to half the work (if that), so i would probably yield a very predictable top 5.

also best not to mention how much i like Taming of the Shrew

post completely in character: i like hamlet the best

Ophelia is such a lovely name, it's a shame it's tough to name someone after her. Same with Desdemona, to a slightly lesser extent.

trying to imagine all the theatre criticks paying heed to his each new play like idk kendrick lamar albums or something nowadays

like, he drops a midsummer night's dream and everyone looks at each other - the 'richard iii guy' is legit, fucking legit

Anthony & Cleopatra is the one that I've read the most and feel like I know the best. But I love The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream.

I've only seen Hamlet staged twice, well over 25 years ago, but guess who played the lead both times?

http://www.lortel.org/Archives/Production/1814

http://www.lortel.org/Archives/Production/1253

ha!

Not to mention pre-Niles Crane as Laertes in the first one.

I've never seen a live Lear, but James Earl Jones as Othello is the greatest Shakespeare performance I've seen (1982, with Christopher Plummer as Iago).

caught antony sher as iago as a schoolboy - really quite something

Sher is bringing his Lear to New York in the spring.

Cymbeline

Iago as schoolboy sounds interesting

I bought the newest Oxford edition like a year ago, seems pretty rad (lots of additional online content) except that there's two additional weighty volumes of commentary I didn't buy and now I feel like I'm missing out on something (or will be when I start digging in).

tbc that's the 2005 second ed. yeah ?

It's the New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition (2018).

I have/had a copy of the Riverside Shakespeare (edited by my old Shakesbeard prof) which was solid but which has apparently evaporated into mist or something since my undergrad days.

I've been watching this series of John Barton masterclasses. There's something kinda fusty about them (like Barton's cardigans) but I've found them captivating tbh. For all his obvious learning, Barton keeps things relatively simple. And what a line-up of actors: David Suchet, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-MPmoQ_s18

yeah i luv these too. lol in that one @ suchet's "naturalistic" salerio.

This looks cool, thanks for the hint.

directing ilx's second-favorite shakespeare play this summer. had previously always been nonplussed by its inert single-agent surface but as usual preproduction immersion has given me more than enough to get obsessed with. the drama is there. ("mine would, sir. were i human.") outrageously difficult to edit tho: so gnarled, impacted, dense; so intricately enjambed. i cut romeo & juliet down by a third last year and it was like disassembling lego in comparison.

There’s a strange lack of drama to Timon of Athens

I've been fascinated by it since I saw the BBC version as a kid. Everything said upthread is true; Timon himself is too shallow to be tragic, and once he throws his revenge party, he sits in his cave until the play ends, like he's looking forward to Beckett.

I've tried to imagine what it might be like to play Lear every night for weeks on end and have concluded that it would kill a superhuman to give it its full due that often. Yikes!

I've been watching this series of John Barton masterclasses.

Obviously a lot of talent there, but Ian McKellen easily outshines the rest. Even reading snippets he always presents an integrated performance that incorporates facial expression and gesture with an apt tone, pace and emphasis. Damn, he's an actor down to his very bones.

directing ilx's second-favorite shakespeare play this summer.

still not my second-favorite but wouldn't have wanted the summer without it

https://i.imgur.com/BQChwW7.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/tEN5rak.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/uNbgw2y.jpg

(i played the bosun.)

been reading henry vi. the scope! the violence!

I find the Tempest both unbearably moving and irritating (language former, intrigue/mistaken identity latter)! This looks like a good production. I'm going to ask a banal but genuine question: what's directing a Shakespearean play like?

I've recently read Antony Sher's book about playing Richard and Harriet Walter's about playing Lady Macbeth and now want to read as many actors' accounts as I possibly can. Anyone got any recommendations? (I'd love to have a go at a Shakespearean acting class but can't help but feel that ship has sailed.)

i have a book called "shakespeare on stage" of julian curry interviews w (mostly) rsc types about specific roles-- likely glossier than what yr looking for, also hit and miss in terms of actor/role pairings. (don't even dislike him so feel bad for how funny the phrase "jude law on hamlet" reads to me.) more or less recommend tho. anyway acting in shakespeare is always good for you imo!

fine with mistaken identity stuff in tempest as it's just ariel fucking w stefano & trinculo and their gullibility is proportionate to ariel's superpowers (+ stef/trinc's drunken and traumatized state)-- plus the specific phrase "thou liest", as a kind of spell that reveals+widens the chasm of atomized despair underneath these two frightened castaways' surface camaraderie/bravado, is a deep choice-- but i did cut an iteration or two yeah lol.

i came around to loving the play of course and even think its Themes are Urgent And Contemporary but it still seems to me an extremely difficult one with more exposition than plot dominated by an unusually unpleasant protagonist speaking some of shakes' densest+freest verse so i'm surprised it's such a crowd fave-- tho it is def a trip so maybe that's why.

what's directing a Shakespearean play like?

i have only directed shakes actually so i don't rly know. i set aside a few weeks at the start for text work-- just sitting in a circle reading+talking-- normal for professional productions but fairly prolonged for mid-sized-town community theater-- think this paid off as partway thru production i felt a distinct shift where after having started out doing a lot of detailed discussion (caliban week 2: "this is like an english class"-- main difference being it's an english class where you actually settle on the answers to questions) i stopped having to do much except approve/adjust things people were trying. in the end all my fave business was cast-developed but early on i spent a lot of time talking about who they were.

technically things were a little harder lol-- after sticking v cautiously to a detailed+modest plan directing romeo+juliet last year i got cocky and decided to be more "exploratory" w this and it predictably turned into apocalypse tempest. ariel's costume alone a months-long series of spectacular battery-powered dead ends that ended up in plain minimalism. producer on-and-off furious with me. i got covid and had to direct over zoom for two weeks. everyone in a good mood now tho.

work at a theater so early on i herded the cast+crew into private latenite big-screenings of forbidden planet (sure) and jurassic park (magic island, storm, control-freak wizard who discovers source of supernatural power locked inside tree + must renounce it, artist-figure's speech at end simultaneously apologetic and defensive). the former influenced our music (original compositions for droning keyboard) and the latter our ambient jungle noises (maybe excessive). ferdinand and miranda started irl dating and he calls her "alta". rip morbs.

we ran for three weeks on our colossal temporary parking-lot stage-- if it's raining or you're distancing you park in front of it and tune into the show via radio-- then packed up the set and drove it ~50mi up the coast to plonk it down (no longer elevated) in a football field about as big as the town it's in. (no ambient jungle noises necessary here.) had been dreading this final roadshow weekend because every parks dept official i talked to about it, except the one whose idea it was, looked at me like it was the dumbest and vainest project they'd ever heard of, and i feared audiences of actual zero. but we forgot that there was nothing else going on for dozens of miles in every direction, because our three nights there went from 50 to 65 to 90 people sitting on bleachers getting high and watching the tempest, surrounded by pitch and cloudless black, while we city slickers staggered around backstage gawping at the stars. after having to give multiple performances, back in town, across the street from an active construction site full of beeping backhoes and crashing steel (at like 8pm????), to audiences sitting silently inside rows of SUVs, in a plague-ravaged and dying civilization, in the rain, "site B" turned out a utopian coda. we looked like we'd landed in a cheap spaceship:

https://i.imgur.com/7vzf8kN.jpg

just amateur stuff obv, but healthy.

henry 6 report: parts 3 and (especially) 2 full of good stuff if structurally a lot sloppier not just than the henriad but also than richard 3. part 1 struck me as pretty dumb, especially the part where a frenchwoman decides to lure talbot to her house; lures him to her house; says "aha! i have lured you to my house!"; he says "aha! my army is outside"; she is like damn you crafty english!! you are the best. nevertheless some semi-interesting unresolved ambiguity around its heroes+villains i guess-- also worth mentioning there are a lot of good female parts in the first history tetralogy, more than anywhere else outside the comedies: margaret, elizabeth, anne, joan of arc. (also tamora in titus, written amidst these and set in a sealed hobbesian hothouse world that seems v closely linked to the civil-war anxiety worked thru w increasing existential despair in the tetralogy.)

wavered on whether or not to include the "apocryphal" edward 3 in current survey but was glad i did. wondered if i'd be able to tell which passages are suspected of being shakespeare's-- but not only does the density and refractivity of metaphor tip you off in the first five lines of a scene, if you wait another five lines you'll prob get a reference to philomela+tereus. (or to dido.) he seems to have been brought in partly to punch up the love stuff: a long scene where edward dictates a love letter to the countess philippa, goes back over it, changes it, winces at some lines, congratulates himself on others-- couldn't believe how gratuitously meta it was.

more interesting because afaict this is the debut of shakespeare seriously on (if not in) love. in two gentlemen of verona it's a plot device; taming of the shrew is too satirical to let itself get mushy undistanced; the most convincing "love" moment in the first history tetralogy is richard coming on to anne, a terrific scene but not exactly the balcony. instead, if anything, there's a preoccupation with rape-- especially when (as in the histories+titus) characters are also instantiations of, or contenders for, the state. (in 2H6 jack cade excoriates a quailing mob of followers for accepting ius primae noctis from the enclosing crown, about thirty lines after announcing every london woman's sexual availability is now his to cybernetically redistribute.) but edward, rhapsodizing inside a much shallower and less cynical play, is free to be merely earnest-- which maybe is part of why you suddenly see shakes blushing+revising in front of your eyes.

and after the edward 3 punchups he publishes venus+adonis and the rape of lucrece (each dedicated to patron/beautiful-boy the earl of southampton)-- both again about sexual assault (and one again about the state) but both also preoccupied in much more detail than heretofore with desire-as-such: place in nature, disproportionate and ironic motive force, function as mask (or glover's-kid shakespeare would say dress) for death. the violence of the civil wars is here inside the feelings themselves. not long now till romeo+juliet, in which love+hate are different valves thru which human life gradually discharges the same finite pressure. someone (venus, juliet) will always make a mystical+crystalline case for infinitude-- the more i give to thee, the more i have-- then lose everything. it's maybe not until rosalind that a character has the reach to peacefully close the circuit between the free mind and the constrained body, or the imagined world and the real, or the self and the other, or life and death, or whatever it is that's going on here.

just a bit of fun

https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/342/607

likewise i wouldn't turn down rosalind/hamlet slash, fraught as it'd get.

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, March 13, 2019 9:15 PM bookmarkflaglink

like romeo i am left so unsatisfied

pressing on. comedy of errors: lynchian farce, much richer/stranger than advertised. the mounting anguish of the antipholi as their identities implode points forward to the high trags but also made me think of after hours. the last few lines-- where the identical servants are left alone onstage to argue over who takes precedence and then give up: "and now let's go hand in hand"-- instantly a favorite shakespeare ending. seems like it'd be unusually fun to do.

love's labor's lost: lmaoooo what the fuck is this. i'm not smart enough. but after three urban-bourgeois comedies (verona/shrew/errors) increasingly vivid in their physical+cultural details ("give her this key, and tell her in the desk / that's covered o'er with turkish tapestry / there is a purse of ducats. let her send it"-- this in errors took my breath away, not sure why-- something about the sight of this elizabethan manufacturer's credenza being projected simultaneously back to greece and forward to me) i do admire the hard shift to fake aristos in a featureless and artificial play-space all talking in the most impacted possible hypershakespeare and wearing buttons reading Hi I Am Constituted Entirely Of Language. someone should set it on a message board.

How's King John? I may read it finally this week. Popular in the 19th century, no? Faulconbridge gets the good notices.

i haven't read it either but in the full chronological survey i'm currently doing like shakes were tribe albums or star wars it is coming up! just some v familiar territory (richard 2, r&j, midsummers) to recross first.

Richard II (1595)
Romeo and Juliet (1595)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

v lyrical stretch here. trying new things

― difficult listening hour, Friday, January 19, 2018 6:24 PM bookmarkflaglink

hadn't realized here that these directly follow LLL, which shares the formality i was partly trying to get at here-- all very cleanly+artificially structured (R2 is an X; R&J a solar arc; midsummers has two versions of everything) and the verse is v regular (+frequently rhymed)-- but actually in that sense these plays are pulling back a lil from the extreme formality of LLL, where people (sometimes groups of people) keep breaking out in sonnet. i don't know that he's ever again this loyal to form.

at the very same time tho it's also where genre starts to crack-- the most tragic history, the most comic tragedy. characters start talking a lot about dreaming. the flawless verse structure cannot be shored up against a weird psychedelic rot blooming inside their heads. LLL takes place in a playground and ends w a messenger announcing that the king is dead and everyone has to grow up. one of the leads' speech prefixes immediately changes from PRINCESS to QUEEN.

never been a biographical criticism guy (one of the attractions of shakespeare) but hamnet dies around here of course.

Thanks for your replies about your production of the Tempest, difficult listening hour. Looks fascinating and a total headache to organise - fair play to you. Was it recorded? Would certainly take a look if it's online anywhere.

sweet of you to ask. didn't have a copy at the time but the other night i was standing in the street and someone suddenly rolled up on a skateboard and showed me an edit they'd made of the whole thing on their phone so maybe i will soon. a little shy abt it tbh i mean i tried to do the best i could but many missed opportunities god knows. in the meantime i have this gif:

https://i.imgur.com/ZKQwVi9.gif

did you get to king john, alfred? didn't know it had katherine hepburn in it, tho five seconds' thought and i guess i would have. the bastard doing some interesting identity work. hitting the fave themes.

merchant: the early comedies are best when there is money involved (or better, realer, than money: debt) so from "your mind is tossing on the ocean" on, this is a kind of pinnacle. strangely storybookish portia/casket stuff rly powerful if staged right, a fairy tale with high stakes. shylock a classic member of the "i refuse to accept the terms of this play and i will see it destroyed" club (president: hamlet), with more reason than most, and less success.

not much to say about henry 4+5 that wouldn't take all year but had not appreshed before how much of a culminative synthesis it is: it's trying to top the tavern bawds from taming of the shrew and the slapstick from comedy of errors and the battle scenes from henry 6 and the disassociative which-is-me-and-which-the-crown stuff from richard 2 and the daddy issues from king john, all at once, and as a national epic. and lest the symphony turn totalitarian it's also where shakes' early line of usually-villainous protogeniuses (aaron, gloucester, the bastard, juliet imo) finally gives birth to someone really capable of overturning the order of the play-- not in the story which is only a story, but in yr mind. it's the bayeux tapestry (well yknow in reverse), except the largest figure in it would have been sliced out of the bayeux tapestry by the state. of course, the state slices him out of the henriad too-- but not before he's completely ruined the big patriotic finish for you. just a masterpiece, a recapitulation and surpassing of everything so far. where do we go from here??

merry wives: apparently engels really liked this one. i've played falstaff in it and prob gave myself nodules. the plum role is ford.

as you like it: finally the acid kicks in.

I did, yeah! Most of what I read is largely true (Faulconbridge yea, title character nay)

title kind of a fakeout, like julius caesar

Shakespeare scholars, is there a consensus critical view on where Richard II sits in the hierarchy? i have found myself returning to it often recently but it's not one you (or at least i) hear much about.

i guess i could see people maybe finding it overly fussy? a little too pleased with its own cleverness? you've got the the formality of the structure and the prettiness of Richard's wordplay. then there's the thematic focus on the transition from medieval to modern, the nature and origin of kingly authority, not exactly the timeless and universal themes you find elsewhere in the canon.

but for all that i find Richard a pretty compelling figure with a certain timelessness of his own (at least if you set aside the particular macro-historical context and view him as an individual) - a foolish, unworldly, privileged brat who finds himself completely baffled in the face of the harsh realities (ugh) of the real world (double ugh) which turns out not to operate at all as he imagined.

and even then there are moments where he breaks out of the helpless reverie and is able to address the cynicism and bad faith with the contempt it deserves ("No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man!"

seems like a great role for a talented actor to stretch their legs a bit. as is Bolingbroke tbh (is he a crafty player of the game? is he a fundamentally decent man who, feeling himself justified as having been unjustly wronged, gets swept up in events beyond his control? is he a willing pawn who allows himself to be manipulated by more cynical peers for their own ends? a bit of all of them?!)

good play imo

i read somewhere the other day that the reason Henry IV never gets to go on the longed-for pilgrimage is because that right is reserved to the true medieval Plantagenets and not usurpers. Bolingbroke's part is to spend the rest of his days mired in interminable domestic squabbles - a lesser role for a lesser man.

i dunno if i fully agree with that (at least not the final judgement - as a plot point i think it's hard to argue against) but i enjoyed thinking it over

richard 2 is major. at work rn but looking forward to not being.

bolingbroke announcing at the end that he’ll clear all this moral and existential fuzziness up with a quick pilgrimage is v funny imo. instead his past eats him.

i’d like to play northumberland.

that were some love. but little policy.

Bolingbroke of course being a Plantagenet but a usurper for all that.

i think that I prefer a reading of Richard II as a standalone play rather than as the first part of the Henriad

xp yeah Northumberland is a great dickhead role. Mowbray also super fun i'd imagine. "i do defy him. and i spit at him!" fuckin come at me bro

he’ll clear all this moral and existential fuzziness up with a quick pilgrimage

a quick crusade i should say. even funnier

yeah it's major but its focus is fascinating and weird

i guess i could see people maybe finding it overly fussy?

its formality works imo because the fussiness is aesthetic+structural analogue for the ordered toy-history (and toy identity) richard discovers isn't real. thus the shift in style between it and henry iv is freighted with a lot imo-- but yeah of the henriad r2 def stands alone the best. (probably even if you take h4 as a piece.)

then there's the thematic focus on the transition from medieval to modern, the nature and origin of kingly authority, not exactly the timeless and universal themes you find elsewhere in the canon.

lol i love this theme for itself (+ its development in the Hs) tho yes it is now niche-- but (as u also suggest) i don't think it is unconnected to much deeper ones (hamlet's problems after all are also kingly-authority-related). richard after the breaking-the-mirror scene (the crux of the X) is assembling or discovering a naked self he's never known. the crown has always explained him to himself and now it's gone. on some level he has only just finally been born. talking thoughtfully to himself in a locked room for two acts then suddenly getting burst in on by assassins is a little like what happens to the whale in hitchhiker's guide-- but again it's also like hamlet, who in his last minute alive says dying is like getting arrested. and richard's final soliloquy-- "thus play i in one person many people"-- anticipates jaques!

meanwhile, bolingbroke, trending upwards, has sealed himself into an ominous new identity he doesn't fully control. lackeys pile heads at his feet. exton is convinced he's pulled a turbulent-priest move and subliminally ordered richard's death; of course when it's accomplished bolingbroke does the elegant machiavellian thing and disclaims it. but is that really what he meant? or all he meant? "have i no friend will rid me of this living fear? / was it not so? these were his very words. / have i no friend? quoth he. he spake it twice." bolingbroke will spend the rest of the cycle fearing and fighting his alleged friends. "they love not poison who do poison need." the question he's repeating has to mean more to him than a euphemism.

is he a crafty player of the game?... is he a willing pawn who allows himself to be manipulated by more cynical peers for their own ends? a bit of all of them?!

otm-- and what if these don't have secret answers but are the questions on his own mind at the end? ones he thinks might be answered-- or better, made irrelevant-- in jerusalem? it's a pr move of course, but is it only for his subjects? does he want to go there to close a gap he feels between himself and the crown? or himself and god? has he no friend will rid him of this living fear? does he even know who he is anymore?

lol @ the scene where everyone throws down their gages at everyone else.

(the return of the repressed!)

have (temporarily) run aground on troilus+cressida (also started a new job so project has suffered).

julius caesar-- about people-as-crowd more directly than anything since henry vi. (long to stage the death of cinna .) used to assume this was much earlier but it's rly just kept under v deliberate control as befits its classicism and (i now confidently announce) you can totally tell it's from the psychedelic period. similarly (synecdochially) i had never thought of brutus as amongst the shakespearian prometheuses but obviously he is; in his soliloquies shakes is not holding anything back he gives to hamlet or rosalind. it's just that brutus is comfortable with Fate, and thus w his role in this play, in a way they can't be. (which does him p much exactly as much good as being uncomfortable does hamlet.)

hamlet-- "if i were informed that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, but that his life might be saved by permitting him to expound his theory of hamlet, i would instantly reply: let him die, let him die, let him die!"

twelfth night-- you know, i don't love this one. i mean the orsino/viola/olivia stuff is staggeringly beautiful and the genderplay is deeper, more disorienting, less resolved, than as you like it's. (imo tho even with its holiday structure as you like it still only resolves things, "restores order", on the surface. rosalind has learned she can do magic.) would also allow that feste > touchstone-- as character if not as clown. but i still just cannot find a way in to the malvolio / sir toby stuff. prefer the mean pranks in taming of the shrew. prefer the bourgeois antics in merry wives. maybe seeing a good one would help.

speaking of which i saw actors from the london stage do macbeth last month, a nice treat for one of the remoter islands of my remote archipelago. inspirationally minimal. you rly don't need much huh. banquo/porter/lennox/macduff-jr in partic slayed (+ was slain).

Love to see Twelfth Night, Malvolio is a delicious part and his denouement can be wrenching

yr right of course; his exit is rly something.

My Shakespeare updates: I read R+J last year and I was like yknow what Romeo and Juliet rules. I read Hamlet this year and I decided Hamlet is the villain of Hamlet

it's me, hi

Someday I will see the fully queer+trans Twelfth Night of my dreams

Love to see Twelfth Night, Malvolio is a delicious part and his denouement can be wrenching

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby)

Bryan Ferry played him iirc

xp i remember you posting that actually and often think of it! i am the same w AYLI (hence parenthetical defensiveness above).

island-hopping this weekend to see a friend's production of his own translation of 12N into hawaiian actually. confidence fairly high on the queer front.

actually.

romeo and juliet is absolutely amazing; juliet is an i n c r e d i b l e part, one of the geniuses; the scene where the wedding musicians are implied to be playing cheerfully underneath an entire prolonged scene of the capulet family screaming in grief is one of the wildest things in shakespeare (when i directed we used a muzak instrumental of "all i have to do is dream")

friar laurence is a dangerous idiot tho

Do you rate Baz’s movie? I also watched that for the first (proper) time in the past year sometime and I really liked it

It overcame my distaste for Leo

honestly i prob haven't seen it recently enough. some vivid childhood memories for sure tho (what satisfaction canst thou have tonight?) all i have in the way of semiadult critical thoughts are i remember thinking leguizamo and postlethwaite were A+ and that everybody could maybe have shouted less. i don't remember paul rudd in it but that is perfect casting so presumably he was great.

once i would have said they cut up the text too much but nah cutting up the text is great, especially in movies obv.

bind me. or undo me. one of them.

opened in much ado tonight. "kill claudio" was like firing a gun: i hadn't moved an eyelid muscle in response when the laugh came. as a laugh partisan this was a thrill, like volunteering for a 400-year-old magic trick. backstage a minute later beatrice dabbed her lipstick off me and whispered "why did they laugh?" he's still got it folks.