Shakespearean Tragedy Poll

king fucking lear

http://www.dunkirkma.net/inreview/images/mifune.jpg

Since the plays I've read are so not the winners, I'm going to have to go based on the Kurosawa adaptations.

xpost!

oh shit i think thats a still from throne of blood! ran was in color, wasnt it.

i am clearly not qualified to talk about either shakespeare or kurosawa

It was.

yeah. but throne of blood is a big part of why i voted macbeth. witches! marching trees! lady macbeth's freakout! the most fun of the tragedies.

plus also my great-grandfather paid some bullshit genealogist a lot of money decades ago to invent some family link to king duncan, so this play is about the GREAT WRONGS done to my ancestors.

lear is clear

i feel dumb for my above post since its so clearly the awes last scene from throne of blood. so to make up for it:

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/winstar_cinema/ran/firebattle.jpg
http://blog.heroes-spain.com/wp-content/ran1.jpg

I can't remember any of the good lines from these shits

cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war!

^^^
i won a shakespeare recitation contest in high school w/ that speech

things you should probably not admit on ilx, part 2351

yeah I'm going to have to go with caesar after a quick review of wikiquote. boring I know but I'm not really into the grecian filial murderfests and etc

LUCIUS:
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON:
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day--and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,--
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

------

TITUS

"tragedy"

"Great poets do not toss off work of this kind simply to pander to the public's taste for the macabre" my round spicy bunghole

Hamlet.

I wanna vote Hamlet but it's a comedy, really.

Yeah you need a heart of stone not to laugh when Hamlet dies (as Wilde should have said). Good riddance I say.

King Lear gets my vote every time.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Thing is, with the olde definition of Tragedy: the noble flaw that is tied in with the character's greatness but ultimately destroys him, Lear's flaw is that he's a bit of a cock. The play doesn't show him as much more than a whiney, needy loser. Albeit with great speeches. Maybe Cordelia is the actual tragic figure in that play.

When it comes to roffles, Titus Andronicus wins hands down.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/163659876_15bbfbae8f_m.jpg

Ophelia

Must admit I've never read TA. I do seriously think Hamlet is a skit on Revenge Tragedy, amongst other things.

Othello

Tamora, convinced of Titus' madness, approaches him along with her two sons, dressed as the spirits of Revenge, Murder, and Rape. She tells Titus that she (as a supernatural spirit) will grant him revenge if he will convince Lucius to stop attacking Rome. Titus agrees, sending Marcus to invite Lucius to a feast. "Revenge" (Tamora) offers to invite the Emperor and Tamora, and is about to leave, but Titus insists that "Rape" and "Murder" (Chiron and Demetrius) stay with him. She agrees. When she is gone Titus' servants bind Chiron and Demetrius, and Titus cuts their throats, while Lavinia holds a basin in her stumps to catch their blood. He plans to cook them into a pie for their mother.[7]

The next day, during the feast at his house, Titus asks Saturninus whether a father should kill his daughter if she has been raped — [8]. When the Emperor agrees, Titus kills Lavinia and tells Saturninus what Tamora's sons had done. He reveals that they were in the pie Tamora has just been enjoying

Or, what Tombot said.

Coriolanus sucks balls. Hamlet is pretty funny, so that.

For I am nothing, if not critical.

I kinda wonder if Shakespeare, having cut his teeth writing splatterplays for the dough, had a really jaundiced view of the whole genre. So he makes his serious plays an examination of woefully ineffective motherfuckers who get sucked into bloodbaths through their own fecklessness. And so Macbeth or Othello or Lear or Hamlet are not the unreflectively heroic figures of other period Tragedies, but losers who lose because their whole code of ethics is ridic.

So I'm saying Shakespeare wrote Fargo, basically.

who was it - some literary scholar i'm guessin' - that said that there are only about about 7 basic stories and every fictional tale is essentially a different version of one of them? if this is true, shakespeare pretty much covered all of them which is probably why everything with any sort of narrative can be compared to one of his. make any sense? no. okay.

also:

old year's resolution: now am no longer shackled by academia and can sense my intellect decaying at a disturbing rate, read these.

am only really familiar with four of these but, out of those four, it's gotta be Lear.

Hamlet. After all, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh and Ethan Hawke can't all be wrong, can they?

Julius Caesar

King Lear.

OTHELLO, i mean, the answer's probably king lear but i still haven't gotten to the bottom of that one

a very strong case can be made for timon of athens incidentally

guys, the second plot (Edgar-Edmund-daddy eyeball poppin') of Lear sucks! The play is a mess, but Ran rules okay.

Hamlet is my answer

I've only seen clunky stage versions of Lear, this is true.

Okay in Lear when he's all flipping out at the end, the dialogue says "Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!" Do you think people are supposed to moan or whatevs or actually say "Howl!"x4? Because I've seen two community theater productions of it and let me tell you, some petulant kid in old man makeup saying "Howl howl howl howl" is about the funniest thing in the world.

Un fortunately. :(

There's only 3 "howls" in the Arden and I guess you're meant to say each one cos it's in pentameter.

Othello, I think, is the best tragedy out of these.

Has anyone seen the B-flick "Black Tide" with James Earl Jones? I don't remember what it's about, he's trying to catch some water monster maybe, but his dialogue is lifted pretty much form Othello bcz he relates to the guy. Seems like an easy way to write a screenplay.

macbeth is the my favourite play of these, but i agree with elmo

I saw James Earl Jones play Othello on Broadway, early '80s, opp Christopher Plummer as Iago and Dianne Wiest as Desdemona. Prob'ly the main reason I voted for it.

Dianne Wiest?! How was she?

Fine, I thought at the time -- perhaps not the easily suspected type, but what does "O" care? I'm not sure she'd done any films at that point.

I've only seen Othello staged once, but I can't recall a halfway decent portrayal of Iago in either film or staged production. Branagh was rubbish.

Antony & Cleopatra is my favourite Shakespeare.

(xpost to me: by which I mean: neither enough repressed homo desire, nor enough nihilistic ingenuity.)

I'm not the first person to say this, but Iago is very much like Hamlet, plus balls, sans conscience.

I saw the Anthony Sher-as-Iago Othello, amazing :D

In that Iago and Hamlet are both self-aware extensions of the dramatist and create their own dramatic impetus, yes.

Plummer was a very entertaining Iago, but 'actorish' and hammy. My favorite might be the Irish actor in Welles' film, Micheal MacLiammoir (?), even tho the whole thing's post-dubbed.

MacLiammoir's great. Chimes at Midnight has a couple of juicy perfs too: Keith Baxter, Gielgud (who was an acerbic Cassius in the dull Mankiewicz Julius Caesar)

My favorite non-Kane Welles performance is his Macbeth.

i liked bob hoskins as iago in the bbc version

I really wanna rep for Troilus, it is so crazy & startling & insanely modern, but I think Othello is probably the best thing ever done by a human in any artistic medium.

i liked bob hoskins as iago in the bbc version

This is the one with Anthony Hopkins in blackface, right? In 1981?

yeah, tho i havent seen it in five or six years

if richard III is not a tragedy, then probably othello.

Rich III can be even funnier than Hamlet

Hamlet and Othello succeed as tragedy partly because they do comedy so well.

King Lear, after some hesitation over Hamlet and Macbeth. Lear gets more mileage out of less blood and fewer guts - and witches or no witches, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern notwithstanding, you just can't beat the Fool, nuncle.

hamlet

oh hey here's a play about a bunch of people nobody should give a fuck about, killing each other. let's talk about human nature every chance we can, and get it all right.

it's like law & order, where every lenny wisecrack just blows your fucking box

Lear, but Hamlet is awesome.

guys, the main character in Hamlet is named "Hamlet." How is that a tragedy?

because he's really a pig???

http://www.jfieldgraphics.com/drawings/hamlet.jpg

How is that a tragedy?

because he has a dumb name like hamlet

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

king lear's the best, though I have a soft spot in my heart for macbeth.

polanski's macbeth is so underrated. jon finch is great, and polanski has the sheer unmitigated balls to add his own epilogue that a) works in a non-groan way, and b)reinforces the common theme of his films at the time ("evil always wins"). the period authenticity is as well-played as andrei rublev's, and the "modern" touches don't make the thing fall apart.

how now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! what is't you do?

Hamlet's humor is exactly what makes it the best of the tragedies. Lear's close though.

more pluses of polanski's macbeth: soundtrack by third ear band, the sex and violence is extreme and unsettling without being exploitive, and did I mention jon finch? his transition from wide-eyed naif to total fucking psychopath is something else.

That scottish play, again, primarily because of Pedo Polanksi

ambassador, the thane of cawdor
dialect so def it’ll rip up the floor

macbeth, original gangster

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

only 2 for caesar wtf

I recited the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquoy in Lit today.

wtf you people

learn how to read

Flinging insults indiscriminately because your favorite didn't win a poll: C/D.

Romeo and Juliet is my 3rd favorite of these, but you don't really think of it as a Tragedy.

Didn't vote but I'd have voted Lear too, prob Hamlet after that.. great despite all the baggage. back in college Antony & Cleopatra was one of my favorites too, it's completely weird or seemed so at the time - don't know how I'd read it today..

I watched the (50s?) movie of J. Caesar a few months ago and found it to be entirely boring and pointless. Why that movie, why then?

Hamlet is pretty awful, though.

The Mankiewicz Caesar is pretty lame by general consensus, but it does feature John Gielgud blazing it in the cut, and Barthes wrote a hella funny essay in Mythologies about Hollywood signifying Romanness with them fringes.

OK, I have to check that out.

i don't get your criticism. the "point" is that it's a good, solid, mainstream film of a shakespeare play.

!!! I remember Brando, Mason and Gielgud all being good or better. And Caesar is Ambassador Trentino from Duck Soup!

I saw Norman Lloyd, the 90something actor, tell stories at the Film Forum last month ... he played Cinna the Poet in Orson Welles' famed 'Fascist Italy' staging of Caesar -- 70 years ago.