Shakespeare

[Brian]

Not Shakespearean, but fool-related: I recently read the excellent adventure novel The Long Ships, by Frans Bengtsson, which is a Viking story about a young man who gets kidnapped by marauding adventurers and goes on to have a long and profitable career "a-Viking" in Spain, France, England, Ireland, and Russia.

Of note to this discussion, there are two characters, Irish court jesters who, for political reasons, decide to abandon the court and travel the countryside entertaining travelers for their keep. Near the end of the story, one of them discovers that his "fool skills" (which include not just verbal dexterity but various physical tricks) have so captivated a Russian tribe that he agrees to become their ruler, and thus the fool becomes the king.

Fun novel.

[(poco) Sforzando]

thus the fool becomes the king.

Let's pray this does not apply to Donald Trump.

[SimonNZ]

Another argument, BTW, for not "translating" or "updating" Shakespeare.)

Over the last couple of days I've been having a bit of fun in my imagination reworking famous scenes into "modern" English. (and concluding again: let Shakespeare be Shakespeare - the audience aren't idiots)

Which reminded me of Lord Buckley's version of Mark Antony's Funeral Oration done beatnik-hipster style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4lZTgbjFJo

Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Caesar out,
Not to hip you to him.
The bad jazz that a cat blows,
Wails long after he's cut out.
The groovey is often stashed with their frames,
So don't put Caesar down.
The swinging Brutus hath laid a story on you
That Caesar was hungry for power If it were so, it was a sad drag,
And sadly hath the Caesar cat answered it.
Here with a pass from Brutus and the other brass,
For Brutus is a worthy stud,
Yea, so are they all worthy studs,
Though their stallions never sleep.
I came to wail at Ceasar's wake.
He was my buddy, and he leveled with me.
Yet Brutus digs that he has eyes for power,
And Brutus is a solid cat.
It is true he hath returned with many freaks in chains
And brought them home to Rome.
Yea, the looty was booty
And hipped the treasury well.
Dost thou dig that this was Caesar's groove
For the putsch?
When the cats with the empty kicks hath copped out,
Yea, Caesar hath copped out, too,
And cried up a storm.
To be a world grabber a stiffer riff must be blown.
Without bread a stud can't even rule an anthill.
Yet Brutus was swinging for the moon.
And, yea, Brutus is a worthy stud.
And all you cats were gassed on the Lupercal
When he came on like a king freak.
Three times I lay the wig on him,
And thrice did he put it down.
Was this the move of a greedy hipster?
Yet, Brutus said he dug the lick,
And, yes, a hipper cat has never blown.
Some claim that Brutus' story was a gag.
But I dug the story was solid.
I came here to blow.
Now, stay cool while I blow.
You all dug him once
Because you were hipped that he was solid
How can you now come on so square
Now that he's tapped out of this world.
City Hall is flipped
And swung to a drunken zoo
And all of you cats are goofed to wig city.
Dig me hard.
My ticker is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And, yea, I must stay cool til it flippeth back to me.

[SimonNZ]

Will anyone here be seeing the National Theatre Live broadcasts to cinemas next week of the Cumberbatch Hamlet? I have to wait until mid-December to see it out my way.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Will anyone here be seeing the National Theatre Live broadcasts to cinemas next week of the Cumberbatch Hamlet? I have to wait until mid-December to see it out my way.

October 15.

[SimonNZ]

October 15.

Ah, good. I look forward to a review. (if you're willing, of course)

Listed as two hours at my theatre - I hope that's just a misprint. A TLS review of the production (which also has some interesting things to say about the history of cutting and changing order of scenes) put it at three hours.

[Ken B]

Ah, good. I look forward to a review. (if you're willing, of course)

Listed as two hours at my theatre - I hope that's just a misprint. A TLS review of the production (which also has some interesting things to say about the history of cutting and changing order of scenes) put it at three hours.

I look forward to a review too. I am dubious about it.  Cumberbatch is flavor of the month. But I have been surprised before. 

[SimonNZ]

I've been picking away at random broadcasts from Melvyn Bragg's superb "In Our Time" series - all of which are available to play on the BBC site - whenever I have a spare 45 minutes, and last night played the one giving an overview of the development of the Revenge Tragedy.

If anyone here is interested I though it was a particularly well done episode and was useful for fitting Titus Andronicus and Hamlet into the historical context of the genre, and highlighting the specific ways the later subverted or confounded it. Also whetted my appetite for reading Kyd, Middleton et al.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l16vp

[(poco) Sforzando]

This is kind of long, so deal with it. Let me start by separating the Cumberbatch (the actor) from the Cumberbotch (the production). The first of these was quite good. He's definitely an actor of great talent and he handles the soliloquies well, although I'm not ready to crown him the next Olivier or Gielgud as apparently did several members of the audience where I saw the NTLive screening, and I'd like to see what he could see in the hands of a competent director.

Some of the supporting performances were good, especially the Polonius and the Gravedigger (who doubled, not as successfully, the Ghost). The King and Queen were quite good too, and the Hamlet-Gertrude scene was one of the better acted. I've read reviews saying the King was too soft-spoken, but on screen he appeared if anything too vehement.

The Ophelia seemed to have talent, but was first seen carrying around a large camera as if to show she has a hobby; and later in her mad scene she lugs a heavy trunk down a flight of stairs (is she planning a trip?) that Gertrude later opens to reveal her camera and cache of photographs. Surely rule no. 1 in good direction ought to be that props ought to serve a purpose; if you can figure out why Ophelia was a photography buff you're a better man than I, but I'm just warming up on the Cumberbotch part of things.

The Horatio was a nerdish fellow with glasses and tattoos; he was always seen lugging around a full backpack (to prove he was a Student, in case you didn't figure that out, but couldn't they have found a room in the castle for him to stow his gear?), and given his whiny delivery one wonders why Hamlet would want him for a friend in the first place.

One of the specialties of the production is re-arranging scenes and re-assigning lines to other speakers. If you're silly enough to expect the play to begin with the first sighting of the Ghost, by which Shakespeare brilliantly suggests the atmosphere of doom and unease that sets the tone for the rest of the action, you'll find that this Hamlet starts with our hero listening to Nat King Cole on his phonograph, and saying "Who's there?" to a visitor who turns out to be Horatio. But this is at least not as bad as starting with TBONTB, as was done in the first previews.

What always gets me with Shakespearean performances is why, if we consider him the world's greatest dramatist and poet, we always have to muck him up by "improving" his dramaturgy and language. It is unlikely even in his own time that the longer plays were done in their full printed texts, but there are cuts that don't damage the action as well as ones that are just plain stupid. Here, in addition to a lot of stupid cuts (including so much of Polonius's part as to make him seem concise, though none as dumb, to my mind, as a Hamlet I saw earlier this year that completely left out the Ghost), there was a fair amount of updated language, as well as a few cases where the director seems to have added lines of her own.

None of the updates helped in the slightest. Laertes' "He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself" became "choose for himself," since "carve" is obviously an obsolete word, and the audience can't be counted on to understand the metaphor of a nobleman who can't be expected to cut his own meat. "Look thou character" was changed to "see thou character," even though "character" is the hard word. "Would drink up eisel?" became "Would drink up poison?" So what if "eisel" means "vinegar." "Niggard of question" was changed to "sparing of question," because we can't use the N word; and the Polacks became the Polish, so as to not offend our Polish friends.

On the other hand, the Nemean lion was allowed to survive, since we all have Nemean lions in our backyards, as was "make Ossa like a wart." The word "color" was retained in "That show of such an exercise may color / Your loneliness," even though its sense of "color" as "justify" is long obsolete.

Nothing makes me cringe more in Hamlet performances than how they're going to handle the alleged feigned madness. (I say alleged, because as Samuel Johnson noted in 1765, "of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity." Unlike the source play, where Hamlet's father was killed publicly and Hamlet needs to feign madness to protect himself, Shakespeare's Hamlet is in no danger until the play scene shows Claudius that Hamlet is on to him; even so Hamlet still has the upper hand until he kills Polonius and thus gives Claudius grounds to banish him to England. If you're still convinced that "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" is proof that Hamlet intends to play the madman, then consider why Hamlet would at once want to swear his friends to secrecy and then to behave in the most suspicious manner possible by acting like a lunatic.)

In the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet of 1964, one of the best I've seen (including a masterly Polonius from Hume Cronyn), the pretended insanity was marked very lightly (as if they didn't believe it themselves), with Burton merely putting on a coat backwards in one scene and inserting a few snide laughs. But the Cumberbotch of course outdid itself with the feigned madness, having Hamlet first come onstage pretending to lead a brass band; later he is seen outside a 6-foot high replica of the castle, complete with life-size toy soldiers on either side (was he engaged in some amateur carpentry while he should have been planning his revenge?), and then in the play scene (badly misdirected by failing to make Claudius the focal point of interest), Hamlet himself plays the Poisoner – how clever! – dressed in a silly robe with "KING" written on the back, and he wears this garb through the Prayer Scene (where he stands on a balcony some 25 feet away from the king, making it rather difficult to run him through with his sword even if Hamlet had so decided) and the Closet Scene as well. Fortunately he changes during intermission (which comes quite late, with Claudius' "Do it, England" speech).

The whole affair was geared towards excess without genuine intensity. Much too much was shouted without restraint, including Hamlet's "by and by is easily said." Why the Cumberbotch wanted Cumberbatch to shout this at the top of his lungs is beyond me, but so is much else in this silly production. Just wait for the few minutes before intermission, where loud electronic music starts playing and strobe lights start encircling the set as if this were the finale of Goetterdaemmerung; and then when you sit down for Part II you'll find the whole set has crumbled into rubble. What a fun way to show how something is rotten in the state of Denmark! But give me a break. If Claudius had seen even a speck of dirt on his palace floor he would have snapped his fingers for the janitor and the whole mess would have been cleaned up in minutes. Unfortunately he could not do so for this dopey, overzealous production.

[North Star]

Thanks. I think I will skip seeing it in the movie theatre.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Thanks. I think I will skip seeing it in the movie theatre.

Oh, do see it. Why should I be the only one to enjoy? It would be a shame to miss the fun, and at least here at home I only had to spend $20 USD rather than £100 sterling at the Barbican, where it is apparently the hottest ticket in years. (I assure you there are quite a few reviews in the British press even more complimentary than my own.)

[Karl Henning]

This is kind of long, so deal with it. Let me start by separating the Cumberbatch (the actor) from the Cumberbotch (the production). The first of these was quite good. He's definitely an actor of great talent and he handles the soliloquies well, although I'm not ready to crown him the next Olivier or Gielgud as apparently did several members of the audience where I saw the NTLive screening, and I'd like to see what he could see in the hands of a competent director.

Some of the supporting performances were good, especially the Polonius and the Gravedigger (who doubled, not as successfully, the Ghost). The King and Queen were quite good too, and the Hamlet-Gertrude scene was one of the better acted. I've read reviews saying the King was too soft-spoken, but on screen he appeared if anything too vehement.

The Ophelia seemed to have talent, but was first seen carrying around a large camera as if to show she has a hobby; and later in her mad scene she lugs a heavy trunk down a flight of stairs (is she planning a trip?) that Gertrude later opens to reveal her camera and cache of photographs. Surely rule no. 1 in good direction ought to be that props ought to serve a purpose; if you can figure out why Ophelia was a photography buff you're a better man than I, but I'm just warming up on the Cumberbotch part of things.

The Horatio was a nerdish fellow with glasses and tattoos; he was always seen lugging around a full backpack (to prove he was a Student, in case you didn't figure that out, but couldn't they have found a room in the castle for him to stow his gear?), and given his whiny delivery one wonders why Hamlet would want him for a friend in the first place.

One of the specialties of the production is re-arranging scenes and re-assigning lines to other speakers. If you're silly enough to expect the play to begin with the first sighting of the Ghost, by which Shakespeare brilliantly suggests the atmosphere of doom and unease that sets the tone for the rest of the action, you'll find that this Hamlet starts with our hero listening to Nat King Cole on his phonograph, and saying "Who's there?" to a visitor who turns out to be Horatio. But this is at least not as bad as starting with TBONTB, as was done in the first previews.

What always gets me with Shakespearean performances is why, if we consider him the world's greatest dramatist and poet, we always have to muck him up by "improving" his dramaturgy and language. It is unlikely even in his own time that the longer plays were done in their full printed texts, but there are cuts that don't damage the action as well as ones that are just plain stupid. Here, in addition to a lot of stupid cuts (including so much of Polonius's part as to make him seem concise, though none as dumb, to my mind, as a Hamlet I saw earlier this year that completely left out the Ghost), there was a fair amount of updated language, as well as a few cases where the director seems to have added lines of her own.

None of the updates helped in the slightest. Laertes' "He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself" became "choose for himself," since "carve" is obviously an obsolete word, and the audience can't be counted on to understand the metaphor of a nobleman who can't be expected to cut his own meat. "Look thou character" was changed to "see thou character," even though "character" is the hard word. "Would drink up eisel?" became "Would drink up poison?" So what if "eisel" means "vinegar." "Niggard of question" was changed to "sparing of question," because we can't use the N word; and the Polacks became the Polish, so as to not offend our Polish friends.

On the other hand, the Nemean lion was allowed to survive, since we all have Nemean lions in our backyards, as was "make Ossa like a wart." The word "color" was retained in "That show of such an exercise may color / Your loneliness," even though its sense of "color" as "justify" is long obsolete.

Nothing makes me cringe more in Hamlet performances than how they're going to handle the alleged feigned madness. (I say alleged, because as Samuel Johnson noted in 1765, "of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity." Unlike the source play, where Hamlet's father was killed publicly and Hamlet needs to feign madness to protect himself, Shakespeare's Hamlet is in no danger until the play scene shows Claudius that Hamlet is on to him; even so Hamlet still has the upper hand until he kills Polonius and thus gives Claudius grounds to banish him to England. If you're still convinced that "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" is proof that Hamlet intends to play the madman, then consider why Hamlet would at once want to swear his friends to secrecy and then to behave in the most suspicious manner possible by acting like a lunatic.)

In the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet of 1964, one of the best I've seen (including a masterly Polonius from Hume Cronyn), the pretended insanity was marked very lightly (as if they didn't believe it themselves), with Burton merely putting on a coat backwards in one scene and inserting a few snide laughs. But the Cumberbotch of course outdid itself with the feigned madness, having Hamlet first come onstage pretending to lead a brass band; later he is seen outside a 6-foot high replica of the castle, complete with life-size toy soldiers on either side (was he engaged in some amateur carpentry while he should have been planning his revenge?), and then in the play scene (badly misdirected by failing to make Claudius the focal point of interest), Hamlet himself plays the Poisoner – how clever! – dressed in a silly robe with "KING" written on the back, and he wears this garb through the Prayer Scene (where he stands on a balcony some 25 feet away from the king, making it rather difficult to run him through with his sword even if Hamlet had so decided) and the Closet Scene as well. Fortunately he changes during intermission (which comes quite late, with Claudius' "Do it, England" speech).

The whole affair was geared towards excess without genuine intensity. Much too much was shouted without restraint, including Hamlet's "by and by is easily said." Why the Cumberbotch wanted Cumberbatch to shout this at the top of his lungs is beyond me, but so is much else in this silly production. Just wait for the few minutes before intermission, where loud electronic music starts playing and strobe lights start encircling the set as if this were the finale of Goetterdaemmerung; and then when you sit down for Part II you'll find the whole set has crumbled into rubble. What a fun way to show how something is rotten in the state of Denmark! But give me a break. If Claudius had seen even a speck of dirt on his palace floor he would have snapped his fingers for the janitor and the whole mess would have been cleaned up in minutes. Unfortunately he could not do so for this dopey, overzealous production.

Most interesting, thanks!

[kishnevi]

Much thanks for this relief.

I suppose the camera for Ophelia business was meant to show she was a sensitive artsy girl who could be thought of plausibly as someone who would commit suicide after being seduced and discarded by Hamlet.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Much thanks for this relief.

I suppose the camera for Ophelia business was meant to show she was a sensitive artsy girl who could be thought of plausibly as someone who would commit suicide after being seduced and discarded by Hamlet.

But there's no proof that she was seduced, and it's she who on Polonius's orders discards Hamlet.

[Brian]

The camera thing seems to have become popular. I just watched the Blu-Ray of the David Tennant & Patrick Stewart Hamlet, where the whole castle is outfitted with NSA-style security cameras. The director's sad idea of how to exploit the cinematic medium is to exploit obviously digitally "enhanced" security camera views with corny red boxes and gigantic-type-size "Recording" messages. You know, the kind real security cameras haven't had in ages. Then, of course, Hamlet feigns madness by destroying one of the cameras.

That was another production where a legitimate actor who has somehow become an improbable sex icon for the teenage female set got saddled by a lot of curious choices. (Even Patrick Stewart shrugs like "sure, why not?" before drinking the poison.)

(p)Sfz, I'd like to hear you elaborate a little bit more on the parenthetical discussion here:

Nothing makes me cringe more in Hamlet performances than how they're going to handle the alleged feigned madness. (I say alleged, because as Samuel Johnson noted in 1765, "of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity." Unlike the source play, where Hamlet's father was killed publicly and Hamlet needs to feign madness to protect himself, Shakespeare's Hamlet is in no danger until the play scene shows Claudius that Hamlet is on to him; even so Hamlet still has the upper hand until he kills Polonius and thus gives Claudius grounds to banish him to England. If you're still convinced that "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" is proof that Hamlet intends to play the madman, then consider why Hamlet would at once want to swear his friends to secrecy and then to behave in the most suspicious manner possible by acting like a lunatic.)

I'm pretty sure I understand your thesis here, but the phrasing of the last sentence leaves me a little bit confused. Hamlet is making his friends swear to keep the secret that he is really sane, no? Or do you simply mean that, the way most directors instruct Hamlets to behave, his lunacy is so ridiculous and over-the-top that any reasonable character in Elsinore would think he was faking it?

Somehow, despite years of instruction on Shakespeare and independent reading, I had never before realized that "Hamlet is in no danger until the play scene" - typical of the insight to be expected whenever you write a paragraph or more here.

[North Star]

Oh, do see it. Why should I be the only one to enjoy? It would be a shame to miss the fun, and at least here at home I only had to spend $20 USD rather than £100 sterling at the Barbican, where it is apparently the hottest ticket in years. (I assure you there are quite a few reviews in the British press even more complimentary than my own.)

I would certainly like to, if it was shown during a weekend, or in my city. 

[kishnevi]

Actually, Hamlet would have been in danger, as the old king's son and the new king's stepson, no matter how Claudius came to the throne.  He was a logical alternative for anyone who did not like Claudius.  History is littered with the corpses of people who had the bad luck of being born too close to the throne.  English audiences would know that Henry VII and Henry VIII chopped off the heads of a few, that Lady Jane Grey was exactly such a case, and that Elizabeth, who took great care not to actually say who would succeed her, was relatively kind: she merely imprisoned and abused relatives who got married without her rathet hard to get consent.   Hamlet playing mad to make himself seem less capable of being king, thereby protecting himself from Claudius's suspicions, was a natural strategy.

Speaking of Claudius, or rather the name... Robert Graves used the same idea for I,Claudius, in which the protagonist pretends he is more stupid, weird, and overall goofy than he actually is to protect himself in a family in which almost everyone who is too close to the throne gets killed, usually by Livia directly or indirectly.  Perhaps Graves borrowed some from Shakespeare.

[kishnevi]

Another observation.

I think Hamlet is a failure.   Shakespeare tried to turn the Elizabethan version of the action flick, the revenge play, into an intellectual investigation of Hamlet, and it did not work.

(Think Bergman directing a Marvel superhero movie, or Woody Allen a Fast and Furious installment.,)

[Karl Henning]

Another observation.

I think Hamlet is a failure.   Shakespeare tried to turn the Elizabethan version of the action flick, the revenge play, into an intellectual investigation of Hamlet, and it did not work.

(Think Bergman directing a Marvel superhero movie, or Woody Allen a Fast and Furious installment.,)

It's the Inaction Movie: it's a success.

[North Star]

Hamlet a failure? I'm sure everyone wants to fail half as gloriously as Bill did with Hamlet.