Shakespeare, Harry Potter and Me, Gehayi

[gehayi]

I looked over the Shakespeare meme that's going around, but the problem with that is that it presumes that you've seen the plays both on stage and in the movies. I have never seen a Shakespeare play on stage or in the movies. The only adaptation of a Shakespeare play that I know I've seen is West Side Story. I've only ever read two plays for

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[lareinenoire]

They considered him overrated and incomprehensible. They did buy me a number of prose adaptations of his works--they felt an educated person should be familiar with the stories that he wrote--but they loathed both his plays and his poetry and definitely didn't approve of me reading him.

Ye gods, how awful! Neither of my parents is a Shakespeare enthusiast by any means, but they both certainly approved of my reading him (so long as I was spending equal time learning multiplication tables, etc).

Does your local library have the BBC Shakespeare DVDs, by chance? If so, some of them are excellent (the First Tet, for instance, also Derek Jacobi as a wonderfully camp yet tragic Richard II), though others are apparently awful. angevin2 actually has a series of posts she made about watching all of them.

I'm sorry the meme has been bothering you, though. It hadn't occurred to me how many of the questions were performance-based, but if you were willing to share your thoughts on the others, I'd certainly be happy to read them.

And, to be honest, I haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays despite the fact that I've been studying a number of them in excruciating detail, so you're way ahead of me there.

[gehayi]

Does your local library have the BBC Shakespeare DVDs, by chance?

Er...I'm not sure. The main library has a DVD copy of Henry V (one with Olivier), but it's got a "No circ" tag next to it. The same goes for As You Like It (a 2007 version), A & E's 2004 version of Macbeth, and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V--no circulation. I don't know what the point is of having a video that doesn't circulate and thus doesn't get watched.

In the videos and entertainment section, there's a copy of Macbeth...but it's by Roman Polanski, whom I refuse to support in any way. There's a 2002 TV adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing and Cedric Messina's 2000 versions of Henry V Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and so on, and Shaun Sutton's Richard III, King John, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear and so on in the video and entertainment section too. There seem to be a lot of vids by Cedric Messina, Shaun Sutton and Jonathan Miller, whoever they are.

The Franco Zeferelli version of R & J is filed in the videos and entertainment section. The Derek Jacobi Richard II is in the non-fiction collection.

Kenneth Branagh's Twelfth Night and Gabriella Martinelli's Romeo and Juliet aren't in my town's library system.

I can't find a blessed thing that says that ANYTHING is by the BBC. So I don't know if my library has the BBC collection or not.

It hadn't occurred to me how many of the questions were performance-based

It's logical that the questions would be performance-based, really; Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels. The reasonable assumption in a fandom involving plays is that a fan has seen the plays. The meme just made me acutely aware that my experience with the plays was not the expected one.

if you were willing to share your thoughts on the others, I'd certainly be happy to read them.

I don't know. Maybe. I still feel acutely uncomfortable about my strong dislike for R & J when I know that Juliet is one of your favorite heroines.

[lareinenoire]

My dad made the mistake of showing me the Polanski Macbeth when I was five or six without realising what a Polanski film generally involved and it gave me some serious nightmares. So you're not missing much.

I can't find a blessed thing that says that ANYTHING is by the BBC. So I don't know if my library has the BBC collection or not.

I made a quick IMDB search and Cedric Messina and Jonathan Miller are directors of the BBC productions, with Shaun Sutton as producer, so those are the ones I was talking about. It looks like your library has either the entire set or a good percentage of it, but has it catalogued by producer/director for some odd reason.

I do have Chimes at Midnight as an .avi file on my computer and I could see about burning it onto a CD/DVD for you. The picture quality is decent -- I was able to watch it fullscreen on a 14" laptop with no issues. I might also have the 2004 Merchant of Venice on the giant storage drive, but I will need to check and see.

I still feel acutely uncomfortable about my strong dislike for R & J when I know that Juliet is one of your favorite heroines.

Oh, I don't take it personally at all! :) I know tons of people who hate R&J. My sister happens to be one of them, despite my various attempts to convince her otherwise -- admittedly, I partly blame the fact that her teacher at the time was incompetent. I almost had the play ruined for me by a similarly problematic teacher who refused to accept any answers that didn't square with her own reading.

And I certainly don't see it as an Epic Love Story by any stretch of imagination. It's about two kids whose lives are turned upside down by feelings they don't seem to fully understand. Nowadays, though, it's built up to be this incredible, transcendent love story when I don't think that's what it is.*

* I have the same problem with Wuthering Heights. It is easily one of my favourite novels, but every time someone I'm looking at you, Stephenie Meyer claims it's a romance, I want to slap them. Of course, Smeyer deserve to be slapped for many and myriad reasons.

As far as expected audiences for Shakespeare memes go, if it's any consolation, one of my close friends from Oxford (who happens to be blindingly brilliant) absolutely HATES performed Shakespeare because they never quite match up to the performances in her head when she reads the plays. So she's more or less given up on performance unless someone amazing happens to be involved.