Shakespeare Marathon, Part II
A while ago, tortoise and I decided to watch all of Shakespeare's plays in chronological order. And I had so much fun, I'm doing it again, but this time by reading them rather than by watching them.
Unless otherwise specified, I am reading the MIT version.
Play: Henry VI, Part 1
Date finished: August 16, 2011
Death count: 6+: Salisbury, Gargrave, Edmund Mortimer, John Bedford, John Talbot, Lord Talbot, plus as many soldiers as the director feels like
Play: Henry VI, Part 2
Date finished: August 19, 2011
Death count: 12+: Horner, Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Suffolk, Sir Humphrey Stafford, William Stafford, a Clerk, a Soldier, Matthew Goffe, Lord Say, Jack Cade, Lord Clifford, Duke of Somerset, more soldiers
Pirate Attacks: 1
Comments/WTF: Drum. Enter CADE, DICK the Butcher, SMITH the Weaver, and a Sawyer, with infinite numbers.
Play: Henry VI, Part 3
Date finished: August 21, 2011
Death count: 13+: Rutland, (probably) Rutland's Tutor, John Mortimer, Hugh Mortimer, the Duke of York, a father killed by his son, a son killed by his father, Lord Clifford, Montagu, Warwick, Duke of Somerset, Prince Edward, King Henry VI, soldiers
Play: The Comedy of Errors
Date finished: August 26, 2011
Death count: None
Shipwrecks: 1
Play: Richard III
Date finished: September 25, 2011
Death count: 13+: Duke of Clarence, King Edward IV, Earl Rivers, Lord Grey, Lord Vaughn, Lord Hastings, Lady Anne, Prince Edward, Prince Richard, Buckingham, Norfolk, Brackenbury, King Richard III, soldiers.
Comments: After three plays of sounding mostly like Julia Foster, all of a sudden Margaret sounds exactly like me.
I actually realized this back at Stratford, but Buckingham isn't actually in cahoots with Richard from the beginning; Richard lets him blame the Queen and her family for Clarence's death.
Play: The Taming of the Shrew
Date finished: August 14, 2012
Death count: None
Antonio: Not shown onstage, but Petruchio of Verona's deceased father was named Antonio. Also Petruchio has a cousin named Ferdinand.
Comments: The Taming of the Shrew is a frame story? Apparently everyone in the world cuts the frame, possibly because Shakespeare forgot halfway through and so it only has half a frame.
It's not just Petruchio. Baptista (Kate and Bianca's father) also cares mostly about how much money his daughters' suitors have.
I knew it was coming, but good grief the misogyny.
Play: Sir Thomas More, Project Gutenberg version
Date finished: August 14, 2012
Death count: 3: John Lincoln, Bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas More
Play: Titus Andronicus
Date finished: August 14, 2012
Death count: 13--15: Alarbus, Mutius, Bassianus, Martius, Quintus, a nurse, Cornelia the midwife (not actually appearing in the play), a clown, Chiron, Demetrius, Lavinia, Tamora, Titus, Saturnius, Aaron (after the play). Oh, and a fly.
Comments/WTF: Random bits of Latin added to make characters sound erudite--in a play set in ancient Rome--is kind of weird.
Apparently the stage full of dead partygoers is not actually written into the text.
Play: Two Gentlemen of Verona
Date finished: August 18, 2012
Death count: None
Crossdressers: Julia/Sebastian. Proteus is not as smart as Figaro.
Pirate Attacks: Well, two outlaw attacks...
Antonio: Lives in Verona. He has an unnamed brother, and a son (Proteus) who is at one point in love with the Duke of Milan's daughter.
Comments/WTF: This play has several moments where it is simply taken for granted that pale skin is pretty. Since the last time I saw this, Julia was black, this was pretty funny.
Also the bit where Valentine doesn't just join the band of landpirates, he is acclaimed their king. And the bit where they are all exiled gentlemen. And the last scene where everything improbably turns out fine.
Play: Romeo and Juliet are Dead
Date finished: August 18, 2012
Death count: 5: Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, Juliet
Comments: Apparently, in addition to the prologue, there is an interlog but no epilogue. Sort of like the frame in The Taming of the Shrew.
Apparently upper-class Italians have fancy exotic names, but lower-class Italians have plain ordinary names like Nell and Susan.
Oh, Benvolio is Romeo's cousin. Balthasar is his servant. So Benvolio's role is to drag Romeo to parties against his will, but Balthasar gets to know about Juliet because Romeo can order him to keep secrets and/or run messages back and forth.
Apparently Mantua really is the land of exile--Romeo and Valentine both were headed there. (Valentine just got waylaid by landpirates on the way.)
Play: Love's Labour's Lost
Date finished: September 1, 2012
Death count: None
Comments: Every single scene in this play is in the King of Navarre's park. This means that to figure out where Scene V.ii happens, you have to look through every single scene in the play to make sure that they all are set in "the same".
Also, all four of the young men in love fail to recognize their respective love interests when in disguise.
Play: Edward III, Project Gutenberg version
Date finished: March 7, 2013
Death count: A bunch of random soldiers--it's a war play--but no one with lines.
Comments: Edward II's wife Isabella was a princess of France. So the kings of England are heirs to the throne of France. Isabella's brothers died without male issue, so now the King of England is going to war because he thinks he is the rightful King of France. Why am I reading Henry V?
Play: Richard II
Date finished: March 14, 2013 (?)
Death count: 7 or 13: John of Gaunt, Green, Bushy, Earl of Wiltshire, Norfolk, Richard II, Oxford, Salisbury, Blunt, Kent, Brocas, Seely, the Abbot of Westminster. However, Wiltshire, Oxford, Blunt, Kent, Brocas, and Seely are just mentioned as dead; they don't have lines (or even show up on stage).
Comments: Hotspur is in this one?! You know, actually, that makes Henry IV.1 make a lot more sense...
Bolingbroke really executed a lot of people when he took over.
Play: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Date finished: January 1, 2014
Death count: Two, if you count Pyramus and Thisbe.
Comments: Theseus abducted Helen when she was a preteen. Theseus was, at best, a contemporary of Paris and Hector and Menelaus, and probably was of the generation before. Thus, in a play set just before his wedding to Hippolyta, it makes no sense for Hermia to be swearing by Dido and Aeneas. It also makes no sense for Thisbe to be comparing herself to Helen.
It also makes no sense for Thisbe to be swearing to be as faithful as Helen, but that's probably deliberate.
While Theseus and company are making snarky comments about the play-within-a-play, they are speaking prose, not blank verse. I thought it might have something to do with the Mechanicals trying to speak blank verse (they do for the stuff they rehearsed, and lapse back to prose for the stuff they ad-libbed), but now I check and it looks like the snark in Love's Labour's Lost is also prose.
I never noticed this before, but Peter Quince's first prologue sounds an awful lot like the comically inept version of...Puck's epilogue.
Play: King John
Date finished: January 2, 2014
Death count: 4+: Austria, Prince Arthur, Melun, King John, soldiers.
Comments: King John is the King of England, so clearly he must be a beacon of independence and Protestantism against the dastardly Catholic church.
Cardinal Pandulph reads a lot like an atheist: if religion is the source of all morality, then any action the Church commands is moral; superstitious people will see any piece of ill luck as a sign that King John has lost Heaven's favor.
Lewis is a French prince, and so clearly he is stupid and evil and going to lose because of his stupid, evil plot to callously murder a bunch of English noblemen as soon as they are no longer useful. However, Shakespeare is even more anti-Catholic than he is anti-French, so Lewis does get to stand up to Pandulph.
Acts I and II have one scene each. To compensate, Act V has seven.
Play: The Merchant of Venice
Date finished: January 5, 2014
Death count: None
Shipwrecks: At least two, all offstage.
Crossdressers: Three: Portia/Balthasar and Nerissa, and Jessica disguises herself as a boy for one scene while she's running away from home. Bassanio and Gratiano are definitely not as smart as Figaro; Lorenzo might be, but he had the unfair advantage that she told him who she was.
Antonio: The title character. Lives in Venice, has lots of ships, and is very much in love with his most noble kinsman, young Bassanio.
Comments: Has Shylock mentioned that he is Jewish today?
Play: Henry IV, Part 1
Date finished: January 7, 2014
Death count: 2 to 6+: Shirley and Stafford (both offstage; neither appears in the cast list), Sir Walter Blunt, Hotspur, Worcester and Vernon (after the play), soldiers
Comments: It starts with King Henry talking about how civil war in England is over and now he can go on crusade. Yeah, right. It ends the same way (although he's more or less right...for the next two plays, at least).
Parolles's captors' nonsense gets carefully specified, but Lady Mortimer's actress (or director, or whatever) has to make up her own Welsh? I wonder if there are standard things for her to say?
Shakespeare clearly has a severe crush on Henry V. And there are times when I do too. Nonetheless, I don't really buy Vernon's admiring speech...especially since it's before the battle, when all Hal has done is talk.
There is a scene where King Henry wants Hal to get off the battlefield because he's injured. I think that for the rest of this read-through I'm going to pretend that the injury in question is an arrow to the face, because that's the incredibly badass thing the historical Prince Henry did at Shrewsbury: get shot in the face with an arrow...and live.
Play: Henry IV, Part 2
Date finished: January 9, 2014
Death count: 6: Glendower, Coleville, Mowbray, the Archbishop of York, and Hastings; Henry IV (all 6 offstage, and Glendower isn't actually in this play).
Comments: Falstaff has a speech about how, among other things, Hal is too young to need to shave. That sounds right for the historical Prince Henry, but is kind of incongruous with a Hal who's Hotspur's age.
The fickleness of The Common People seems to be one of Shakespeare's favorite themes--the Archbishop of York has a speech about it.
Given that Falstaff dies of grief before (or in) the next play, it's easy to see Henry's last scene as a really rotten thing to do. But reading it, I'm not so sure. I mean, he does offer Falstaff and his friends a pension, and he does give Falstaff several chances to be actually, you know, useful when dealing with the rebels--read, a chance for Falstaff to still have a role in his grown-up life. Falstaff was really expecting a lot out of his King Hal, really an unreasonable amount, and Henry has no way of knowing that Falstaff is going to die of grief.
Interlude: There's a persistent pattern here where I go to Ashland/Stratford, read about five plays, then get stuck because the next play is The Taming of the Shrew (and thus awful) or Edward III (and thus scary and unfamiliar), and put this project aside for a year. I didn't start up this August because we were moving. I started up in January because I saw (most of) The Hollow Crown in December. I wonder what happened in March?
I am skipping Henry V because I haven't seen the last episode of The Hollow Crown yet and I don't want it to be too familiar when I do.
Play: Timon of Athens
Date finished: January 10, 2014
Death count: 1: Timon
Comments: I am reading this one out of order because (a) I don't really want to read Coriolanus and Timon back-to-back, (b) the next one up is Much Ado about Nothing, which is probably my favorite of the comedies I haven't read yet, and (c) I was curious to see whether Timon is really as bad as I think based on the BBC Television Shakespeare version.
I think that the conclusion is no, Timon is not a total loss with absolutely no redeeming features. The poetry is good--it's Shakespeare, after all. Flavius is an honestly sympathetic character, and his scene with Timon in Act IV is actually touching. Apemantus hates everything and is hilariously snarky about it. (His scene with Timon in Act IV could have stood to be shorter, but it was pretty good for a little while.) And Acts I--III have an actual plot. (Act I: Establish Timon as generous; Act II: Reveal that Timon is broke; Act III: Timon tries to borrow money and snaps when it doesn't work.) Act IV is kind of pointless (Timon hates everyone!) except for the aforementioned scenes with Flavius and Apemantus, and I suppose you need Alcibiades to show up for a minute in order for the resolution in Act V to work, but mostly it's just Timon being misanthropic, which gets old really fast. And Act V has some sort of resolution (Alcibiades attacking Athens; Timon dying). So, yes, Shakespeare's worst play, but not totally a waste.
Paul Sally has a line about how the math department will teach one-quarter calculus (differentiation without integration) when the English department teaches a class on Acts I--III of Macbeth. I've been joking for a while that it has to be Macbeth and not Troilus and Cressida, because Troilus doesn't get any worse when you leave off the last act. I think Timon might be an even better example--the awful parts are all in Act IV, and Act III even has some sort of resolution (the feast of waters).
Some other comments:
"Nothing I'll bear from thee/But nakedness, thou detestable town!" There is some textual support for the idea that Timon is naked (or almost naked) for Acts IV and V. Clearly, this means that this is a role for Ben Whishaw.
"I am speaking Latin, because I am so erudite" is silly when Titus does it, but I think it may be even sillier when Timon does it. In related news, clearly Athens had a Senate, because all ancient democracies were totally identical.
"The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction/Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,/And her pale fire she snatches from the sun". Is this the most scientifically correct verse in Shakespeare, or what?
Casting this has got to be interesting, because it's pretty clear that the First Senator in V.ii is not the same First Senator as in V.i.
Play: Much Ado About Nothing
Date finished: January 10, 2014
Death count: None
Antonio: Leonato of Messina's brother, Hero's uncle, but evidently not Beatrice's uncle. Given the imprecisions of Shakespearean terminology, he could be Leonato's brother-in-law.
Comments: And that was definitely a good post-Timon palate cleanser.
This play almost fails the reverse-Bechdel test. Not quite; Don John and Conrade have a conversation about how angry Don John is, and Dogberry and Verges have a conversation about how the Watchmen should comport themselves. (There is a dialogue at the beginning about Don Pedro's battle with Don John, but since one of the participants is named "Messenger", it doesn't count.)
It is kind of odd that Beatrice and Benedick are apparently prose characters. Also, after Timon, which really does have five natural subsections, the act breaks seem really random in this one. (Especially Act III, which starts between the two scenes setting up Beatrice and Benedick.)
Don Pedro's plan to set up Beatrice and Benedick is either totally pointless (because they clearly have a thing for each other already) or else is the proper way to deal with people who refuse to admit their feelings.
I can't remember if Nathan Fillion gets to declare himself "as pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina", but it's funny anyways.
I have seen the Branagh/Thompson Much Ado so many times that I don't just hear Benedick as Branagh and so forth--I hear Benedick as Branagh for some lines and not for the lines that he cut. This is very disconcerting when he cuts only part of a speech.
I saw the Branagh Much Ado many, many times as a teenager. And then I started seeing other versions, and I realized that he was cutting things. Okay, yes, if it's not Macbeth it needs to be cut for performance, and Much Ado is good enough that I will like whatever it is that gets left out--but I realized that he was cutting all the funny lines that are spoken by anyone except Beatrice and Benedick, especially Margaret's jokes at their expense. I still haven't forgiven him for that.
Halfway done!
Play: Hamlet, first quarto version. Commentary redacted until I've read the MIT version.
Date finished: January 13, 2014
Play: The Merry Wives of Windsor
Date finished: January 13, 2014
Death count: None
Crossdressers: Two. At the end, Anne Page and two boys are dressed similarly enough that they can be mistaken for each other. Technically they are all dressed androgynously, but since the boys pretend to be her, it counts.
Comments: There is a line indicating that Ford is jealous of the correct person, i.e., Mistress Page, but it doesn't go anywhere.
This play is almost entirely in prose. One of the best things about reading Shakespeare is the poetry. Thus, this play is missing Timon's most significant redeeming feature, and it kind of also needs it.
I think that this probably happens between Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2. It can't be later because Falstaff dies of grief soon after Henry V's coronation; Fenton is mentioned as having been a companion of "the wild prince and Poins", so it can't possibly be much before Henry IV, Part 1; and Falstaff has a boy companion, as he does in Henry IV, Part 2. It's a little odd that he's so very broke when he's also so very in favor with Hal, but on the other hand, it's Falstaff.
Sort of. I don't really recognize this guy as Falstaff: he's old, unattractive, and full of vices (lust in this case), but he doesn't have any of his comic soliloquies or elaborate excuses. I feel like Hal's Falstaff really ought to have a much better explanation of why it was all in Ford's best interest for Falstaff to be seducing his wife. In short, he's Falstaff so he can be the (weakly justified) Butt Monkey, not so he can do any of the things that makes Hal's Falstaff fun to watch.
Play: Hamlet
Date finished: January 16, 2014
Death count: 6 to 9: Hamlet Senior, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, Hamlet.
Pirate Attacks: 1
Comments: I'm not going to put up a full analysis of Hamlet here, since I definitely see why this is one of the most-studied, analyzed, performed, parodied, and referenced of Shakespeare's plays. However, in reading the full version, including all the bits that get cut all the time, I kept going, "Oh, so that's where that bit of Pseudonymous comes from!"
The most recent Hamlet I saw was the National Theatre Live version with Rory Kinnear as Hamlet. Which was brilliant, but oddly enough, the voice that seemed to stick with me from that performance was Ruth Negga's: I kept hearing her voice as Ophelia in my head.
In addition to the gravedigger, the Player King talks about having been married for thirty years just before he dies.
Scene V.ii is a lot shorter to read than to see. Shakespeare in particular, and plays in general, are better to read than, say, movie scripts, because so much of the action is in the words and not in explosions and special effects, but V.ii is both a fight scene and a climax where a lot of things happen.
And I definitely believe that the first quarto is either reconstructed from memory or a rough draft.
Play: As You Like It
Date finished: January 16, 2014
Death count: None
Crossdressers: Rosalind/Ganymede. I'd like to see a performance sometime where Orlando is as smart as Figaro, but usually he rather spectacularly is not--which is kind of odd, since Phebe is.
Comments: I've been considering naming a hypothetical future girlchild Rosalind for a while, after (1) Rosalind Franklin, (2) a Shakespeare heroine and (3) tortoise's grandmother Rose (Celia refers to Rosalind as "Rose" in one line). As You Like It is not Shakespeare's best comedy, but it's not his worst either. (According to tortoise's statistics, As You Like It is performed more often than any other play except Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Of course, those statistics also have The Taming of the Shrew performed more often than Much Ado About Nothing, so obviously they are not definitive indications of quality.) And Rosalind is both competent and kind enough to be a good role model if not a particularly stunning character. Orlando is not an ideal prospective son-in-law, even among Shakespeare's characters, but at least he values having an education enough to be pissed that he doesn't have one.
I haven't seen any particularly stunning productions of As You Like It (or any movie more than once), so the only character who really has a distinct reading presence for me is Silvius, who in my head is played by Justin Pava.
I know I keep talking about this, but I'm realizing that I really like Shakespeare's verse, and kind of only like his prose if he's doing something clever or funny with it (Hal's Falstaff, say, or having Hamlet speak in prose when he's pretending to be mad). So the way this play kept switching between prose and poetry kind of bothered me.
I also think it's kind of funny that Touchstone's proposed rhymes for "Rosalind" at least all still rhyme with each other, and Orlando's don't.
Play: Julius Caesar
Date finished: January 16, 2014
Death count: 8+: Flavius and Marullus (offstage), Caesar, Cinna the Poet, Portia, Cassius, Titinius, Brutus, soldiers, possibly the other conspirators.
Comments: The first Shakespeare I ever saw was probably the Branagh Much Ado or the CalShakes Much Ado, but I think Caesar may have been the second. I remember the first time I saw it, I got my parents' copy and tried to memorize Antony's funeral speech. (I did something similar with Macbeth, which we read in school when I was twelve.)
In addition to being sneaky, ambitious, and evil, Cassius doesn't like the theater. This is very important.
Play: Antony and Cleopatra
Date finished: January 19, 2014
Death count: 6+: Domitius Enobarbus, Eros, Mark Antony (although it takes him about a hundred lines including a scene change to actually die), Iras, Cleopatra, Charmian, soldiers. All of the named characters commit suicide onstage.
Comments: My favorite part about the histories is the overarching multi-play plot arc; indeed, that's the best reason I can think of to watch or read Henry IV.2. I was hoping to get the same thing here, since Octavius and Antony are in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and that's why I read Caesar late and Cleopatra early. It doesn't really work, because there's a lot of stuff that happens between Caesar and Cleopatra, because Octavius and Antony are both very different characters in the two plays, and because, well, Caesar is frankly a better play than Cleopatra. I think it might have worked better to read Caesar, read some other things in between, and then read Cleopatra, because I can believe that Antony and Octavius in Cleopatra are Antony and Octavius in Caesar after a lot of time has passed.
What happened to Cleopatra's children after she died?
Play: Twelfth Night
Date finished: January 20, 2014
Death count: None
Shipwrecks: One, setting up the play
Crossdressers: Viola/Cesario. I suppose we can't accuse Orsino of not being as smart as Figaro, since he met Cesario before Viola. Sebastian, on the other hand, is.
Antonio: Sebastian's friend. Sometime before the play began, he and Duke Orsino fought a sea-battle, in which they saw each other's faces; he's been in a couple of other sea-battles with Orsino's fleet.
Comments: I've seen the Imogen Stubbs movie enough times that I do hear their voices in my head when I read this (especially Helena Bonham Carter's). I did notice a few differences. Cesario and Sir Andrew's fight, and Antonio and Sir Toby's fight, and I think even Sebastian and Sir Toby's fight, aren't in the script; they all get interrupted before they do more than draw their swords.
Olivia and Sebastian agree to keep their wedding secret for a little while. The line "What time we will our celebration keep/According to my birth" probably just means that when time comes to reveal her secret she will celebrate as befits a countess, but could mean that, like my aunt Lynn and uncle Aaron, they are getting married on her birthday and are camouflaging it in those celebrations.
This is about when I gave up on reading it in chronological order and reorganized the remaining plays so that the tragedies and comedies/romances alternated.
Play: Othello
Date finished: January 22, 2014
Death count: 4 or 5: Brabantio (offstage), Roderigo, Desdemona, Emilia, Othello. Oddly enough, not Iago.
Comments: The first time Iago explains why he doesn't like Cassius and Othello, he has a valid point: promoting someone who doesn't have any battlefield experience over someone who does is a bad idea. When he starts making up more reasons, though...
I think the implication is that Iago has spent his entire life telling the truth and being honest to set up his one little revenge drama, because the play only works because everyone trusts him totally.
Play: All's Well that Ends Well
Date finished: January 27, 2014
Death count: None, although if the director really wanted, I suppose he could throw in a battle scene at the start of Scene III.v and have Bertram kill some Italian soldiers.
Antonio: After Bertram, Parolles, and the whole Florentine army enter, Diana's mother points out "Antonio, the duke's eldest son" to Helena. Notice that she doesn't specify which duke, and earlier in the scene mentioned Bertram as having slain "the duke's brother", without specifying that he'd slain the brother of the Duke of Siena, not of the Duke of Florence.
Comments: Ashland has one very small theater (the "New Theater") in which there are about five rows of seats, the first of which is about a meter from the stage. And since it's a 3/4 or round theater, none of the stage is that far from you no matter where you are sitting. A few years ago we saw All's Well in the New Theater, and it apparently made such an impression on me that I kept seeing their Helena, Bertram, Diana and Parolles, rather than hearing them as I usually do.
That particular performance was also unusual in that they actually managed to make Bertram a remotely sympathetic character, and thus the reconciliation at the end was (a) plausible and (b) actually a happy ending for Helena (who is not, thus, stuck with a jerk until one of them dies). tortoise is glad he's seen at least one performance (at Stratford) that was a bit truer to the dark spirit of the text, and I do agree, but the happy Ashland New Theater performance is still really my favorite and probably will always be. So the way I kept seeing that performance in my head was at least a little deliberate on my part.
Play: Troilus and Cressida
Date finished: January 28, 2014
Death count: 3+: halfway through Act V, Shakespeare remembers that the Iliad is going on in the background, so we get the deaths of Patroclus, someone in splendid armor, and Hector. All, if I recall correctly, offstage.
Comments: I've seen four plays in the New Theatre: Julius Caesar, All's Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and King Lear. Again I kept seeing flashes of that performance in my head. Oddly enough, that mostly didn't happen with Caesar (maybe the death of Cinna the Poet, but that's it). I think it's because, while that performance of Caesar was good, it wasn't overwhelmingly my favorite Caesar ever--and the happy All's Well is my favorite All's Well, and I've only seen Troilus twice and the BBC film version was pretty awful. So, flashes of my favorite version. I wonder if I will flash back to the New Theatre during Lear? Unfortunately there's no way for me to test this without thinking about it.
Play: Measure for Measure
Date finished: January 29, 2014
Death count: One, if you count Ragozine, who is never onstage and has no lines.
Comments: This is another one I've seen twice, and once was the BBC version. Again I kept seeing flashes of the live performance--oddly enough, as it wasn't in the New Theatre.
In the BBC version, I feel like they tried to present Duke Vincentio as this sort of very competent, very in-control guy with a plan. And, well, he's not. And presenting him that way makes him not only a huge jerk, but kind of bad at planning too. His stated plan, in running off and leaving Angelo in charge, is that he's been too lenient in enforcing the law in Vienna and he wants Angelo to crack down and get everyone to take the law seriously. And at the end of the play he comes back and pardons Claudio (and Barnadine), thus totally undermining it all. And that works, if he's an optimistic sweet guy who just can't stand to actually have anyone die, which is how he got in that mess in the first place. It doesn't work at all if he's a cynical plotter. There are other things--he seems totally sure that Angelo is going to carry through his promise to free Claudio, and he promoted Angelo despite knowing what he'd done to Mariana: either he's a horrible judge of character because he's so sweet he can't stand judging people, or he's let himself realize what a jerk Angelo is and is handing him his city anyways in a cynical bid to make his subjects really want him back. The Ashland version had Duke Vincentio running around with a big grin on his face most of the time, which I think suits the text much better.
[edit] I suppose you could go with the idea that Duke Vincentio's cunning plan is to make himself loved by rescuing everyone from Angelo, and he's lying to Friar Thomas about his plan as part of his plan. That does leave him as competent, but I don't really feel like that's the interpretation presented in the text. (And also if he's ruthless and competent, then he's presumably making up the "everyone flouts the laws" thing, because ruthless competent rulers don't let that happen.)
Some of the BBC Television Shakespeare is actually quite good (Hamlet, Much Ado, Derek Jacobi was good as Richard II, and I liked their Henry VIs and Richard III). Others were awful (Timon, Troilus, Coriolanus, Henry IV.2) and I'm realizing that Measure for Measure wasn't that good even taking into account that Measure for Measure is a dark and awkward play. I think part of it is that they didn't have time to do a lot of textual analysis. (I mean, they were doing six plays a season and I don't think they had the resources that, say, Ashland can bring to bear.) So Hamlet and Much Ado are great because people have already read or seen or discussed them, but Measure for Measure misses out because they didn't spend enough time analyzing Duke Vincentio, and nobody's seen Timon, Troilus or Coriolanus and they didn't have enough time to figure out what's going on so they can convey it to the audience. (I remember being totally lost through all of Coriolanus, and it wasn't entirely because of the cheap sets and low-quality film making the whole movie look the same.) (The others are sort of hit-or-miss depending on the casting: Anthony Quayle's Falstaff is just awful and that ruined Henry IV.2, Derek Jacobi is good enough to carry Richard II, and I at least am a huge fan of Ron Cook, as Miles Vorkosigan, as Richard of Gloucester.)
Play: King Lear
Date finished: January 30, 2014
Death count: 10--12: the Fool (in some productions), Cornwall's servant, Cornwall, Oswald, Gloucester, Regan, Goneril, Cordelia, Cordelia's murderer, Edmund, Lear, Kent (after the play).
Comments: Apparently if I've seen lots of good performances of some play, what that means is that I get flashes of all of them while reading.
Play: Pericles: the Legendary Journeys
Date finished: January 31, 2014
Death count: 6: Antiochus and his daughter, Leonine, Simonides, Creon, Dionyza.
Shipwrecks: 3: one brought Pericles to Pentapolis to meet his wife, one brought Pericles to Mytilene to meet his daughter, and one brought Thaisa and a bunch of random extras to Ephesus. Apparently Shakespeare decided that three shipwrecks was enough and it would be more plausible to have a deus ex machina, or at least ex somnus, send Pericles to Ephesus to find Thaisa again.
Pirate Attacks: 1; they rescue Marina.
Comments: The current theory I think is that the first half of the play was written by someone else, possibly George Wilkins, and Shakespeare just finished it. I believe it: a lot of the lines in the first half end with very forced rhymes, and Shakespeare generally either (a) finds good rhymes or (b) doesn't bother rhyming at all. So Antiochus and his riddle are not Shakespeare's fault. However, Marina's incorruptible pure purity definitely is.
Play: Macbeth
Date finished: February 1, 2014
Death count: 10+: Cawdor, Duncan, Duncan's two guards, Banquo, Lady Macduff, Macduff's son (and presumably his other children), Lady Macbeth, Young Siward, Macbeth, soldiers.
I didn't quite manage to read twenty plays (half the corpus) in the month of January...or I did, but only technically, if you count the two different versions of Hamlet as two.
Play: Cymbeline
Date finished: February 2, 2014
Death count: 2+: Cloten, the Queen, soldiers.
Crossdressers: Imogen/Fidele. Posthumous is not as smart as Figaro. Then again, Imogen isn't either: she mistakes Cloten's body for Posthumous's because Cloten is wearing his clothes (and has no head). Cymbeline, on the contrary, almost is.
Comments: As a 21st-century feminist in good standing, I am of course in favor of people breaking gender roles. But as a Shakespeare fan I do find it kind of weird. Imogen, like Marina, is so sweet and wonderful that everyone loves her and wants to protect her...but she doesn't really do anything. And that feels like a very traditionally-feminine way of being awesome: the men everyone loves, like, say, Posthumous, go out and win battles. So it seems strange that she can attract protection and affection through sheer pure sweetness (and possibly through cooking and housework)...even when she's disguised as a man. I almost think that the best explanation is that she's very badly disguised as a man, and everyone can see that she's a woman and is playing along because they agree it's the best way to protect her. (Considering, say, that Guilderius calls her "O sweetest, fairest lily", either he's seen through her disguise...or there is some overwhelming homoerotic subtext going on.)
Play: Coriolanus
Date finished: February 3, 2014
Death count: 1+: oddly enough, the only named character who dies is Coriolanus.
Comments: Up until he yields to his mother and saves Rome, the closest Coriolanus comes to being sympathetic is when he's channeling Cordelia, and doesn't want to tell flattering lies for political gain. However, there is a difference in that "I do not love my father astronomically more than everything else in the world put together" is a totally reasonable sentiment, while "I have nothing but contempt for the very people I'm asking to give me power over them" isn't.
I should also mention that I liked the later bits of the play much more than the earlier bits; I find it kind of hard to track what is going on in the first act or two. As soon as he gets back from Corioli (or maybe as soon as he leaves again?) it starts to get much easier to follow.
Play: Henry V
Date finished: February 4, 2014
Death count: 10+: Cambridge, Grey, Scroop, Bardolph, Nym, York, the Constable of France, the Dauphin, the Boy, Mistress Quickly, and lots and lots and lots of soldiers. (There's a long list of French noblemen who die, which I'm not going to repeat; I think the Constable and the Dauphin are the only ones with lines.)
Comments: This is the point at which I looked at my Netflix queue, realized that Henry V wasn't going to arrive for about a month, looked at my list of remaining plays, realized that there were five left, and decided to just read Henry V already. It might be just as well: I was curious as to whether I'd hear Branagh or Olivier or John Tufts while reading it. (As it happened, I didn't; I suppose I did see them a while ago.) And I'm pretty sure that if I had read this just after seeing the Hollow Crown version, all that would happen would be that I'd have heard Hiddleston the whole time. (Something like that happened with McKellan's Lear.)
If you're watching the histories starting with Richard II and ending with Richard III, then Henry V makes a nice breather episode in the middle of all the succession debates. In this case Edward III is sort of like King John in that it's not tied to the main thrust of the histories. On the other hand, if you're starting with Richard II and stopping at Henry V, I sort of like to attach Edward III because Edward III and Henry V are both about a war in France to claim the throne for Princess Isabella's descendant the current King of England, and thus you get a nice full-circle effect.
And now if I want this to be the comprehensive Shakespeare marathon:
Date: February 4, 2014; Poems finished: The Phoenix and the Turtle, A Lover's Complaint, Sonnets 1-50.
Date: February 5, 2014; Poems finished: Venus and Adonis, Sonnets 51-74.
Date: February 6, 2014; Poems finished: The Rape of Lucrece, Sonnets 75-87.
Date: February 7, 2014; Poems finished: Sonnets 88-116.
Date: February 8, 2014; Poems finished: Sonnets 117-125.
Date: February 9, 2014; Poems finished: Sonnets 126-154.
Comments: Consent-based sexual ethics are a good thing. Also, I don't really feel that sitting down and reading all 154 sonnets in a row really works; any one sonnet is good, but there isn't a lot of overarching sonnet-to-sonnet narrative structure, and a lot of them are kind of repetitive.
Play: Henry VIII
Date finished: February 7, 2014
Death count: 3: Buckingham, Cardinal Wolsey, Queen Katharine
Comments: How much can we possibly suck up to Queen Elizabeth, and her mother, and her successor, in one play?
Play: A Winter's Tale
Date finished: February 8, 2014
Death count: 2: Mamillius and Antigonus. (3, if you think Hermione died and was resurrected rather than just hid for sixteen years.)
Shipwrecks: Antigonus's ship wrecks just as he's abandoning Perdita, in order to make it really hard to find her.
Play: The Two Noble Kinsmen, from Shakespeare's Words.
Date finished: February 9, 2014
Death count: 1+: Arcite.
Comments: I still can't get over the way, at the end, Palamon's friends are scheduled to be executed with him...especially given that his friends and relations are probably also Arcite's friends and relations, and are risking their lives to kill him and his friends.
Play: The Tempest
Date finished: February 10, 2014
Death count: None
Shipwrecks: One, setting up the play.
Comments: After A Winter's Tale thoroughly breaks the classical Greek convention that time inside the play should run at the same rate as time outside the play, The Tempest may in fact be the only play in the canon that actually resolves in three hours.
My biggest problem with The Tempest is that my first exposure to Shakespeare was the illustrated novelization of this Tempest cartoon, which I read enough times as a kid that I remember many of the lines that made it into the novelization. I sort of wish I'd at least had the cartoon as a kid (or, better, a full film version), because I missed a lot of the implications reading it that young and I'm sort of stuck with my first impression. Most noticeably, I managed to miss that the storm in Scene I.i is dangerous and that the mariners are afraid for their lives, so when it's performed in my head they sound ridiculously cheerful.
Done! Two years, five months and 25 days after starting this, although I should note that the first thirteen plays took two years and four months and the remaining 27 plays (plus the poetry) took me a mere 41 days.