dudes, you know I love you, but COME ON.
This afternoon, instead of doing anything useful, I listened to the cast and crew commentary on the Shakespeare in Love DVD, which I'd never heard before. (I've had the movie on VHS since pretty much the day it came out, but I just bought the DVD last month when it was on sale.) Anyway, much enjoyment was had, except for a couple of things:
--Marc Norman mispronouncing "Viola," despite the fact that everyone in the movie pronounces it properly. (This really sets my teeth on edge, despite the fact that most people [including several of my students from last term, and wasn't that a fun little experience in TORTURE?] probably pronounce it Norman-style, or as though she were a musical instrument. What can I say? Favorite play, favorite heroine. I'm picky.)
--The bigger annoyance, though, came from the commentators' (particularly Joseph Fiennes and Tom Stoppard) odd notions about "academics." They both seem to think that modern academics are the ones promoting non-Stratfordian candidates for authorship (umm...?), and Fiennes is of the impression that making Shakespeare in Love was great because it would drive academics insane. I sort of wished I could wave a copy of 1599 in their faces and tell them that James Shapiro has often said he was inspired to write the book in part because of the film. Not all of us are stuffed shirts who can't take a joke! Some of us adore this movie! (And then I thought, "Wait a minute. Did I just align myself with academics? When did *that* happen???") I'm growing used to people using "academic" as a perjorative, I suppose, but it's especially frustrating coming from a film that relies on the research of academics, especially when Marc Norman was constantly mentioning that he'd talked to Stephen Greenblatt about the film as he was in the process of writing the screenplay. (That said, though, the Renaissance students in my department whom I've talked to about the subject--which is not all of them, I hasten to add--really do dislike this movie. Between this and their disdain for the comedies, I am not sure what to do with these people, I swear.)
I did have some other thinky thoughts about the commentary, especially with regard to public perception of Shakespeare:
As I said above, I love this movie. It came out during my freshman year of college, right about the time I was becoming obsessed with Shakespeare--and I can't say for certain that the spate of "who was Shakespeare, really?" articles that came out around that time didn't play some role in getting me to think about Shakespeare historically, and not just in the disembodied way he'd been taught to me in high school. It was certainly in the back of my mind, anyway, as I was taking my first college Shakespeare course and getting handouts about the Elizabethan theatre, reading Louis Montrose's piece on A Midsummer Night's Dream for the first time, all of that. And two of my closest college friends became obsessed with the film at the same time, and we bonded over our many (many) trips to see this movie at the local theater. I would have become obsessed with Shakespeare without Shakespeare in Love, of course (since why would I have wanted to see it in the first place if I hadn't already loved Shakespeare?), but I *do* think it provided me with a window into being interested in the biography and perhaps the stagecraft. Maybe this was in part a bad thing, as I spent my undergrad time reading things like Shakespeare: The Evidence and Andrew Gurr instead of theory and criticism--but it does mean that I'm now the go-to girl among our cohort if you want to know about Manningham's anecdote about "William the Conqueror" or (someone asked me this on Tuesday) why the 1608 Quarto of Lear didn't have act divisions. It's stuff that is pretty basic--I don't pretend to be an expert in any of it--but it is stuff that my current classmates don't seem to have been at all interested in.
That was actually a bit of a digression, really. Anyway. Marc Norman trotted out that old warhorse of Shakespeare-as-entertainer cliches: that he had to write for everyone, that he had to have the pratfalls and the gags for the poor people, and the pretty poetry for the lords and ladies, and that the film basically had to do the same thing. Maybe Hamlet, with his whole "capable of nothing but dumb shows and noise" bit, is somewhat responsible for this attitude, but it's horribly elitist, I think, to say that only lords can appreciate poetry. Not to say that Shakespeare *didn't* write for everyone, but somehow I doubt that the enjoyment of a pratfall broke down along class lines.
I'd never really thought about it before, but various people on the DVD commentary also kept saying that they hoped this film somehow made Shakespeare less scary for people, that it made him seem accessible. For the record, I hope so too. (Because I don't disagree that Shakespeare is scary for a lot of people, and I hate that. It made my stomach hurt each time someone said it. I just wish I could *do* something about it. [Besides dragging my unwilling mother to the local free Shakespeare in the summers, I mean.] But I'm pretty sure academic monographs aren't the way to go on this one. I'm not even sure that teaching college students is--maybe it's already too little, too late by then? Even if I *could* teach, instead of frustrating students to death by letting them choose their own topics for discussion or whatever it is they hate so much about sections.) But if they're actually thinking about their audience in this stratified way, or if we think about audiences in that way, then aren't we just replicating that attitude toward Shakespeare? That the stuff that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare--the language--is upper-class, elite stuff, and the groundlings will only get it if we make the Montagues and Capulets rival gangs or something, and reduce the language to the bare minimum one needs for plot? How can we say that Shakespeare is for everyone, while at the same time blithely assuming that, actually, huge parts of it aren't?
Part of this has nothing to do with Shakespeare in Love, and everything to do with the fact that I've seen several subpar Shakespeare performances in the last couple of years, and in each case, the problem was lack of attention to the verse, and over-attention to the "concept." I went to a couple of these with a friend in the department, and after one particularly bad one, she wanted to know why people felt they had to dress Shakespeare up in ways that just detracted from the plays. In my heart of hearts, I think it's because a lot of directors don't trust the audience to understand Shakespeare; they feel they have to give the audience (and perhaps their actors) some concept to hang on to, while the actors simply raise their voices to indicate passion of some sort, without bothering to make the lines intelligible. (I've seen a lot of Shouty Shakespeare lately. I'm bitter.) I think this is what is actually being said when a lot of people say they want to "make Shakespeare relevant" to a modern audience--it means they're going to wrap the Shakespeare up in a concept, no matter how much it strains interpretation, so the audience doesn't have to think so hard. And the reason I was so startled to hear this attitude espoused by Marc Norman was because I think Shakespeare in Love really *doesn't* do that; it presents Shakespeare with a light touch, sure, but it also expects the audience to get it. The movie really privileges Shakespeare's language--it cures stuttering, for heaven's sake--even while it "demystifies" the man of genius idea of Shakespeare.
Basically, I need to live somewhere with better Shakespeare performances. :) And ones that I could afford, of course.
--Marc Norman mispronouncing "Viola," despite the fact that everyone in the movie pronounces it properly. (This really sets my teeth on edge, despite the fact that most people [including several of my students from last term, and wasn't that a fun little experience in TORTURE?] probably pronounce it Norman-style, or as though she were a musical instrument. What can I say? Favorite play, favorite heroine. I'm picky.)
--The bigger annoyance, though, came from the commentators' (particularly Joseph Fiennes and Tom Stoppard) odd notions about "academics." They both seem to think that modern academics are the ones promoting non-Stratfordian candidates for authorship (umm...?), and Fiennes is of the impression that making Shakespeare in Love was great because it would drive academics insane. I sort of wished I could wave a copy of 1599 in their faces and tell them that James Shapiro has often said he was inspired to write the book in part because of the film. Not all of us are stuffed shirts who can't take a joke! Some of us adore this movie! (And then I thought, "Wait a minute. Did I just align myself with academics? When did *that* happen???") I'm growing used to people using "academic" as a perjorative, I suppose, but it's especially frustrating coming from a film that relies on the research of academics, especially when Marc Norman was constantly mentioning that he'd talked to Stephen Greenblatt about the film as he was in the process of writing the screenplay. (That said, though, the Renaissance students in my department whom I've talked to about the subject--which is not all of them, I hasten to add--really do dislike this movie. Between this and their disdain for the comedies, I am not sure what to do with these people, I swear.)
I did have some other thinky thoughts about the commentary, especially with regard to public perception of Shakespeare:
As I said above, I love this movie. It came out during my freshman year of college, right about the time I was becoming obsessed with Shakespeare--and I can't say for certain that the spate of "who was Shakespeare, really?" articles that came out around that time didn't play some role in getting me to think about Shakespeare historically, and not just in the disembodied way he'd been taught to me in high school. It was certainly in the back of my mind, anyway, as I was taking my first college Shakespeare course and getting handouts about the Elizabethan theatre, reading Louis Montrose's piece on A Midsummer Night's Dream for the first time, all of that. And two of my closest college friends became obsessed with the film at the same time, and we bonded over our many (many) trips to see this movie at the local theater. I would have become obsessed with Shakespeare without Shakespeare in Love, of course (since why would I have wanted to see it in the first place if I hadn't already loved Shakespeare?), but I *do* think it provided me with a window into being interested in the biography and perhaps the stagecraft. Maybe this was in part a bad thing, as I spent my undergrad time reading things like Shakespeare: The Evidence and Andrew Gurr instead of theory and criticism--but it does mean that I'm now the go-to girl among our cohort if you want to know about Manningham's anecdote about "William the Conqueror" or (someone asked me this on Tuesday) why the 1608 Quarto of Lear didn't have act divisions. It's stuff that is pretty basic--I don't pretend to be an expert in any of it--but it is stuff that my current classmates don't seem to have been at all interested in.
That was actually a bit of a digression, really. Anyway. Marc Norman trotted out that old warhorse of Shakespeare-as-entertainer cliches: that he had to write for everyone, that he had to have the pratfalls and the gags for the poor people, and the pretty poetry for the lords and ladies, and that the film basically had to do the same thing. Maybe Hamlet, with his whole "capable of nothing but dumb shows and noise" bit, is somewhat responsible for this attitude, but it's horribly elitist, I think, to say that only lords can appreciate poetry. Not to say that Shakespeare *didn't* write for everyone, but somehow I doubt that the enjoyment of a pratfall broke down along class lines.
I'd never really thought about it before, but various people on the DVD commentary also kept saying that they hoped this film somehow made Shakespeare less scary for people, that it made him seem accessible. For the record, I hope so too. (Because I don't disagree that Shakespeare is scary for a lot of people, and I hate that. It made my stomach hurt each time someone said it. I just wish I could *do* something about it. [Besides dragging my unwilling mother to the local free Shakespeare in the summers, I mean.] But I'm pretty sure academic monographs aren't the way to go on this one. I'm not even sure that teaching college students is--maybe it's already too little, too late by then? Even if I *could* teach, instead of frustrating students to death by letting them choose their own topics for discussion or whatever it is they hate so much about sections.) But if they're actually thinking about their audience in this stratified way, or if we think about audiences in that way, then aren't we just replicating that attitude toward Shakespeare? That the stuff that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare--the language--is upper-class, elite stuff, and the groundlings will only get it if we make the Montagues and Capulets rival gangs or something, and reduce the language to the bare minimum one needs for plot? How can we say that Shakespeare is for everyone, while at the same time blithely assuming that, actually, huge parts of it aren't?
Part of this has nothing to do with Shakespeare in Love, and everything to do with the fact that I've seen several subpar Shakespeare performances in the last couple of years, and in each case, the problem was lack of attention to the verse, and over-attention to the "concept." I went to a couple of these with a friend in the department, and after one particularly bad one, she wanted to know why people felt they had to dress Shakespeare up in ways that just detracted from the plays. In my heart of hearts, I think it's because a lot of directors don't trust the audience to understand Shakespeare; they feel they have to give the audience (and perhaps their actors) some concept to hang on to, while the actors simply raise their voices to indicate passion of some sort, without bothering to make the lines intelligible. (I've seen a lot of Shouty Shakespeare lately. I'm bitter.) I think this is what is actually being said when a lot of people say they want to "make Shakespeare relevant" to a modern audience--it means they're going to wrap the Shakespeare up in a concept, no matter how much it strains interpretation, so the audience doesn't have to think so hard. And the reason I was so startled to hear this attitude espoused by Marc Norman was because I think Shakespeare in Love really *doesn't* do that; it presents Shakespeare with a light touch, sure, but it also expects the audience to get it. The movie really privileges Shakespeare's language--it cures stuttering, for heaven's sake--even while it "demystifies" the man of genius idea of Shakespeare.
Basically, I need to live somewhere with better Shakespeare performances. :) And ones that I could afford, of course.