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Fannish 5: Brush up your Shakespeare
Mar. 5th, 2011 07:10 amName the five best uses of Shakespeare’s work (faithful adaptations, plots inspired by his work, references to one of his plays/sonnets).
It's impossible to narrow it down to five, and "best" is a tricky denomination, but here are five that stayed with me the most. Also I tried to avoid making this a list of favourite film versions of Shakespeare plays, which would be another question.
1) A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in Neil Gaiman's Sandman (as well as the use of William Shakespeare as a character, still probably my favourite fictional version of Will S.). These two plays who are themselves very meta, containing plays-within-plays, the magic of stagecraft versus real magic and so forth, work terrifically juxtaposed with the Sandman themes. Plus I've said it before, I'll say it again: Neil Gaiman is the only author to pull off a use of Prospero's final monologue, traditionally regarded as Shakespeare's goodbye, use it as his own farewell to his opus magnum and make that feel not pretentious but entirely apropriate.
2.) Othello in the film Stage Beauty. Stage Beauty is anything but a straightforward and accurate historical film (just try to date it when you know anything about the Restoration and the characters therein, who flit through the film despite being sometimes decades too late or too early for their appearance), but hey, neither were any of Shakespeare's histories. What it does provide is a great story doing marvellous things with acting, gender, sex and jealousy (the one fuelled by professional ambition and identity issues as well as the more sexual type), and that as much as anything makes Othello the perfect choice for the play-within-the-story. The use of Desdemona's death scene throughout, the question as to who plays Desdemona, how to play Desdemona, and how to play Othello, it's all really essential to the plot, and no other scene but the one between Desdemona and Othello could provide nearly as much suspense for the climactic highlight at the end.
3.) West Side Story (as an adaption of Romeo and Juliet brought into the then present and made into a musical). Thank you, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. (With a side of Arthur Laurents for the script and Jeremy Robbins for the original choreography.) The marvelous thing is that this works entirely as its own piece and yet when you map it against the Shakespeare play you see how entirely bit for bit it is matched. Oh, and it still cracks me up that Laurents is proud (arguably justifiably so) that he got Will one better in giving Anita a damn good reason not to deliver the right message when in Romeo and Juliet it's simply a case of bad luck that Brother Laurence's letter doesn't reach Romeo in time.
4.) Chimes at Midnight by Orson Welles. The reason why this is here despite my declaration of "no straightforward film versions" above is that Chimes isn't. Orson W., about the only director/scriptwriter who would, after a lifetime of preoccupation and previous attempts to wrangle the Henries down, used the two parts of Henry IV, bits of Merry Wives and a bit from Henry V and put it together in what is essentially a new play, The Tragedie of Sir John Falstaff. He did it with his usual post-Kane obstacles of no money and having the actors available only intermittendly as favours because he charmed them into gallivanting off with him to Spain or whereever he happened to be shooting, and created something fantastic out of it. (Francois Truffaut reviewed the film thusly, summing it up as: "I can't help being a genius, I'm dying: love me.")
5.)Hamlet in In the Bleak Midwinter (detailed raving just linked) by Kenneth Branagh. Best use of Hamlet in a film I've seen (and no, I still haven't watched Slings and Arrows - I'll get there, I promise!), including Banagh's own straightforward take on the Danish play later, it manages to be both hysterically funny and genuinenly moving at different points, says a lot about acting from an actor/director's pov in a way that simultanously pokes fun at himself (and which better play than the one where an amateur aristo lectures actors on how to play to use for that one?) and is heartfelt, and if I didn't love the film for all those reasons already, I'd always love it because Ophelia gets to slap Hamlet in the get-the-to-a-nunnery scene.
BONUS 6.), because I have to: THIS. The rehearsal photos aren't half bad, either. *shamelessly objectifies*
It's impossible to narrow it down to five, and "best" is a tricky denomination, but here are five that stayed with me the most. Also I tried to avoid making this a list of favourite film versions of Shakespeare plays, which would be another question.
1) A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in Neil Gaiman's Sandman (as well as the use of William Shakespeare as a character, still probably my favourite fictional version of Will S.). These two plays who are themselves very meta, containing plays-within-plays, the magic of stagecraft versus real magic and so forth, work terrifically juxtaposed with the Sandman themes. Plus I've said it before, I'll say it again: Neil Gaiman is the only author to pull off a use of Prospero's final monologue, traditionally regarded as Shakespeare's goodbye, use it as his own farewell to his opus magnum and make that feel not pretentious but entirely apropriate.
2.) Othello in the film Stage Beauty. Stage Beauty is anything but a straightforward and accurate historical film (just try to date it when you know anything about the Restoration and the characters therein, who flit through the film despite being sometimes decades too late or too early for their appearance), but hey, neither were any of Shakespeare's histories. What it does provide is a great story doing marvellous things with acting, gender, sex and jealousy (the one fuelled by professional ambition and identity issues as well as the more sexual type), and that as much as anything makes Othello the perfect choice for the play-within-the-story. The use of Desdemona's death scene throughout, the question as to who plays Desdemona, how to play Desdemona, and how to play Othello, it's all really essential to the plot, and no other scene but the one between Desdemona and Othello could provide nearly as much suspense for the climactic highlight at the end.
3.) West Side Story (as an adaption of Romeo and Juliet brought into the then present and made into a musical). Thank you, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. (With a side of Arthur Laurents for the script and Jeremy Robbins for the original choreography.) The marvelous thing is that this works entirely as its own piece and yet when you map it against the Shakespeare play you see how entirely bit for bit it is matched. Oh, and it still cracks me up that Laurents is proud (arguably justifiably so) that he got Will one better in giving Anita a damn good reason not to deliver the right message when in Romeo and Juliet it's simply a case of bad luck that Brother Laurence's letter doesn't reach Romeo in time.
4.) Chimes at Midnight by Orson Welles. The reason why this is here despite my declaration of "no straightforward film versions" above is that Chimes isn't. Orson W., about the only director/scriptwriter who would, after a lifetime of preoccupation and previous attempts to wrangle the Henries down, used the two parts of Henry IV, bits of Merry Wives and a bit from Henry V and put it together in what is essentially a new play, The Tragedie of Sir John Falstaff. He did it with his usual post-Kane obstacles of no money and having the actors available only intermittendly as favours because he charmed them into gallivanting off with him to Spain or whereever he happened to be shooting, and created something fantastic out of it. (Francois Truffaut reviewed the film thusly, summing it up as: "I can't help being a genius, I'm dying: love me.")
5.)Hamlet in In the Bleak Midwinter (detailed raving just linked) by Kenneth Branagh. Best use of Hamlet in a film I've seen (and no, I still haven't watched Slings and Arrows - I'll get there, I promise!), including Banagh's own straightforward take on the Danish play later, it manages to be both hysterically funny and genuinenly moving at different points, says a lot about acting from an actor/director's pov in a way that simultanously pokes fun at himself (and which better play than the one where an amateur aristo lectures actors on how to play to use for that one?) and is heartfelt, and if I didn't love the film for all those reasons already, I'd always love it because Ophelia gets to slap Hamlet in the get-the-to-a-nunnery scene.
BONUS 6.), because I have to: THIS. The rehearsal photos aren't half bad, either. *shamelessly objectifies*
