Shakespeareana
Apr. 4th, 2013 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSome recent London aquisitions came in dvd form.
Being Shakespeare: This is a recording of Simon Callow's one man show, which was highly enjoyable. I had already seen Callow on stage do this kind of show for Oscar Wilde, but missed the Dickens one, and the Shakespeare one. Turns out the later exists on dvd. If you haven't seen it, either: it's Callow narrating a highly likely version of Shakespeare's life plus some aspects of the Elizabethan age and acting out several monologues and dialogues from the plays (plus two sonnets and a bit from Venus and Adonis) in between, managing to connect them with life or the age. Which he does very well, whether it's Falstaff's "honour" take down or highlights from the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet or William the schoolboy from Merry Wives of Windsor. It's not just the "greatest hits" thing, either; he includes a speech from Thomas More, an obscure play that Shakespeare contributed to (or so researches concluded in recent years). For me the renderings that made me go most "huh, I hadn't expected this" was the way he played the Antony's funeral speech - less mob stirring, more genuinenly emotionally shattered than I'm used to, but then of course Antony is both - and the way he used Hal's dismissal of Falstaff from Henry IV, Part II, "I know thee not, old man..." etc., the entire dismissal, not just the first sentence: he included it very near the end, talking about Shakespeare & old age, and made it into the self loathing of an aging man.
A Waste of Shame: this is a BBC film, script by William Boyd, about the story of the sonnets, starring Rupert Graves as Shakespeare, Tom Sturridge as William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (aka the Fair Youth in this version) and Indira Varma as Lucie (aka the Dark Lady in this version). For supporting roles, it has Zoe Wannamaker as the Countess of Pembroke (W.H.'s mother), Nicholas Rowe as Richard Burbage, and I thought that curly blonde guy with a moustache who played John Hall, doctor in Stratford (and later Shakespeare's son-in-law, but that's not mentioned in the film), looked vaguely familiar, but only when the credits ran did I realise he was Tom Hiddleston. This great cast is why I bought the dvd, but alas, Boyd's script isn't up to the cast, or rather: it does some interesting things but two thirds in loses its way.
Or maybe there is a problem in the outset. Stories about writers frequently stumble against the part where writing isn't physically dramatic. There is a great satiric German film called Rossini where the writer character (based on Patrick Süskind) tells the waitress he's been crushing on for ages when she finally scares him by taking him up on the adoring looks and would be willing to meet with him outside work, "Scrivo, non vivo". So either you completely invent a story that bears some vague resemblance to their own best known plots (see also: Shakespeare in Love, or films with Jane Austen as a character) instead of their actual lives, or you have to do some contorting. Also, bringing in some kind of dramatic structure into the sonnets - always assuming they are indeed autobiographical instead of literary constructs - is bound to be headache. What Boyd comes up with for a plot is: Shakespeare's son Hamnet dies (on that occasion we're filled in to the fact he's practically never at home and his marriage with Anne is miserable), Shakespeare delivers some comissioned sonnets to the Countess of Pembroke to persuade her son to marry, actually meets the guy, is smitten by his androgynous beauty, meets a new whore in his favourite London brothel, who is French and half "moorish" (the film doesn't detail whether that means Arab, Indian or black, the Elizabethans used the term in all these senses), Lucie, pines after the first without daring to do more than hang out and gaze longingly, has sex with the second but sulks when fellow writer Ben Johnson also does that (and Johnson gets hang out with W.H. even more), gets the pox, gets the contemporary unpleasant mercury cure, has sex with Lucie who by now is hired by W.H. to be his mistress one last time, meets W.H. on the way out and delivers some sarcasms disguised as servility, gets sonnets into print, finds syphilis has come back, retires to Stratford. The end.
The good: Lucie manages to be a non slut-shaming version of the Dark Lady, which is really really rare; actually, come to think of it, have I seen one before? I don't think so. And it's not just Indira Varma having innate grace and dignity. The script manages to get across that Lucie has her own life - she has a son in France, for example - and being a prostitute is what she does to earn money. She's neither ashamed or proud of it, it's her job and she has no intention of starving. (There is a great bit when Shakespeare asks her why she is in London when she doesn't like the town and she shrugs and says "for the same reason you are - money", thus paralleling their professions, and he doesn't refute it.) This makes Shakespeare's reaction when she has sex with other men irrational - he never asks her for an exclusive contract or offers her any non-money based relationship, after all - but then sexual jealousy often is. Tom Sturridge looks suitably beautiful and androgynous (btw, while Pembroke is indeed the second most popular candidate for W.H. after Henry Wriothelsy, Earl of Southhampton, I don't think I've seen a story use him), and also is sincerely impressed by Shakespeare's poetry. The script leaves it open whether he ever is aware that Will S. is longing for something more than patronage. And Rupert Graves is doing his best, but here we come to...
The bad: Graves has an expressive face, but he can do only so much. There is understatement, and there is Shakespeare as a passive and not likeable main character throughout. When Lucie at one point tells him he's her favourite among her clients, you wonder why, because Graves!Shakespeare doesn't actually do anything to impress her - he's not charming, he doesn't woo her, he's not spectacularly generous or anything like that. He gets to show off a bit of verbal wit with William Herbert but not much, and also, bemusingly, none in his two or scenes with Johnson where there really would have been the opportunity. (If you make Ben the rival poet from the sonnets, which btw I don't think he was, then go for the big verbal sparring between two masters, for God's sake! Don't let just Shakespeare observe him with W.H. and the Dark Lady from a distance.) Also, early on, when Shakespeare is introducing William H. to the London low life, they pass three men beating up a prostitute (not Lucie). WH asks what that is about. WS replies it's probably because she has given them the pox. Neither of them cares a bit that a woman is getting brutally beaten right on front of them, they just walk on. This is probably supposed to be historic realism (and foreshadowing for Will eventually ending up infected as well), but it doesn't make me like Graves!Shakespeare and his Fair Youth.
Then there is the last encounter between Shakespeare and Lucie, and Shakespeare and W.H. He visits Lucie after doing the mercury "cure" (reliability of same wasn't that high, but it's what the Elizabethans did), not before, but John Hall has informed him the illness will probably be back even after the whole mercury business. The script is so dammed vague on Shakespeare's feelings, and Graves looks so enigmatic, that I can't tell whether or not this last visit is actually sentiment and love or a vicious sort of revenge (i.e. that he's hoping to infect Lucie who will infect W.H. in turn). I like ambiguity, but not this much of it.
In conclusion: could have been great, especially given the cast, but wasn't. Alas.
Being Shakespeare: This is a recording of Simon Callow's one man show, which was highly enjoyable. I had already seen Callow on stage do this kind of show for Oscar Wilde, but missed the Dickens one, and the Shakespeare one. Turns out the later exists on dvd. If you haven't seen it, either: it's Callow narrating a highly likely version of Shakespeare's life plus some aspects of the Elizabethan age and acting out several monologues and dialogues from the plays (plus two sonnets and a bit from Venus and Adonis) in between, managing to connect them with life or the age. Which he does very well, whether it's Falstaff's "honour" take down or highlights from the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet or William the schoolboy from Merry Wives of Windsor. It's not just the "greatest hits" thing, either; he includes a speech from Thomas More, an obscure play that Shakespeare contributed to (or so researches concluded in recent years). For me the renderings that made me go most "huh, I hadn't expected this" was the way he played the Antony's funeral speech - less mob stirring, more genuinenly emotionally shattered than I'm used to, but then of course Antony is both - and the way he used Hal's dismissal of Falstaff from Henry IV, Part II, "I know thee not, old man..." etc., the entire dismissal, not just the first sentence: he included it very near the end, talking about Shakespeare & old age, and made it into the self loathing of an aging man.
A Waste of Shame: this is a BBC film, script by William Boyd, about the story of the sonnets, starring Rupert Graves as Shakespeare, Tom Sturridge as William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (aka the Fair Youth in this version) and Indira Varma as Lucie (aka the Dark Lady in this version). For supporting roles, it has Zoe Wannamaker as the Countess of Pembroke (W.H.'s mother), Nicholas Rowe as Richard Burbage, and I thought that curly blonde guy with a moustache who played John Hall, doctor in Stratford (and later Shakespeare's son-in-law, but that's not mentioned in the film), looked vaguely familiar, but only when the credits ran did I realise he was Tom Hiddleston. This great cast is why I bought the dvd, but alas, Boyd's script isn't up to the cast, or rather: it does some interesting things but two thirds in loses its way.
Or maybe there is a problem in the outset. Stories about writers frequently stumble against the part where writing isn't physically dramatic. There is a great satiric German film called Rossini where the writer character (based on Patrick Süskind) tells the waitress he's been crushing on for ages when she finally scares him by taking him up on the adoring looks and would be willing to meet with him outside work, "Scrivo, non vivo". So either you completely invent a story that bears some vague resemblance to their own best known plots (see also: Shakespeare in Love, or films with Jane Austen as a character) instead of their actual lives, or you have to do some contorting. Also, bringing in some kind of dramatic structure into the sonnets - always assuming they are indeed autobiographical instead of literary constructs - is bound to be headache. What Boyd comes up with for a plot is: Shakespeare's son Hamnet dies (on that occasion we're filled in to the fact he's practically never at home and his marriage with Anne is miserable), Shakespeare delivers some comissioned sonnets to the Countess of Pembroke to persuade her son to marry, actually meets the guy, is smitten by his androgynous beauty, meets a new whore in his favourite London brothel, who is French and half "moorish" (the film doesn't detail whether that means Arab, Indian or black, the Elizabethans used the term in all these senses), Lucie, pines after the first without daring to do more than hang out and gaze longingly, has sex with the second but sulks when fellow writer Ben Johnson also does that (and Johnson gets hang out with W.H. even more), gets the pox, gets the contemporary unpleasant mercury cure, has sex with Lucie who by now is hired by W.H. to be his mistress one last time, meets W.H. on the way out and delivers some sarcasms disguised as servility, gets sonnets into print, finds syphilis has come back, retires to Stratford. The end.
The good: Lucie manages to be a non slut-shaming version of the Dark Lady, which is really really rare; actually, come to think of it, have I seen one before? I don't think so. And it's not just Indira Varma having innate grace and dignity. The script manages to get across that Lucie has her own life - she has a son in France, for example - and being a prostitute is what she does to earn money. She's neither ashamed or proud of it, it's her job and she has no intention of starving. (There is a great bit when Shakespeare asks her why she is in London when she doesn't like the town and she shrugs and says "for the same reason you are - money", thus paralleling their professions, and he doesn't refute it.) This makes Shakespeare's reaction when she has sex with other men irrational - he never asks her for an exclusive contract or offers her any non-money based relationship, after all - but then sexual jealousy often is. Tom Sturridge looks suitably beautiful and androgynous (btw, while Pembroke is indeed the second most popular candidate for W.H. after Henry Wriothelsy, Earl of Southhampton, I don't think I've seen a story use him), and also is sincerely impressed by Shakespeare's poetry. The script leaves it open whether he ever is aware that Will S. is longing for something more than patronage. And Rupert Graves is doing his best, but here we come to...
The bad: Graves has an expressive face, but he can do only so much. There is understatement, and there is Shakespeare as a passive and not likeable main character throughout. When Lucie at one point tells him he's her favourite among her clients, you wonder why, because Graves!Shakespeare doesn't actually do anything to impress her - he's not charming, he doesn't woo her, he's not spectacularly generous or anything like that. He gets to show off a bit of verbal wit with William Herbert but not much, and also, bemusingly, none in his two or scenes with Johnson where there really would have been the opportunity. (If you make Ben the rival poet from the sonnets, which btw I don't think he was, then go for the big verbal sparring between two masters, for God's sake! Don't let just Shakespeare observe him with W.H. and the Dark Lady from a distance.) Also, early on, when Shakespeare is introducing William H. to the London low life, they pass three men beating up a prostitute (not Lucie). WH asks what that is about. WS replies it's probably because she has given them the pox. Neither of them cares a bit that a woman is getting brutally beaten right on front of them, they just walk on. This is probably supposed to be historic realism (and foreshadowing for Will eventually ending up infected as well), but it doesn't make me like Graves!Shakespeare and his Fair Youth.
Then there is the last encounter between Shakespeare and Lucie, and Shakespeare and W.H. He visits Lucie after doing the mercury "cure" (reliability of same wasn't that high, but it's what the Elizabethans did), not before, but John Hall has informed him the illness will probably be back even after the whole mercury business. The script is so dammed vague on Shakespeare's feelings, and Graves looks so enigmatic, that I can't tell whether or not this last visit is actually sentiment and love or a vicious sort of revenge (i.e. that he's hoping to infect Lucie who will infect W.H. in turn). I like ambiguity, but not this much of it.
In conclusion: could have been great, especially given the cast, but wasn't. Alas.
