Joined: Apr 2002 Gender: Male Posts: 77 Location: Washington State
Re: The Introductions Thread! « Result #1 on May 17, 2009, 12:15am »
I've been away from Shakespeare discussion for a long time. I hope to round up the veterans and invite them back to rebuild our community. Anyone out there, I'll be waiting.
Re: Shakespeare songs « Result #2 on Feb 9, 2005, 8:06pm »
Hi, I am having a birthday party for my ten year old - "Shakespeare's Idiots" is the theme. He's written a play in which all the characters are idiot characters from the Shakespeare plays he knows. Its really funny. Kids will come, rehearse the play and enact it for their parents at pick-up time.
So anyway, I was wanting to make a cd of songs somehow related to Shakespeare, and only have Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet and The Smiths' Shakepeares' Sister. I was google-surfing for ideas when I came upon your discussion.
How far did you get compiling this music? Do you have a cd yet? I would LOVE a cd with all these songs on it. Can anyone help?????
Joined: Mar 2002 Gender: Male Posts: 534 Location: Meadville, PA
Macbeth (McKellan/Dench) « Result #3 on Feb 7, 2005, 10:14pm »
Wow. Quiet.
I know this site has pretty much become defunct, but I felt like posting for old time's sake. I got the McKellan / Dench version of Macbeth on DVD for my birthday, and I'm very excited to finally watch it. I've been a diehard McKellan fan since he did Richard III. Incidentally, can anyone offer their opinion on the version of Othello with Sir Ian as Iago? I'm very curious.
My next curiosity purchase will be the BBC Histories set. It looks to be a bit lacking, but I've always wanted a film collection of the 2nd Henriad with the same actors throughout.
Oh well. Maybe someone will write back in a year's time
"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, that, if I then had wak'd after long sleep, will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again"
Joined: Aug 2004 Gender: Male Posts: 3 Location: Maryland
Lighting Design for Macbeth « Result #4 on Aug 12, 2004, 5:05pm »
I have no experience with lighting design, and would welcome the feed back of any members here who may have experience in that field. But if I were directing Shakespeare's Macbeth, there would be a very specific lighting design I would like to try, which on paper would seem to work for me, but having never been able to test it, i cannot say for sure.
To me, the Scottish play has always been the darkest of Shakespeare's collection. True, evil and darkness, and sinister deeds take place in many of the Bard's works, but my personal interpretation is that it posesses the most evil OVERALL atmousphere for the entirety of the piece. When I read it, I get a distinct notion that no matter what seen I am reading, there is always an intagible something, a force, a presence of some sort, watching over events. The whole play I feel effuses the same sort of creepy, "I am not alone, even though I know I should be", sort of uneasiness as one may feel standingalone in a graveyard at night, or in a supposed haunted house. The further into the play we go, the more this ominous, unspoken, hidden evil seems to permeate the action and setting of the play.
Pursuent to this, I envision a simple lighting design which starts off regularly enough in the first scene or two, but then extremley slowly, and almost imperciptibly, begins to get darker, throughout the course of the entire play, until the final scenes, (at least up until, "tommorow and tommorow", would be lit only in a sort of haunting, candle light sort of light...where we are almost observing shadows, instead of actors performing across the stage.
This so called "super-fade", as I said would not be noticble right away, but as the play wore on, and the evil of Macbeth, and the spirits of the time start to gain strength, one would suddenly look up and notice, "its darker and creepier in here,".
I feel this works, because despite his total odious nature, (with which, unlike many, I have no sympathy at all), even the evil Macbeth feels surrounded by things more powerful and evil, even then himself. He acts scared of unknown things and bumps in the night through half the play, and eventually he becomes numb to it...but it is still there.
Joined: Aug 2004 Gender: Male Posts: 3 Location: Maryland
King Lear's Edmund « Result #5 on Aug 12, 2004, 1:02pm »
What a great part Edmund would be to play. And while I do believe that there are many interpretations to the character, none of the performances or movies I have seen of King Lear have really explored what i think would be the most entertaining interpretation of the character, and one that I would either make use of myself, if I had the chance to play the character, or one I may, as a director, encourage my actor to explore.
Allow me to take, as a starting place, his first soliloquy from Act 1 Scene 2.
Usually, in my experience, Edmund is portrayed, especially during this section of the play, as a vengeful, hateful villain, consumed by anger, greed, and blood lust. Perhaps that is all very true, but as is the case with Richard III in his play, (whom I think Edmund has much in common with) I feel that the lines he is given to speak in the text of the play, give the actor a great opportunity to "eat this role up", or to have, at least initially, the audience eating out of his hand, as I think Richard somewhat succeeds at doing, despite the nearly instantaneous understanding that his plans are villainous. But Richard is a villain we almost root for, if not his purpose, than at least the spirit of his audaciousness and style. This is so because he in a way seduces the audience. We want him to lose, eventually, but we cannot deny that we have enjoyed the ride he takes us on, a ride we would have been denied had he been wholly good in the first place.
It is not at all a stretch to see Edmund in the same way, and to allow us to enjoy his all too brief scenes of deliciously charming evil. Edmund too can seduce us.
Thou, nature, art my goddess, to thy law My services are bound.
Edmunds first lines spoken while alone could in fact be spoken in anger, as a protest to the belief system of others. Could they not, however, also be spoken with a lilt; as an introduction to his vanity? Almost as if to say that it is not society, religion, or even legality that he feels bound to follow, but in fact, "nature", nature being the state that each of us find ourselves in, when simply acting on our more fundamental instincts and intuitions. If taken in this light, all that follows in his speech reveals a simple intention to make use of those aspects of his nature that will help him obtain maximum comforts.
A director would make a very compelling choice to have his Edmund staring cunningly into a mirror at his own reflection, when delivering the first two lines of this monologue.
He even seems to take pride in his status as a bastard child, all of whom, he says, are conceived in the "lusty stealth of nature", as opposed to the "dull, stale, tired bed" of monogamous relationships. For to him, to be conceived thus, provides him with a "fierce quality", unmatched by "honest woman's issue".
So we have Edmund, addressing himself somewhat, announcing that it is nature, and nothing more, on which he relies and to which he is subservient. Turning to the audience, (and perhaps challenging some of their conventions) he slyly begins tosses aside any notion of social standards dictating his life. He wishes to avoid standing in the "plague of custom", that would require him to "permit the curiosity of nations" to deprive him, simply because he is not only a bastard, but not a first born.
As mentioned earlier, he moves on to mention how all of his fine qualities are at least at powerful as those of legitimate children. A greater depth is created for the character, not to mention a far more interesting scene, when this indictment is made in an off handed, flippant manner, more in tune with his established vanity, as opposed to the whimpering, angered, spoiled diatribe of a man/boy who wishes more than he has been given. Perhaps he even chuckles as he thinks of the temerity of some who would rank the great likes of himself lower than many of his legitimate, ("a fine word, legitimate!") counterparts in society.
In this vein he moves on to mock his own legitimate brother, and states that he must have Edgar's land. Need this be only vengeance? Or merely, an almost afterthought to a man who has shown that he is little worried about anything but his own advancement, and is indeed willing to do anything in order to secure it? The latter, again, I feel, brings about a far more entertaining figure, than does that easier, and perhaps more accepted convention of the rage filled younger bastard brother, that spits fire when alone.
Imagine the speech ending, not with a conniving sneer, or thoughts of blood, but with Edmund with a glass of wine, or some such drink, raised to the heavens, as he smugly declares what is undoubtedly his greatest line in the play,
Now gods, stand up for bastards!
(Almost as if to say, "whatever millions of different gods that are out there that these fools around me choose to pray to, let such gods take a lesson from my book, and stand up, instead, for bastards, here and everywhere!")
With another laugh, he drinks his own toast, and so, with letter in hand, sets into motion the chain of events, which readers of the play are of course familiar with.
The preceding is only one interpretation of course. But to deliver the speech and present the character in his true form thus, (as opposed to the mask he was wearing in the first scene), creates in the audiences mind an Edmund who is evil, but charming, selfish, but seductive, possessed of a narrow minded purpose to life, but no less possessed with a very particular panache for acknowledging it and pursuing it.
I think the characterization I refer to here for Edmund is something of a cross between the cool, mostly detached bemusement of a Hannibal Lecture, and the audacious, cranky jocularity of Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Though I will not go into detail here, I think one will find as one reads, that Edmund's later lines, and especially his ultimate end, (like one who has played a game as well as he could, but lost), take on a whole new life when the character is seen in such a manner.
(I am indebted to A.C. Bradley's lecture on the characters of King Lear, as found in his book Shakespearean Tragedy, published in England in 1904 by Macmillan and Company.)
Joined: Aug 2004 Gender: Male Posts: 3 Location: Maryland
Re: Your least favorite play? « Result #6 on Aug 12, 2004, 12:44pm »
I wholeheartedly agree with those who chose Love's Labor's Lost as their least favorite Shakespeare. I have not read every single one, but I actually performed in Love's Labor's, and it was not a pleasent experience. Everyone I have talked to since always gets a puzzled look on their face thinking I am referring to another play, that no one would possibly want to actually perform it, let alone come see it. But that was the one, and almost no one came to see us.
The narrative is a disaster, the jokes, if ever witty, are highly dated and mean nothing to a modern person even when researched, and most of them cannot even be researched, as their meaning is lost to history.
It's a bad play, and i think it must have been one of the ones Shakespeare wrote for a wedding party or a particular function or something, and sadly, it has survived, (barely) as part of his canon, over the centuries.
Writing a historical fiction - need help!! « Result #8 on Jun 8, 2004, 6:14pm »
I'm writing a historical fiction about the seventeenth century, and need to know some things about the theatre of the day, and also about the middle classes in England. Nobody seems to have much to say about them, except that they were there. Merchants and things like that.
I know that time period isn't *strictly* Renaissance, but it seems usually to be clumped in with the Renaissance.
Is there anybody with especial knowledge of the above topics that would be willing to help me?
Help: Theatre & Plague « Result #9 on Jun 5, 2004, 3:45pm »
Hello i'm Sara from Italy and I really, really, really need some informations to prepare my final dissertation for the university. I need to write a paper about how actors organized when theatre were closed for plague (expecially during the 1625 plague). Is there someone who would be so kind to tell me something 'bout this topics? Or at least where I could find some informations 'bout it?
Joined: May 2004 Gender: Female Posts: 2 Location: Wakefield, MA, USA
Re: Which is your favorite play? « Result #10 on May 16, 2004, 4:52pm »
Well, I'm 14 and I've only read six plays so far. All tragedies, too! But, there were a couple that I liked more the the others.
Julius Caesar-We had to read it in class this year, and I thought I was going to hate it. It was just the opposite. We only read the first three acts in school because my teacher thought the rest was boring (of course, my favourite scene is in act four). Anyways, I bought my own copy and finished it.
Why do I like it? Two reasons: Brutus and Cassius. I just think they're really cool, and I really like the dialogue, attitudes, and relationship between the two. I've fallen madly in love with Cassius...
Hamlet-How predictable... Maybe I like it so much because I often wonder "To be or not to be." I kind of feel like I can really relate to him.
King Lear-It's been a year since I've laid eyes on it, as I lack a copy, but I thought it was beautiful. Very powerful. It also bears a strange similarity to an incident in marching band this year.
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