sensiblecat: (to be...)
On 16 August 2008 RTD went to Stratford for the first time in his life (or so he claims in DWM 400), to see "Hamlet", in the company of Jane Tranter, Julie G and Phil C. He seemed to enjoy himself:

"It's bloody brilliant. Surprisingly funny. Amazingly clear....David is just dazzling. He seems young, he seems old, he's fast, he's wild, he's detailed, he's honest, he's heartbreaking. I don't need to have seen Hamlet before: I cannot imagine better than this."

For someone who'd previously said, "Who could sit through three hours of Hamlet?" that's pretty high praise. Afterwards the DW people met with David for dinner and a long chat. The Specials - at least up to WoM - were already at the stage where RTD could drop teaser words from the scripts - they've turned out to be correct, by the way. I don't know what stage the finale was at - hopefully the reissue of "A Writer's Tale" will tell us more about that, so from here on it's mainly conjecture on my part.

Read more... )
sensiblecat: (resistance)
I came across a wonderful quote from Northrop Frye a few days ago - in the reading guide to a novel by Salley Vickers called Mr Golightly's Holiday. It's basically about the difference between comedy and tragedy:




sensiblecat: (Default)

DSCN2521_3
Originally uploaded by Jau!
This is one of a series put together by someone working on the "Hamlet" movie shoot - I think it's fairly clear from this Closet Scene where they managed to get their Hamlet figure from. Seen that suit before somewhere, methinx.

WIth Gertrude, they'd have had to be a little more creative.

There are some other little gems - I love the BarbieDoll Ophelia.
sensiblecat: (penguin hamlet)
I had a lovely birthday - thanks for all the greetings. Not very exciting, just relaxing with my family. I'm going to be taken to The Church Green at Lymm for a celebratory lunch in May. The chef there, Aidan Byrne, is I believe the youngest ever in England to receive a Michelin star, and he's tipped to be the next big thing in TV cookery.

I've spent a lot of the last few days going through three versions of Hamlet simultaneously and noting down the differences, a task calculated to bend your brain badly after an hour or two of it. For those who don't know and are interested, a fairly small subset I'd imagine, said three versions are the First Quarto (Q1) of 1603, the Second Quarto (Q2) 1604 and the Folio (F) 1623.

Q1 is basically a pirate copy, probably written from memory by a couple of the actors who played minor roles. It is just about recognisible as the Hamlet most people know, but misses out a great deal of the reflective speeches (not necessarily a bad thing, many would argue). The poetry is greatly inferior, probably because it wasn't being remembered accurately, but it does move faster and gets through the story. There are some interesting differences, which I won't go into here in great detail, but to give you a flavour, here's a bit of Q1:


        "To be or not to be, aye there's the point
       To do, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all
        No, to sleep, to dream, ay, marry there it goes..."

You get the idea. What really gets interesting and challenging is that the scene order varies a lot and I've been sitting down with a big notebook, Q1 on the left, Q2 on the right, and two highlighters in different colours, trying to do a running version of the two side by side, ready for an essay.

F differs again, but it is the Hamlet we recognise. The whole textual history is very much more complex than even this note implies, and what we tend to get in modern productions is some conflation of Q2 and F, because some fairly major speeches are omitted from F and directors like to put them in.

But sometimes directors borrow from Q1 as well. Greg Doran moved the great "To be" speech and the notorious nunnery scene that follows it from its usual position in Act 3 to halfway through Act 2, which is its position in Q1. Arguably this works better, because then it comes before Hamlet resolving to use the Players to trap Claudius, rather than after. In its usual position, we see Hamlet psyche himself up to form a plan and then go backwards as a character to become suicidal.

So what I have to write about is the fact that many Shakespeare texts, and particularly Hamlet, are not fixed in any one form, but that editors and directors have to make decisions all the time whether to attempt to recreate what they imagine Shakespeare originally wrote, or to look first and foremost at what works theatrically, or some combination of the two. It's fascinating stuff, partly because the Elizabethans and Jacobeans had different ideas to ours today about what made good theatre.

I haven't done anything this intellectually challenging for a very long time, and you do need to come up for air now and then. So I'm off now to dig the garden.

I've found some wonderful icons made from the covers of the Penguin Shakespeare by [livejournal.com profile] angevin2  - you'll  be seeing quite a lot of them. All credit goes to her.
sensiblecat: (Shakespeare Chandos)
I have spent much of the past week mentally in Tudor and Jacobean London, reading Michael Wood's "In Search of Shakespeare". It's remarkable how much time I spent in my youth studying various Shakespeare plays with little or no knowledge of the world that he inhabited. It didn't seem to be considered relevant to "Henry IV Part I", "Othello" and "The Winter's Tale" - and they wonder why teenagers don't like the Bard.

Wood brings Shakespeare's high pressure existence at the top of his profession vividly to life. The book was originally a TV series and it still comes across as very visual and dynamic. No wonder he died in his early 50s - he wrote 39 plays in 20 years, and all that as part of a punishing schedule of morning rehearsals, afternoon performances and numerous appearances at Court. The whole company must have been total pros - putting on six different plays in a week. About 40 new plays a year were needed to satisfy demand.

There were considerable political and religious pressures on the players. Condemned as immoral and dangerous by the Puritans, their work was at the topical cutting edge and scrutinized carefully by the Elizabethan thought police. For example, due to sensitivities regarding the unpopularity of the ageing Queen after a series of costly wars, the deposition scene from "Richard II" was probably never performed in S's lifetime. One of the major reasons for the difference between the two main texts of "Othello" was a Puritan edict forbidding oaths in public performances. And both "Julius Caesar" and "Hamlet" had very topical resonances at the time - one thing I enjoyed about the recent Greg Donan reading of "Hamlet" was his honesty about whether Claudius is a better king than the one he usurped. (After all, he sends ambassadors on sensitive foreign policy missions, and they succeed where a warlike attitude failed and brought Denmark to its knees).

One of the most interesting issues of the period, for me at least, is the birth of Protestant England. The country was very much in transition after Mary Stuart's bloody attempt to reinstate Catholicism, and the old ways were privately adhered to by many people. At first this was tolerated, but gradually throughout Elizabeth's reign attitudes hardened, until by the early 17C it was a serious criminal offence not to take CofE communion on Easter Sunday, and a number of Shakespeare's close friends and family associates died for their loyalty to Rome.

Shakespeare survived at the top for so long because he was able to articulate a very nuanced view of human motivations with immense diplomacy and skill. For example, the injunction of Hamlet's father's Ghost is very much couched in terms of traditional Catholic doctrine - he makes it clear that he must suffer in Purgotary untill his death is avenged. Tennant plays a Prince who is emotionally stirred and frightened by this command, yet he is very much Protestant man at heart, believing intensely in the right for individuals to work out their own salvation. It is significant that, right up to the final scene, Tennant's Hamlet does not kill Claudius, but presents him with a sword whereupon the erring monarch kills himself. And there is a fascinating contrast between the scene of Claudius stuggling to pray but unable to do so because he is wracked with guilt:

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,
Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

(Act III, Scene 3)

...and the claustrophobic closet scene between Hamlet and his mother, in which Hamlet pleads with her to repent and leave Claudius, but the force of his message is undermined by the fact that he's bouncing around on her bed and clearly suffering from a serious bout of Oedipus complex as he contemplates his mother as a sexual being.

".......this I bid you do:
Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed,
Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses
Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft"

(Act III scene 4)


To borrow another line, "Methinks he doth protest too much." To hear that speech from David Tennant sends a shiver down your spine - it is so full of jealousy and hatred, yet here is a man who couldn't bear to kill the object of his loathing, but needs to emotionally blackmail the Queen instead.

Going back to the scene of Claudius at prayer, which actually spans the interval in this production, making it a cliffhanger worthy of Doctor Who itself, Hamlet's reasons for not killing his uncle at that point are fascinating. Most of us would feel an instinctive moral revulsion at the idea of stabbing a man in the back while he prays, and it's likely Hamlet shares that, but he doesn't give that as his reason for prevarication.
Rather he appeals, once again, to traditional Catholic doctrine, which by the time the play was staged was not only outdated, but illegal and punishable by death:

"A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge."

(Act III 3-4)


Here again, Hamlet articulates his own inner conflict, but not entirely honestly. He is of course, referring to the doctrine that it's possible for the blackest villain to die in a state of grace and repentance - if he repents at the moment of his death, he's rescued from Hell - a situation Hamlet says he wants to avoid, because Claudius deserves damnation. But Hamlet's phrase "hire and salary" reveals that he feels compelled to avenge his father in the traditional sense; he's been ordered to do so against his gut instincts, emotionally blackmailed by the thought of his father being tortured. He is being denied free agency. (Wittenburg University, incidentally, was the cradle of the Reformation).

So it seems to be that Hamlet's dilemma is very much on the sharp end of the generation divide - he wants to please his father, but his instincts are drawn towards the more modern worldview that we are individuals responsible for our own actions and destinies. Shakespeare was probably caught in a similar conflict between two spiritual worlds - the traditional, Catholic England of his parents and the modern post-Reformation society. (There's some evidence that he received the Last Rites on his deathbed, and you couldn't just call in a priest to do that casually - you had to know your way around an underground network of Catholic priests and their protectors - he died a few years after the Gunpowder Plot, when Catholics must have been regarded as terrorists).

The more you delve into Shakespeare's world, the more of these resonances you pick up and the more you gain from the plays. Shakespeare was incredibly subtle, writing for a sophisticated audience and regularly presenting plays at Court. The fact that he was able to probe so deeply into the moral conflicts of his age yet never fell out of Royal favour shows how skilfully he could present not only the issues themselves (which would often have been dangerous to present directly) but to the dilemmas behind them. He realised that our spiritual and political loyalties are often complex and, to some extent, irrational. That's why we can still get so much out of seeing his plays - he was, as Ben Johnson said, "not for an age, but for all time."
sensiblecat: (cheesygirl hamlet)
So what did I think of “Hamlet”? Weeelll….

sensiblecat: (cheesygirl hamlet)
Here is a picture that's just crying out for a caption. OMG that Hair - where will it end? I can't wait to see what the Carlisle Co-op have to say about that shot!

Non-spoilery shot from The Poison Sky

And while we're on davidtennant.com - I loved this comment from the man who is about to direct DT in Hamlet:

"And just as I was playing around with the idea I was watching TV, and David Tennant was on ‘Who do you think you Are’ on BBC1. He happened to go to a church in Northern Ireland, where they had been doing some work, and excavating the church floor. And there amongst the planks on the floor was a skull. And David, dressed in this great coat, picked it up and I thought – that’s like an audition for Hamlet. In fact, I texted him that night and said ‘I saw your audition for Hamlet ’ "

Hands up anyone who didn't think exactly that? And thank you [personal profile] cheesygirl for such a prophetic caption.

Before you all comment and nitpick, I don't think that church was in Northern Ireland, but anyway.

Given that, maybe I shouldn't get too excited about the mention of DT's "temporary vacation from the TARDIS" to do the role. I'll go back to my DWM instead and see how many little Adipose I can spot.
sensiblecat: (Default)
Apparently we beat France at rugby last night, and we seem to be getting rather good at it. Surprising since we're now officially the most obese nation in Europe.

I was intrigued to read that ITV drafted in Geoffrey Streatfeild from the RSC to reprise his role as Henry V and get us all fired up with the Agincourt speech. Seems it did the trick. Is this the dawn of a new era as RSC seek new avenues to make the Bard relevant to contemporary society and its concerns?

Take the obesity crisis. A line in Hamlet comes to mind (okay, slightly tweaked). "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Form and resolve itself into a dew." The RSC endorses liposuction? Who could possibly bring off such a gig? He'd have to be skinny, sexy, high-profile, and ideally connected with Hamlet (scratches head).

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