The Bard’s Meme

Got this from Ted.

What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

I honestly can’t remember. Since I’ve always been obsessed with acting, I imagine my introduction was quite early. It wasn’t a literary introduction so much – it was a performance introduction. He was a man of the theatre. I read his stuff looking for monologues, because he counted as “classical”. I have always loved Shakespeare. I love the challenge of performing it (it can bring me to my knees!), and I also love reading it out loud, to this day. Other people do yoga. And I suppose I should do some yoga too. But to relax, I read the sonnets out loud. When I was about 12 years old, my parents took me to a production of Twelfth Night at the local university (where I ended up going) and I was transported. Malvolio was such a buffoon! When he descended the stairs wearing the yellow stockings with the blue ribbons, thinking that was what was wanted of him, I almost died laughing. What a pompous ass! The production was marvelous – funny, sexy, and clear as a bell to me, the tween in the audience. When you see a production like that, it makes you want to try to say the words yourself, and make them come as much to life as those actors did.

Which Shakespeare plays have you been required to read?

In my career, I would imagine all of them. I took a couple of Shakespeare courses in college, and we read most of the plays – and the rest were covered by my various acting classes. And now, like I mentioned, I just read them for fun. There isn’t one of his plays I haven’t read, but I honestly can’t remember what I read for class, and what was just for pleasure or preparation. I started this whole Shakespeare project on my blog (here’s the Two Gentlemen of Verona piece) and … well, I would love to get back to it. I had a ton of fun putting that piece together. One thing that I have never done (which was the original point of the Shakespeare project) was read the plays in chronological order.

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel you are a “better” person for having read the bard?

Of course Shakespeare is important. To say he’s “not important” is like dismissing our heritage. That would be idiotic. Of course he’s important. And to the second question – I already think it’s funny that “better” shows up in the question in quotation marks, which already betrays the bias or insecurity of the person who wrote the quiz. To just blatantly say, sans quotes, “Yeah, I think I’m a better person” is far too assholic to be borne, and so the protective quotation marks are there to keep us all safe. No, I don’t think I’m a “better” person. But I do feel grateful and blessed that Shakespeare is in my life, and also that I know him well enough to refer back to him in my mind, in moments of stress or conflict, that I can call upon his plays to provide context to the messes of MY life … I feel really enriched because I know him. But better? Or, oops, should I say “better”? No. Some of the kindest most loving people I know have never read a play of Shakespeare’s. Big whoop. Or should that be “big” whoop? Or big “whoop”? But in all seriousness, I love that I can see a random act of kindness from somebody and immediately go to that line in Merchant of Venice in my head (“how far that little candle throws his beams … so shines a good deed in a naughty world”). Other people have said things about random acts of kindness … but no one has said it as well as Shakespeare did in that line.

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

I am partial to As You Like It, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing.

How do you feel about contemporary takes on Shakespeare? Adaptations of Shakespeare’s works with a more modern feel? (For example, the new line of Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, or novels like Something Rotten, Something Wicked, Enter Three Witches, Ophelia, etc.) Do you have a favorite you’d recommend?

I love adaptations! I am not a purist. Sometimes, in stage productions, a director has a concept – and it just doesn’t work all the way through … but when the concept really hits it can be exhilarating. I LOVED the recent Macbeth I saw with Patrick Stewart. I didn’t think there was possibly a way to make those witches frightening – I’ve seen the play so many times, I have been a witch myself … It’s usually silly. The Macbeth stuff is gripping, but it’s hard to make those witches scary. But this production? Those witches were fucking SCARY. Bra-VO. That probably had a lot to do with the Stalinist concept – and the sense that the witches were the agents of the KGB, or something omniscent … creatures that could be everywhere at once … those girls were TERRIFYING. When a concept doesn’t work, you can feel the play collapse. I liked Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet but he did not deal, sufficiently, with the fact that modern-day gangs would use guns, they would not have sword fights. It was tongue-in-cheek, how he handled it – and I know lots of people liked it, but I didn’t. You can’t be tongue-in-cheek with Romeo and Juliet. Gangs use guns nowadays. They would not have long-drawn-out fights with swords or knives. I’m not saying you can’t transplant the play into a modernday era, but I think you need to deal with that pesky issue in a more honest fashion than he did. The MTV inspired filming is also perfect for that young-teens-in-love story … but I thought his way of dealing with the fact that there are no guns in the play was a copout. Shakespeare’s plays must be dealt with on their own terms. If you try to make Taming of the Shrew into a feminist manifesto (as nearly every production now does), it WILL COLLAPSE. The script does not support your academic and politically correct reading of it. So please, directors, I beg of you. Stop trying. The best “adaptation” of Taming of the Shrew that I ever saw was that one episode of Moonlighting with Cybill Shepard and Bruce Willis sparring around the table in Elizabethan costume. (my favorite clip below) Yes, yes, yes, that is exactly how that text needs to be handled. Taming of the Shrew not only can handle the tongue-in-cheek, but it needs it desperately. If you play it straight, the audience of today will not stand for it. So the asides and snarks are just marvelous in that Moonlighting episode (“If you’re a man, you gotta love the 16th century”) … and it makes the play (which is, in actuality, already a play within a play – it is already something totally artificial) perfectly realized. It was absolutely brilliant, a highwater mark in television as far as I’m concerned. Your best bet with that material is to go with a 1930s/40s-era screwball comedy vibe – something that predates the modern gender-definitions (which was also the hot-and-heavy intellectual-and-sexual-sparring vibe captured in the Raul Julia / Meryl Streep version in Central Park – I saw a video of that production, which made Streep a star, and it is, to date, one of the most exhilarating things I have ever seen in my LIFE). But seriously: if you try to make that play into “I am woman, hear me roar” – the text will not support you. So STOP TRYING, GODDAMMIT. The play is good enough on its own. Stop imposing. It doesn’t work. Also: the parts that DON’T fit into our modern-day concept of gender are the best parts, the most troubling parts … don’t avoid them, or try to iron them out … PLAY them for all they are worth.

Thank you.

I know no directors are listening to me, because Taming of the Shrew continues to be a pesky problem, and that’s a shame. I really feel that any director who wants to put up that play needs only watch, oh, The Big Sleep or Only Angels Have Wings, or Bringing Up Baby – hell, just watch ANY Howard Hawks movie – and you will be halfway there.

The last exchange in The Big Sleep goes like this:

She: And what about me?
He: You? What’s wrong with you?
She: Nothing you can’t fix.

I can hear the heads explode in women’s studies departments around the country, but that’s the whole point. If you watch The Big Sleep and feel that Lauren Bacall is in any way oppressed or victimized, you need to have your head examined.

What’s your favorite movie version of a Shakespeare play?

I loooooooooove the Much Ado About Nothing with Emma Thompson and Branagh and all the rest. More than any other production I have seen of that glorious piece of playwriting – that adaptation captured the sheer joy of the thing. It is a delight.


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18 Responses to The Bard’s Meme

  1. Junebug says:

    It’s funny that I stopped by today. I watched “The Taming of the Shrew” on tv last night. The 1967 production with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was hilarious! I don’t know if you liked their version but I enjoyed myself.

  2. red says:

    Junebug – Yes!!! That was such a fun version too!

  3. ted says:

    The Ragazzo will get a kick out of the fact that you loved the Moonlighting Shrew – he loooooooves that show and that episode in particular.

  4. red says:

    It’s brilliant! Best production I’ve ever seen of that play!!

  5. red says:

    “Welllll, I hateth to brag …”

  6. Desirae says:

    I have a story that I want to tell about Shakespeare, because it’s such an amusing memory. And has nothing to do with this meme by the way.

    When I was 15 saw my first ever production of Shakespeare. It was Romeo and Juliet, the play we had studied that semester. Our school, along with several other schools, took the grade 10 classes to see it and so the audience was filled with 15-16 year olds. The stage was round and had seats 3/4 of the way around it and looking down on it.

    It was a professionally done play with money behind it if I remember correctly, which makes what happened even stranger. Everything was going swimmingly until the scene after Romeo and Juliet’s first night together. You know, “the nightingale, and not the lark”, etc.

    Well, they lay in this big bed with sheets pulled up over them. Juliet was wearing a billowy modest nightgown. Romeo was not. Out he climbs, bare assed as the day he was born. I was on the side that saw his butt only, but my best friend at the time was across the theater and got the full monty for sure.

    The was this shocked silence for a moment and the audience just exploded with laughter. Truly, it unbalanced the entire thing. Nobody could take it seriously after that.

    I have a very clear memory of a guy my age saying afterwards, “What the hell? What did he do – just haul the nightgown up to get at her?” The best part is that he sounded sort of offended.

    Thanks to that school I also saw Anne Frank: The Musical. Turns out? Not a great concept.

  7. red says:

    “What the hell? What did he do – just haul the nightgown up to get at her?” The best part is that he sounded sort of offended.

    I’m dying laughing!!!!

  8. justjack says:

    Ah, yes, coming to Shakespeare. What a great blog post to read after having been so long away.

    I have great memories of those moments when I would really “get” Shakespeare. Like my 11th grade English teacher who had us read Hamlet and Richard III, and who made us memorize passages (I still remember Hastings’ “o momentary grace of mortal men” amongst others); she made us see the sly humor of “glorious summer by this ‘son’ of york,” which really grabbed my attention–I mean, here’s an ugly villain, letting us in on his plans like this was an episode of Columbo, yet still ready to slip a few puns into his speech like he was Hawkeye Pierce. I began to see that it wasn’t so hard to understand Shakespeare.

    Then, in college in 1983, PBS aired that version of King Lear that starred Laurence Olivier and Diana Rigg, only my a capella singing group was out of town singing at an alumni gathering, and I missed it. But my buddy’s parents had one of those newfangled videocasette recorders, and he taped it for us; the next night, a few of us went over with a case of beers and sat in the basement and watched, hooting and hollering at the screen like we were watching Red River or something.

    Several years later, I was interviewing for my first teaching job at a small k-8 private school; I’d be the math and science teacher for grades seven and eight, and I’d be partnered with this seriously old-school lady who taught seventh and eighth grade English. When she mentioned that they learned (and performed!) Shakespeare at this school, I said how much I loved the recent “Shrew” episode of Moonlighting, her dour face lit up, and the interview turned into a conversation. I got that job, and thus began my career as a teacher.

    Last year I rented the Ian McKellen Richard III, knowing that the update would make it easier for my 13-year old son to follow the story. I can always tell when he gets into a movie, because he starts leaning forward little by little. By the time that McKellen was shrieking “a horse! a horse!” from the back of the crashed jeep, my son was leaning over so far that you could have kicked the chair out from under, and he wouldn’t have fallen. When McKellen plunged to his firey death at the end, grinning maniacally up at the camera, my son uttered his highest critical approval: “dewwwwwwwwwwd.”

  9. Kate P says:

    Wow, what a great meme–and I loved your answers, Sheila. I forgot how much my brother loved that Moonlighting episode, and how many times he watched it on the VCR! I’ll have to tell him I was reminded of that.

    My first “live” experience also was “Twelfth Night,” only it was last year, a production by a company near my sister in VA. The Fool had a magnificent voice.

    Desirae, that account was hilarious.

  10. justjack says:

    Hah. I forgot to mention another one. Have you seen Penny Marshall’s “Renaissance Man,” starring Danny DeVito? It’s pretty standard fare, a service comedy about a teacher who’s lost his interest in his work, who is hired by the army to tutor a group of soldiers whose educational bona fides don’t pass muster. One thing leads to another, and he winds up teaching them Shakespeare, even taking them to a performance of Henry V. Weeks later, the soldiers are training in the middle of the night, in a driving rain, and their sergeant, who doesn’t believe they’re capable of learning Dick And Jane, much less Shakespeare, belittles them and taunts them, and dares them to show any proof that they’ve learned anything at all in Danny DeVito’s class. In the night, in the rain, one of the soldiers recites the St. Crispian speech, and I want to tell you, it’s the greatest single moment of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. In a mediocre service comedy.

  11. red says:

    Justjack – I have tears in my eyes from your comments. I love your son going, “dewwwwwwwd”!!

    Yup – this shit just WORKS. I also love the old-school lady lighting up when you mentioned Moonlighting. Wonderful!!

  12. red says:

    Kate – How wonderful that you just saw your first live production of Shakespeare!

    Was it good??

  13. just1beth says:

    Sheila- Member the Crud made us ALL get up and recite Shakespeare? “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace…”
    I have such beautiful memories of our classmates ALL doing it, and taking it so seriously…
    I love that man.

  14. red says:

    Yes! Awesome class – what a great teacher.

    “The Crud”.

    hahahahahahahaha

  15. Ken says:

    My first Shakespeare? A Midsummer Night’s Dream in seventh-grade English class.

    Unless you count the musical Hamlet episode of Gilligan’s Island

    “Hamlet my dear
    Your problem is clear
    Avenging your father’s death”

  16. Catherine says:

    Justjack, I loooove McKellen’s Richard III! Such a great interpretation of it. McKellen’s one of my favourite actors, especially when he’s tackling Shakespeare because he just looks like he’s having so much fun with it. His Iago is just…gah. I rented the dvd of the Trevor Nunn production last year when I was studying Othello for my Leaving Cert last year and I was just blown away by his Iago.

  17. Kate P says:

    Sheila, it was fantastic. Low-budget, minimal props. Someone built this huge wooden convertible box/table/closet/chest–they hid in it, lay on it, you name it, they did it.

    In fact, the play opens with the lovesick Duke lying on it, moaning the first line: “If music be the food of love, play on,” and stops, as if it were a demand. The attendant tries to comply with a little CD player (LOL!) but it breaks, so he starts humming the tune, “What’ll I do/When you/Are far away. . .” The song becomes a motif for the play. That was a great idea.

    It was part of the 2007 DC Shakespeare Festival and I talked my 20-something sister into going. She talked a couple of friends into going by e-mailing a synopsis and promising them that if they didn’t like it, I was buying the first round afterwards. We walked into a sold out show in the community center. (In fact some of her friends who waited too long to get tix were annoyed.) IIRC it was closing night. The cast was great. Small theater, huge laughs–my sister and her friends were raving. Definitely didn’t have to buy the first round!

    I’ll probably be borrowing this meme shortly. :)

  18. Catherine says:

    Anyway, for my own Shakespearen history, I hate to admit it but I’m still very much a novice. So far, I’ve only been required to read two plays for school, Othello in my last year and Romeo & Juliet a few years before that. So R&J was my first introduction to reading the plays, and I’m kind of proud that I managed to persevere and keep positive about Shakespeare after the ATROCIOUS way we were taught it! I was a quiet, bookish 14/15 at the time, in a class full of wild, unruly 15 year old girls. We were supposed to read it aloud in class and our English teacher had the bright idea to assign the principal characters to all the lazy, uninterested girls in the class in the hopes that they’d suddenly be inspired to pay attention for the first time in their lives. Which, whatever, good for her for trying, I guess (can you tell I’m still bitter I had to read Lady Capulet??) but it was a total disaster. The girls playing the two lovers were best friends (and total bitches) and they just took the piss out of everything, raced through the lines, skipped over words, dissolved into laughter whenever the word ‘ho’ appeared (alright, I’ll give them that!). Argh! I was most angry about the girl who played Mercutio, who I really wanted to be. She was totally over the whole thing and read his monologues in the most bored, slow, monotone ever. It killed me! Meanwhile, all the bright kids who were actually interested in the play and would’ve done a good job were forced to sit in silence, every now and again coming in with a “Here is your sword, sir” or whatever.

    Anyway. Deeeep breath.

    The first play I saw live was The Tempest, I think. My dad brought me to see it a few years ago. It was in French (!?) and relied heavily on the use of holograms (?!), but still was enjoyable. I saw a version of Romeo & Juliet last year with my younger sister, who was studying it at the time. That was a very good production, but I got a little irritated during a (very impressive) rain storm with real water coming down, because it made it difficult to hear the words being spoken. Still, a fabulous production. Oh yeah, I also saw Othello with my school and absolutely HATED the woman who was playing Desdemona. We all did. She was about 6 foot tall, stick thin and bony, in her late 30s with a strong Roscommon accent. Um, no.

    For film versions, I’ve seen the RSC versions of Macbeth and Othello (both with Ian McKellen) and McKellen’s Richard III (are you seeing a pattern?). Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, obviously. Oh! One more thing about my awful R+J version. The other English class were shown 4 or 5 filmed versions of the play, including Luhrmann and even West Side Story. They LOVED their English teacher. Wheras we watched the Zeffirelli version 3 times. It drove everybody nuts! At least this united the two factions in the class, no matter if we liked or hated Shakespeare, we were unanimously against this version. We used to joke it was because our teacher wanted to see Romeo’s ass again and again.

    I’m actually reading Macbeth at the moment. Along with, um, a gazillion other books.

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