Book Note: Ungentle Shakespeare

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

---

I've been using some of my copious free time to catch up on some required reading. For example, I should have read Katherine Duncan-Jones' Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life in 2001.

Duncan-Jones is one of the truly great Shakespeare scholars of all time, and even though her biography of Shakespeare covers most of the same material you'll find elsewhere, it's being handled here by the hands of a master. She's always enormously meticulous, incredibly scholarly, and eminently readable.

She also pulls no punches about detrimental information about Shakespeare's character. She lets us know that he may have been mean (in both senses of the word), selfish, and critical. If you want a biography that tempers the bardolators of the world, this is it.

Duncan-Jones places Shakespeare uncompromisingly in his day and age. There's no room for any authorship debate when the facts are so clearly outlined. One moment when this particularly struck me (although Duncan-Jones does not use it to refute any alternate authorship theory—she's just presenting the facts) was in this passage:

Just at the moment when he might have anticipated a life of prestige and privilege at court and elsewhere, Shakespeare in middle age was reduced once again to a stressful and uncertain period as a travelling player. He and his colleagues also experienced bereavement. Their patron, the affable and generous Sir George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, died in September 1603, only six months after the death of his cousin and Queen. Closer to home, however, was the death in 1604 of the leading player Augustine Phillips, whose Mortlake house had offered shelter to the King's Men in the plague-ridden autumn of 1603. First mentioned among his colleagues, he left "to my fellow William Shakespeare a thirty shillings piece in gold." Phillips and Shakespeare were evidently close friends as well as close colleagues. (182)

That's very interesting. Augustine Phillips acted with William Shakespeare. If there were any sort of conspiracy in which Shakespeare didn't actually exist or wasn't actually an actor, why would Phillips be leaving him any money at all—let alone a substantial amount? Surely you're not allowed to leave a pseudonym a legacy in your will!

In any case, Duncan-Jones is only unintentionally debunking authorship theorists. Her main intent is to provide a clear, well-written, meticulous biography of Shakespeare. And she succeeds admirably.

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Titus 2.0

Titus Andronicus 2.0 [a.k.a. Titus 2.0]. Dir. Tang Shu-wing. Perf. Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio (formerly No Man's Land Group). Web. 15 February 2011.

---

Titus 2.0 is one of the most masterfully done adaptations of Shakespeare's play I've seen. Seven actors, each dressed in black and with bare feet, sit in a line of chairs facing the audience. The plot of Titus Andronicus is narrated by the actors, who occasionally take on the roles of the characters—while continuing to speak in the third person much of the time. The style, which is a mixture of mime, dance, music, and drama, is simple but profoundly moving. The production avoids portraying the specific violence of the plot—no other character touches Lavinia during the description of her rape, for example—and, in so doing, it more deeply conveys the abstraction of violence. The lighting, which is masterfully done, adds to the depth of the production.

The scene in which Marcus discovers Lavinia is one of the production’s most effective (see the low-quality video clip below—the only way I could get it on this site—or head to MIT's Global Shakespeares site to see a full production of the play—this scene is about a third of the way in—near 43:30). The actor who has been telling Lavinia’s story stands on her chair at the up right corner of the stage while the actors who have just been lying on their backs representing Titus’ sons in the pit smugly stand at center stage. She delivers this narration:

Somewhere in the forest, Tamora’s sons were lustfully ravishing Lavinia. They even taunted her: I’d hang myself if I were her. Fine, just help her to tie the cord. Demetrius and Chiron knew she was helpless and left her in the wild.

The narrator then slowly looks at her hands and contorts them, stretching one around her neck and one behind her back. She runs down left, just out of a large half-circle of light that covers most of the stage, where a lighted rectangle stands vertically. The rectangle flickers as vague shadows cross its surface. The actor in the centermost of the seven chairs stands on it and delivers lines equivalent to Marcus’ in the text of the play. When the narrator of Lavinia’s story resumes—and not before—we learn that Lavinia’s hands have been removed and her tongue cut out: “Marcus spotted Lavinia’s amputated arms but from her silence and blood-streaked mouth, he knew her tongue had also been cut.” Tamora’s sons’ line about helping her with the rope now retrospectively makes a terrible kind of sense.

Though our minds are looking back at that line, the plot moves forward to Marcus’ carrying Lavinia to her father. In this production, the actor who has been uttering Marcus’ lines stays on his chair but extends his arms toward the Lavinia character; with difficulty, she stands and slowly and painfully, as if carrying her own weight as well as Marcus’, crosses back to her chair. When she reaches center stage, she stumbles and falls to her knees. She slowly unwraps her arms from around herself, looks at her hands, stands and turns to face the audience, and slowly lowers her arms to her sides while the other actor, who is about four paces behind her and still standing on his chair, does the same. The distance between the actors and the characters whose stories they narrate is extended into an even greater distance between the characters themselves.

Stripped of the visual elements of violence, Titus Andronicus’ tragedy can be examined more fully both intellectually and emotionally in Titus Andronicus 2.0. The production avoids the possibility of distracting its audience with the physical results of violent acts—blood, severed limbs, corpses—and forces it to consider the emotional, psychological, and spiritual elements of violence to a greater degree.

---

Links: The Full Video of the Film at MIT's Global Shakespeares.

Richard III and Julius Casear in Gidget

"A Hearse, a Hearse, My Kingdom for a Hearse." By Louella MacFarlane and John McGreevey. Perf. Sally Field, Don Porter, and James Davidson. Dir. William Asher. Gidget. Season 1, episode 6. ABC. 20 October 1965. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2006

---

The same internet wag who made the joke about the archeologists not being certain that the skeleton was that of Richard III—remember, they only have a hunch—also risked a joke about Richard's skeleton objecting to being carried away in a mere ambulance. "A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!" he supposedly cried.

When I heard that joke come out of my—I mean, his—mouth, I wondered how original it was. A quick search revealed that the line was taken as a title for—of all things—an episode of the 1960s sitcom Gidget. Yes, the show with Sally Field—currently playing Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincon.

I requested the episode, just in case anything interesting should come of it, though I didn't really have much hope for a Richard III tie in. I suspected the episode was merely titularly parasitical. Yesterday, I put it on while grading essays and straightening up the office (it's not the sort of show you need to devote your entire attention to).

At first, I was disappointed.  Gidget wants to buy a cool hearse (apparently, it's "the end"—just the thing to cart your surfboards to the beach). To do so, she decides to sign up for auto shop. She hopes to earn money, impress her dad, learn about cars, and demonstrate that girls can do anything boys can do. The men are skeptical (not to mention patriarchal), and plot how to get her to drop auto shop.

At that point, an allusion to Julius Caesar dropped in out of nowhere! I imagine that the writers though the allusion appropriate for a fifteen-year-old high school student to make under the circumstances. I found it surprising and delightful—especially as it tends to undermine some of the overbearing patriarchalism of the two men.

---

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase all the Gidget you'll ever want from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Doctor Who, Richard III, and William Shakespeare

Doctor Who: The Kingmaker. By Nev Fountain. Perf. Peter Davidson, Stephen Beckett, and Marcus Hutton. 2006. Audio CDs. Big Finish Productions, 2006.  

---

Richard III. Silent Shakespeare. Perf. F. R. Benson, Alfred Brydone, Murray Carrington, Eric Maxon, Violet Farebrother, Elinor Aickin, Mrs. Constance Benson, and Moffat Johnston. 1911. DVD. Image Entertainment, 2000.

---

The discovery of a skeleton that might be Richard III's led to an explosion of commentary and speculation on the web. Humorous remarks also spread like wildfire, one internet wag even going so far as to say, "I feel that I cannot stress this enough: The archeologists are not certain that the bones are Richard III's. They just have a hunch."

The story happened to correspond with my own acquisition of an audio drama related to Richard III: A story from the Doctor Who universe mentioned by a reader a long time ago in Shakespeare Geek's archives.

The plot involves Doctor Who traveling back in time to Shakespeare's age—and then, having gotten angry with Shakespeare, traveling even further back to Richard's time. [Note:  Spoilers follow—both in this paragraph and in the video / audio clip below.] Shakespeare sneaks back in time as well; eventually, he and Richard switch places.

The thing I liked best about the production was its use of the typical jokes about Richard III. I've compiled them in an audio file—and then attached the audio file to part of a silent film version of Richard III. The result is odd but entertaining. Enjoy!

---

Click below to purchase the audio drama from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Me and Orson Welles: Setting Julius Caesar in 1937

Me and Orson Welles. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian McKay. 2008. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2010.

---

In 1937, Orson Welles directed and played Brutus in the Mercury Theatre Production of Julius Caesar.  Me and Orson Welles tells the story of that production through the eyes of a young, naïve actor who is swept up in Welles' charisma, genius, and vision.

The production-within-the-production is absolutely fascinating.  The modernized world of Welles' Julius Caesar is fascist and frightening.

One of its most effective scenes is Act III, scene iii:  The Death of Cinna the Poet.  At this point in the play, Caesar has been assassinated, Brutus has made his case to the pleblians, and Mark Antony has turned the crowd entirely against the conspirators and into a riotous mob (for one stunning version of Mark Antony's speech and its results, q.v.).  And Cinna the Poet decides to take a walk.  He's Cinna the Poet—not Cinna the Conspirator—and, if he has any political views at all, he seems to be opposed to the assassination of Caesar.  But his name is enough to condemn him to the mob.

Welles' production of the scene, envisioned here by Linklater's direction, is chilling.

The stage direction at the end of the scene in Shakespeare's text reads "Exeunt all the Plebeians [dragging off Cinna]."  The direction in the scene above is very understated, but, for the setting, it is all the more shocking.  It suggests a flavor of Secret Police, Enforced Disappearances, and Disappeared Persons.  The gasp we hear from the audience brings the dread of Shakespeare's scene to our own door.

---

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Bonus Image!  A page from the 1 January 1938 issue of Vogue:

The Great River Shakespeare Festival 2013

The Great River Shakespeare Festival. 26 June to 4 August 2013.

---

Readers of Bardfilm will know that one of the greatest joys of Shakespeare is seeing live productions.  One of the most exciting places to do that is in Winona, Minnesota during each summer's Great River Shakespeare Festival.

This year marks its tenth season—the tenth season of professional, astounding, life-altering Shakespeare productions.

This year, Twelfth Night and Henry V will be on the docket.  Plan to be there.

Remember, these are the people who brought you "Stuff People at a Shakespeare Festival Say":

Go there and find out for yourself if it's true.  And you'll find that it is.

---

Links: The Great River Shakespeare Festival.