Doctor Who and Shakespeare—The Enduring Connection

Hamlet. Dir. Rodney Bennett. Perf. Derek Jacobi and Patrick Stewart. 1980. DVD. Ambrose Video, 1980.

---

The connection between Doctor Who and Shakespeare has been made in the show numerous times. The characters frequently interact with Shakespeare and / or his day and age.  But what people sometimes forget is that the actors in Doctor Who have frequently played Shakespeare.

Lalla Ward, for example, played Ophelia in the BBC production of Hamlet—an Ophelia a bit too meek and submissive for my tastes, but one well-acted nonetheless. [As an added bonus, she played opposite Patrick Stewart's {Cap't Jean-Luc Picard to you} Claudius—see image below.]

The big Doctor Who / Shakespeare news is this. The current Doctor, David Tennant, will be playing Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer!

And Patrick Stewart is set to reprise the role of Claudius!

Oh, to be in Britain this summer.

The rumor is that a Dalek will be playing Polonius, giving a certain . . . whatsit . . . je ne sais quoi to the production.

In preparation for that, some marvelous person has taken the time to edit up (in the mode of Radio Free Vestibule's "Laurence Olivier for Diet Coke," for which q.v.) a sample of David Tennant as Hamlet.

Observe the wonder:

---

Bonus Image: Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

---

Links: BBC Hamlet.

“Half the time I didn’t even know what they were saying, but it didn’t even really matter.”

Ryzik, Melena. "Scottish Play Gets Polish Makeover." New York Times 11 June 2008.

---

I have a decidedly mixed reaction to the production of Macbeth mentioned in the New York Times this morning. My head starts to hurt when I hear things like "“Half the time I didn’t even know what they were saying, but it didn’t even really matter” to describe a Shakespeare play. I think we should know what they're saying, and I think that it does matter.

I'm also worried about this description: "The show is blood-and-guts Shakespeare as a drive-in movie."

Hmmm.

On the other hand, it sounds like it's trying to be relevant—as well as visually stunning. But I'm not sure Macbeth-as-action-film is quite what I'd like from a production.

I need my Brooklyn readers to give a report. From where they live, they may be able to hear the fireworks, after all!

---

Links: NYT Article.

These are but wild and whirling words

Jones, Keith. ““Why, you are nothing then: Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife?”: Motives, Morals, and Marriages in Measure for Measure.” WORD and RITE: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespeare Plays. The Shakespeare Institute. 5-7 June 2008

---

All the wonderful material presented at the Shakespeare Institute Conference is wildly whirling in my mind.

Conferences like these are energizing—there’s a great deal to think about afterwards, and some challenging ideas to explore.

And that doesn’t exclude my own essay. I hope it will find a home in some journal or as part of a larger project. It was, I believe, well-received, but twenty minutes goes by remarkably quickly! 


By the way, someone inquired as to the word count for the essay, so I thought it fair to post that information here. The essay was 4,597 words long.

By my calcualations, that’s about 229 words per minute. And that’s about 3.8 words per second.

My goodness! I was reading at a good clip, wasn’t I?

[Actually, I did edit out about four or five hundred words while reading the essay. But I do tend to read fast when I’m nervous, and I think I may have packed too much into the presentation.]

Marvelous. Intriguing.

Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare's Wife. New York: Harper, 2007.

---

The Shakespeare Institute's conference has only just started, but already a host of ideas is swirling around in my head.

Not all of them are from the conference, but I promised myself that this would be a very Shakespeare-intense series of days.

When I'm not walking to some of my favorite old restaurants around the area, I'm reading Germain Greer's Shakespeare's Wife. It's quite lovely--disarming at points, funny quite a lot, sometimes contradictory but extraordinarily scholarly, the book is a very good read.

I fell for it when I first saw the chapter headings. Like Tom Jones (the novel, not the singer—that's why the MLA form for underlining is so important . . . I can easily distinguish between Tom Jones and Tom Jones—the chapter headings are huge and whimsical.

One of my favorites so far is Chapter Five:

Chapter Five of the making of a match, of impediments to marriage and how to overcome them, of bonds and special licenses and pregnancy as a way of forcing the issue, of bastards and bastardy, and the girl who got away. 

Very nice.

And applicable to my paper—which is to be delivered at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

In short, I'm enjoying the book very much. I just hope I enjoy giving the paper half as much.

Perhaps I should revamp my title to fit Greer's style . . . .

---

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

Off we go!

On the Road to Chicago!

---

I'm off to Chicago today! Google maps, as you can see, recommends driving recklessly. I'm not sure I'll be exiting the highway from the far left lane, but we'll see.

More Shakespeare-related posts when we get there!

Done.

Jones, Keith. “'Why, you are nothing then: Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife?': Motives, Morals, and Marriages in Measure for Measure.” WORD and RITE: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespeare Plays. The Shakespeare Institute. 5-7 June 2008. Ed. Steven Jan Schneider. New York: Barron’s, 2003.

---

The draft of the essay for the Shakespeare Insitute is complete.

Hurrah.

Now I can get to all the other things I’d love to do with my copius free time.

Like reading books about Shakespeare.

Assuaging Guilt—The Easy Way

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Ed. Steven Jan Schneider. New York: Barron’s, 2003.

---

Usually, I feel guilty about watching too many videos—squeezing them in when I should be concentrating on grading papers or writing essays. So I thought I’d check out a book that would make me feel guilty about not watching enough videos.

The book listed above does so. Looking through its pages, you feel dwarfed by the immensity of what you must accomplish before you die. You think, “I’ve got to get started! I’ve got to drop everything and watch some old Peter Sellers movies!”

Of course, given my own interests, I looked for the “Shakespearean” slot in the genre index.

There wasn’t one.

So I started seeing what Hamlets they think we must see before we die.

There wasn’t one.

I wonder what percentage of the movies you must see before you die you would estimate to be Shakespeare films. Two percent? Two percent of one thousand is twenty films. That seems reasonable. One percent? That would be ten movies. One-half percent (or five films)?

The answer? One tenth of one percent—0.1%—that’s all.

One film.

Actually, if you count adaptations, the percentage rises to 0.3%—which is still repulsively low in my estimation.

So, of all the wonderful and marvelous films I mention on this blog, require my classes to view, and watch myself, only three are pre-mortum must-see films: one by Olivier and two by Kurosawa:

Henry V. Dir. Laurence Olivier. Perf. Laurence Olivier. Two Cities, Britain, 1948. Videocassette. Films for the Humanities, 1987.

Throne of Blood [Kumonosu jô (The Castle of the Spider’s Web)]. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Isuzu Yamada. 1957. DVD. Criterion, 2003.

Ran. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Tatsuya Nakadai and Akira Terao. 1985. DVD. Criterion, 1985.

Now, does that seem right to you?

---

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

Hamlet, The First (In)Action Hero!

Last Action Hero. Dir. John McTiernan. Perf. Arnold Schwarzenegger, F. Murray Abraham, Art Carney, and Austin O'Brien. 1993. DVD. Sony, 2007.

---

While looking through a folder of scholarly articles on Shakespeare, I came across Eric S. Mallin's tremendous and seminal work on Shakespeare and Schwarzenegger.

Mallin, Eric S. “‘You Kilt My Foddah’; or Arnold, Prince of Denmark.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 127-51.

I keep meaning to require it as reading for my Shakespeare and Film class—and I'll certainly do so next time. The way the article reads deeply into the film and into Shakespeare is intriguing.

For example, Mallin points out the interest of the choice the teacher (played by Joan Plowright, Lawrence Olivier's widow) makes in showing a scene from Olivier's Hamlet.

The connection-by-marriage is obviously interesting. But, more interesting that that, is the teacher's decision to show the Claudius-at-prayer scene to support her thesis that Hamlet is "one of the first action heroes." Mallin says that "The weight of the wish in Danny's dream of Shakespeare and the appropriateness of Arnold as a bearer of this weight are of course that Hamlet become an agent of immediate, uncompromising revenge and destruction, not of mediation and equity" (130).

To follow Mallin, Hamlet works because its hero is an inaction hero. We know what action heroes might (and will) do, but we wonder constantly what Hamlet will do, how he'll do it, and (to an extent) why he doesn't.

That's an unformed thought, but I have a semester or two to work on it. In the meantime, enjoy the scene below!

---

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

Twin Cities Park-Bound Shakespeare

Love’s Labor’s Lost. Dir. Derek Washington. Perf. Erin Busby, Paul Brutcher, Erin Caswell, and Erika Danielle Crane. Cromulent Shakespeare Company. St. Paul, Minnesota. 6-28 June 2008.

You peasant swain! you whoreson malt-horse drudge!
Did I not bid thee meet me in the park,
And bring along these rascal knaves with thee? (The Taming of the Shrew, IV.i.129-31)

This year, the Cromulent Shakespeare Company is presenting Love’s Labor’s Lost in various parks in the Twin Cities. I think that it will be well worth a trip, especially because there is no cost!

Leaving apart, of course, the cost of trying to follow the tightly-constructed, university-wit-parodying, dizzyingly-rapid language of the play!

The first show is in Kenwood part one week from today: on Friday, June 6 at 7:00 p.m.

For families, there’s a performance at Como Park at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 15.

Let’s hope it’s a good one! But, stellar or not-quite-so-stellar, it’s free and it’s in the park.

Enjoy!

The Ape-Bearer will be Down for the Weekend: Hamlet Auditions

A Midwinter’s Tale [a.k.a. In the Bleak Midwinter]. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Richard Briers, Hetta Charnley, Joan Collins, Nicholas Farrell, Mark Hadfield, Gerard Horan, Celia Imrie, Michael Maloney, Jennifer Saunders, Julia Sawalha, and John Sessions. 1995. Videocassette. Turner, 1999.

“I know this man well: he hath been since an ape-bearer;
then a process-server, a bailiff . . .” (A Winter’s Tale, IV.iii.94-96).

The College’s server is going to be out until Sunday, so I thought I’d quickly try to put up this selection of auditions for Hamlet from Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale—a really brilliant film that has not yet been released on DVD. I'm also considering moving most of my blogging to this site rather than the other. It's becoming cumbersome to update the entire site every time.

Enjoy!

[Quick Note: Language may not be appropriate for all viewers. There's only one obscenity, but I thought I should mention it.]

---

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

“Lively-Minded Discussion by Stellar Shakespearean Scholars”

Jones, Keith. “'Why, you are nothing then: Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife?': Motives, Morals, and Marriages in Measure for Measure.” WORD and RITE: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespeare Plays. The Shakespeare Institute. 5-7 June 2008.

---

Alternate title: “I know what I’ll be doing this summer.”

In just over a week, I’ll be presending my paper on Measure for Measure at the Shakespeare Institute at Wheaton College. The Institute is the entity kind enough to promise the “lively-minded discussion” mentioned above.

It strikes me that “stellar Shakespearean scholars” probably end their blog posts at this point and get back to their essays.

So I will, too.

---

Finding Small Measure in A Waste of Shame

A Waste of Shame. By William Boyd. Perf. Rupert Graves, Tom Sturridge, Indira Varma, and Anna Chancellor. Dir. John McKay. Shakespeare Retold. 2005. DVD. Open University / BBC, 2005.

---

That title may sound like a line from a Shakespearean sonnet, but it refers to a scene in A Waste of Shame in which one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors delivers Angelo’s lines from Act II, scene ii of Measure for Measure.

I wish I could gather this brief speech up and put it on the site for all to see, but it’s beyond my technical abilities (and my time limitations!) at this point.  [Note: My technical abilities improved; you may now find a clip here.]

I recalled it because almost all my attention is directed at finishing the revisions on my Measure for Measure essay, due to be presented at a conference in just over a week’s time.

Since I can’t give you the video of the speech itself, I’ll just reproduce the text below. You’ll have to pierce out this blog’s imperfections with your thoughts, thinking when we talk of that actor delivering his lines that you see him putting his proud lines i’ th’ receiving audience’s ear. And also a general pan of the audience that reveals Shakespeare watching his own play and thinking of his lost loves.

                                Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Ever till now,
When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.

—Measure for Measure, II.ii.181-87

---

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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

Professional Amateur Production of Romeo and Juliet in Hot Fuzz

Hot Fuzz. Dir. Edgar Wright. Perf. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. 2007. DVD. Universal Studios, 2007.

---

Earlier, I was only able to post a few pictures from the Romeo and Juliet portion of Hot Fuzz. Now, it seems, I can post a fifty-five-second video clip!

---

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com

(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Oh, What a Lear!

King Lear. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Sir Ian McKellen, Sylvester McCoy, Romola Garai, William Gaunt, Frances Barber, and Monica Dolan. BBC, 26 December 2008.

---

Last Fall, we were privileged beyond belief to see Ian McKellen (and the RSC—sorry not to give you top billiing, RSC . . . maybe later) in a production of King Lear directed by Trevor Nunn. I felt very honored and humbled and was grateful beyond measure that our Guthrie-Theatre-season-ticket-holdin’ friends were able to wrangle us two seats with them.

At that time, I wished that more people could witness this astonishing actor in this more-than-astonishing role. I wanted to take every student at the college to the production, in fact. But the tickets sold out almost immediately and the run was a very limited one.

Well, on Boxing Day this year, a version of that production made for television broadcast will be broadcast! And that may mean that a US release—either on television or on DVD—will follow.

It will not be the same as live theatre. I’m not sure any film version can capture the rituals, rites, and responses of attending a production with fellow audience members. But it does vastly expand the extent of the potential audience.

---

Hamlet 2 Trailer

Hamlet 2. Dir. Andrew Fleming. Screenplay by Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming. Perf. Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, David Arquette, and Elisabeth Shue. Focus, 27 August 2008.

---

Well. I just viewed the trailer for Hamlet 2, and I must confess that my earlier enthusaism is waning a bit. Just a bit. Well, a bit more than a bit, I suppose, but hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

Trailers are supposed to contain the best material in the film, and the modern moviegoer holds out hope that the rest of the film will be just as good as the best parts of the trailer.

I think that this modern moviegoer will have to hope that the rest of the film will be better than the best parts of the trailer.

But don’t take my word for it . . . . Judge for yourself:

---

Links: Trailer. Official site. Previous Post One. Previous Post Two. Previous Post Three. The Film at IMDB.

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