wshaffer

I'm not dead! It's just been a slightly hectic past few weeks.

Something I learned about time management: I thought that I was being tremendously clever in scheduling most of my physical therapy appointments in the early morning, so I could get them over with and get on with my day. I forgot that with the increasingly close collaboration I have with colleagues in different time zones, early morning is also practically the only time we have to hold important work meetings. This has turned my work schedule for the past few weeks into something akin to a slightly stressful game of temporal Tetris. I've learned my lesson - my last two physical therapy appointments are scheduled for early afternoon. It will mean a bit more driving back and forth, but I think I'll be saner.

Physical therapy is going pretty well. I'm not all better yet, but I've got a pretty functional range of movement in everything except the "reaching up between my shoulder blades" movement, which remains sticky.

And then I got a horrible cold and lay around at home for a few days. Daniel, who knows how to look after a sick Wendy very well, brought me a few liters of diet ginger ale, and the DVDs of the BBC's recent production of The Hollow Crown - Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), and Henry V. I watched Richard II and thought it was an excellent production. The cast is basically a who's who of British actors, but Ben Whishaw is particularly good as Richard II. Richard II is a difficult role to play, because he's basically someone who is making a great outward show of being king without having the decisiveness or the political savvy to back it up. I think my initial reaction to reading the play was basically, "For god's sake, kid, hand over the crown to Bolingbroke and put us all out of our misery." But when you see the role played by an actor with real charisma, it really changes the play, because you half buy into Richard's image of himself. My only quibble with this version is that they cut down the farewell scene between Richard and his queen, which I remember being really heartbreaking in the Arkangel Shakespeare audio version of the play, and in this version was merely mildly heartstring-tugging.

Also, I think maybe they over-egged the visual coding of Richard as effeminate and Bolingbroke as manly. Because there's really no connection between having fabulous hair and wearing pink and being ineffectual at governance. (Ben Whishaw does have fabulous hair in this, though. If the BAFTA awards had a category for best performance by a ringlet, this would have been a shoe-in.)

Looking forward to watching the rest of the set. Which has Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal/Henry V. Niiice.

nwhyte linked to this post about the film Anonymous, which has removed any lingering doubts about whether I should go see it in a theater. Because the moment we hit the following dialogue exchange...

Oxford: “Romeo and Juliet. A romantic tragedy in iambic pentameter.”
Jonson: “ALL OF IT? Is it possible?”
Oxford: “Of course.”

...I would be on the floor. Howling. And would probably need to be carried out. In a straight-jacket. Which would be unkind to the others in the theater. Though possibly less unkind than the experience of watching this movie.

So, okay, I have only an interested amateur's grasp of the literary history of this period. Yes, iambic pentameter blank verse was an important innovation for drama of the period - if you read the early Elizabethan dramas, the insistence on rhyming couplets does get rather clunky.

But, laying aside the inconvenient historical fact that blank verse iambic pentameter was in routine use well before Romeo and Juliet (and indeed, for more than a decade before Ben Jonson was born), I have a tremendously hard time imagining a wide-eyed Ben Jonson reacting with the line given above. Ben Jonson is being played by Sebastian Armesto in this film - if he manages to sell that line, he deserves an Oscar.

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups by Ron Rosenbaum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of the best books on Shakespeare that I've read yet. With a title like "The Shakespeare Wars", I expected it to be much concerned with biographical/historical controversies about Shakespeare, but it's actually a much more interesting look at the clashes and controversies of people responding to Shakespeare's text. This book asks the questions: how do we read and interpret Shakespeare, both academically and dramatically? And what do these readings and interpretations tell us about why we respond to Shakespeare the way we do? In other words, what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare?



Rosenbaum is probably the ideal person to write this book. His background in English literature allows him to understand some pretty arcane academic controversies, while his training as a journalist helps him make these accessible to the general reader. And he is passionate about Shakespeare. Before I read this book, I would not necessarily have expected a detailed discussion of Shakespeare's spelling or a close reading of a particular sonnet to be so compelling. This book makes them so.



Rosenbaum does make it pretty clear that, in his mind, there are right ways of studying Shakespeare and wrong ways of studying Shakespeare. The wrong ways include excessive obsession with Shakespeare's biography, excessive reliance on Literary Theory, and virtually everything ever written by Harold Bloom. The right ways mostly include various kinds of close textual analysis. I'm new enough to Shakespeare studies that I don't have a Shakespearean ideology, so I mostly find Rosenbaum's occasional dogmatism amusing. If I had more fixed opinions of my own, I imagine it might grate occasionally.



Still, I have yet to read any other work on Shakespeare whose sheer enthusiasm was so infectious. Do be warned, this is a book that will leave you with a long list of other works you need to read or reread, starting, of course, with the works of Shakespeare himself.



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Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Before I started listening to this series of Shakespeare plays on audio, I had feared that they'd be difficult to follow without the visual element. This hasn't proved to be a great problem, but I was a bit surprised to find Much Ado About Nothing more difficult in this respect than Richard III. Some of it is due to the extra effort required to follow Elizabethan wordplay, and some of it is that the characters in Much Ado About Nothing are less obliging about addressing each other by name at the beginning of each scene.

Most of the play revolves around the evil Don John's efforts to cause trouble by disrupting the marriage of Claudio to Hero, culminating in his convincing Claudio that Hero has been unfaithful to him with another man. Meanwhile, Don Pedro, Claudio, and Hero conspire to make the feuding Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other.

It's the Benedick/Beatrice plot that really makes this play stand out, mostly because Claudio is a bit of a jerk. Convinced that Hero has died of shame after he wrongly charged her with infidelity, he still has sufficient spirit to tease Benedick about his love life, and he rather meekly accepts Leonato's offer of a substitute marriage to a woman he's never met (who, of course, turns out to be Hero in disguise). It all turns out happily in the end, but I wouldn't have blamed Hero if she'd called the whole thing off.

Beatrice and Benedick, in contrast, are great fun. In the course of their sparring with each other, and trying to reconcile their feelings for each other with their previously firm intentions never to marry, they get all the best lines.

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