Since I already realized that one's study of Shakespeare never ends, I cannot conclude, but I shall outline all the deep thoughts I had about Shakespearean shit this week.
Noguchi’s King Lear Designs - Wow
Since the first mental image most of us conjure when we hear “Noguchi” is that ding-dang beautiful mid-century modern iconic wood-and-glass coffee table we all want, imagine my bemusement upon reading that the guy designed the sets and costumes for a 1955 production of King Lear starring John Gielgud.
It’s… non-traditional to say the least, as is evident from the above examples. I am impressed that they even considered a production this brazenly experimental in the UK in the 50s. This is the vision they had:
“Aim: to find a setting and costumes which would be free of historical or decorative associations so that the timeless, universal and mythical quality of the story may be clear. We have tried to present the places and the characters in a very simple and basic manner, for the play to come to life through the words and the acting.”—Statement signed by John Gielgud; Herbert Devine, director, and Isamu Noguchi, the designer.
More like understatement amiright?
The BBC Shakespeare plays
From 1978-1985, the BBC reluctantly greenlit the concept of producing and broadcasting all 37 of the generally accepted Shakespearean canon plays on television. It was a miracle that it was approved, and having seen several of them during the past year, I’m amazed they stuck to it because a lot of them are pretty mediocre as films (to be clear, they are high quality taken as theatre stagings). But power to them for at least preserving a collection of performances by professional theatre actors for posterity (and all us poor schlubs who don’t live anywhere near international hubs of live theatre). Sometimes you’d catch a Sir Derek Jacobi as Richard II or Hamlet, or you see Sir Patty Stew as Claudius, or even Dame Helen Mirren as Rosalind, so that made it worth it.
The Long S
Upon studying scans of the original printings of Shakespeare's First Folio (or anything printed up until the nineteenth century) it is abundantly clear that spelling and typesetting has come a long way. They did not have dictionaries back then, so multiple phonetically-related spellings of the same word were easily accepted. Also, letters were a little funny. U’s and V’s were interchangeable, orthographic ligatures (combined letters like the dipthong "æ") were frequently used, and of course, there are those prominent lower-case f-like letters that somehow denoted what was called the "long s."
We've all seen them in "ye olde" printed materials--it makes the text appear to have a lisp. The long s, however, is just your run-of-the-mill lower-case "s," its shape borrowed from how the Romans used to write it in casual cursive. The elongated symbol came about when the difference between lower-case and capital letters was emphasised in Charlemagne’s court (Carolingian script, circa 800 CE). A capital "S" was exactly as we know it, and the long s was frequently utilized as the lowercase version. But in the Folio, we see both the long s and the mini "s" used for the lowercase. Well, English being English, people managed to make up usage rules for the long s that I am loathe to go into here. Long story short (pun intended), typesetters eventually got tired of including so many goddamn letters and ligatures in their kits that many symbols were dropped altogether because why have two symbols for the exact same sound? Go home, English language, you're drunk.
Sir William Davenant
The poet/playwright Sir Davenant, who was tasked with reviving many of Shakespeare's plays after his death may or may not be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son/godson, but he basically came up with the "wing and shutter" theatre stage scenery system that was widely utilized throughout the world for two hundred years. Until his innovation, European stages were usually naught more than a bare platform with perhaps a trapdoor and a background curtain like at The Globe. Davenant's concept consisted of a proscenium arch with floor grooves parallel to the front curtain on either side where decorated shutters could be added and removed to resemble a hall, a room, or even a forest of trees. A lovely example of this setup is displayed in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982), as compared to a diagram of The Globe:
Having finally been able to sit down and watch Bergman's gorgeous semi-autobiographical Hamlet-themed film this year, I am now besotted with everything about it, as you shall see below.
The ironical mentions of Sir Kenneth Branagh in the Riverside Appendix
Amongst the myriad notable stage productions mentioned in my beloved 2nd Edition of the Riverside Shakespeare, published in 1997, there was a Hamlet whose art direction was inspired by Fanny och Alexander, starring Kenneth Branagh. I would have KILLED to have seen that shit. Like, committed justifiable homicide. I (and plenty of other cinephiles, I’m sure) lament the fact that Bergman didn’t do pure Shakespeare on film, because he did quite a few plays on the stage in his time and they were held in high esteem.
Reading about the trends in filmic Shakespeare in the Riverside is obviously laughingly out of date. It’s particularly adorable when it comes to covering the then-only-vaguely-burgeoning influence young Kenneth was having on stage and screen. It begins by acknowledging his clear and present talent in RSC productions of Henry V and Hamlet in the ‘80s:
To hear Branagh read lines that had only been words on the page before and make them so clear was worth the trip to London. -H. R. Coursen
It goes on about how this upstart burst onto the screen with Henry V in 1989, as very few films were made after Polanski's Macbeth (1971). Jarman's The Tempest (1979) and Kurosawa's Lear-inspired Ran (1985) are not to be overlooked, however. The Riverside mentions the praise Branagh got with Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and how he was a solid Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s Othello in 1995. Then there’s passing mention of the yet-unreleased Hamlet (1996). It even says that Branagh’s new offering will not diminish Zeffirelli’s star-studded Hamlet (1990).
*le sigh*
Branagh’s Hamlet ended up overshadowing practically every Shakespeare film ever made. It is frequently hailed as one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare put to celluloid (usually second or third to his Henry V, appropriately enough). There's so much to unpack about this "eternity version" of Hamlet, but for now, I must point out Sir Ken's "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" scene, the closing of which appears to have been a direct reference to the opening scene of Fanny och Alexander:
I cannot believe that this shit was a coincidence. I fucking LOVE THIS.
Anyway, Hollywood’s 90s and 2000s revivals of Shakespeare were directly influenced by none other than Sir Ken’s earnest enthusiasm for the subject, and his ability to prove that the Bard can and shall be adapted to be accessible to a wide movie-going audience. He picked up and donned Sir Laurence’s mantle at exactly the right moment. He didn’t win that knighthood for merely banging out a few popular films in iambic pentameter, folks.
I could literally write a college thesis on Shakespearean film auteurism and one day I probably will just because it gives me great pleasure. As Hamlet says, “O ’tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet.”
Upstart Crow
One cannot overstate just how much this brilliant BBC programme filled my heart with joy in the waning months of this atrocious year of 2020. Written by Ben Elton and starring Peep Show alum David Mitchell as our favorite balding actor/playwright, Upstart Crow is so named for author Robert Greene’s epithet from the 1592 tract Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit, in which he famously drags the world’s favorite playwright for being over-popular and undereducated.
Greene—cast in the show as the Queen’s Master of Revels and existing beyond his real-life death—is hilariously played by Mark Heap (Spaced), who clearly relishes the role of the snivelling snob always trying to get “The Crow” into trouble. Kit Marlowe (Tim Downie) is Will’s pub mate and effortlessly charming “posh boy”/undercover royal spy who likes to nag Will to lend him another play to keep up his fake identity in the theatre world. Will’s theatre buddies are Burbage (Steve Speirs), Condell (Dominic Coleman), and the ersatz-Ricky-Gervais actor Kempe (Spencer Jones), who dutifully, if idiosyncratically, put on all the plays at the Red Lion Theatre. Will’s servant Bottom (Rob Rouse, with his lively Northern accent) oftentimes proves the most street-wise of the bunch. The wonderful Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones) plays Will’s London landlady who dreams of acting on stage despite being constantly reminded that it is “illegal” in England, but it never suppresses her feminist hot takes on every one of Will’s plot and character choices.
The sitcom presents Will as a fairly down-to-earth paterfamilias who commutes between London and Stratford on a regular basis, unfailingly delivering complaints about Albion’s less-than-stellar public transport services to his and long-suffering wife Anne (Liza Tarbuck). Will gets all his inspiration from the comings and goings around him, although he is comedically dense about incorporating them into his work. Nonetheless, his friends and family adore him despite his insistence that he alone has come up with every great word or turn of phrase in the English language.
Featuring a titillating mixture of scholarly Shakespeare in-jokes, Elizabethan history, and parodied current events (Brexit anyone?), Upstart Crow appealed to a broad enough BBC audience to run for three series and inspired Ben Elton’s successful stage play in 2019. A one-off “Lockdown Christmas” episode will air later this month (I hope to find a way to see it!) as a perfect coda to this plague-ridden 2020 full of innumerable journalists reporting on how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during The Plague. Um, Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays during a lot of plagues. Makes us look like a bunch of whinging barstibles.
On that note, one of the best things about the show is its euphemized bawdy language, often adding ridiculously British endings to modern-day curses. Whenever Will has a genius idea, his eyes go wide and he says “Hang on... Hang the futtuck on!” The actor Condell, who always plays the female lead, wears coconut shell boobingtons under his dress, Will’s daughter Susanna acts like a total bitchington, and Marlowe often references his massive cod-dangle. It’s silly and charming fun.
Of course, no Shakespeare celebration would be complete without the great guest stars. For the first Christmas episode, Emma Thompson plays the half-bald but intimidating ginger Virgin Queen herself, with great whimsy and hilarity. Her exiting line about being married to her country and how she shall go to bed and lie back and “think of England” is just what the Bard ordered.
To my gleeful surprise, Sir Kenneth pops up in a dual role in the second Christmas episode. At first he is Colin, a travelling Irish jester (Ken uses his original Belfast accent!) whom Will meets on a crowded coach ride home. He is also the mysterious ghost-like Stranger who spills the entire story of A Christmas Carol into Will’s lap. Saddened by the passing of Hamnet, this encounter inspires Will to play a trick on Robert Greene involving friends and family dressed up as a trio of informative ghosts, in order to save Greene’s soul from a lifetime of narcissism and greed. At the end, Anne suggests that the story would make a great play, but Will is so thoroughly humbled by the entire experience that he decides to let the story float on into the future, to alight on some other lucky writer one day.
I binged every episode of Crow twice now, and other than Schitt’s Creek and post-election Stephen Colbert monologues, nothing else on TV or in movies has delivered unto me such genuine mirth this whole fucking year. I was obviously primed for this very type of entertainment, which made it all the more satisfying. I might have to keep my BritBox subscription for a while, if only for this one priceless series.
I want to end this week with some wisdom. As soon as I heard it, I was enamored with this quote from Fanny och Alexander. At the Christmas party in the Ekdahl family’s theatre, Mr. Ekdahl gathers all the actors and stagehands and his family to thank them for another year of doing what they love. He is particularly emotional at the time, and he’s not sure why, but he delivers a crystal-clear insight into what theatre does for us as humans:
Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one... so that we understand it better. Or perhaps we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while... for a few short moments...the harsh world outside. Our theatre is... a little room of orderliness, routine, care, and love.
Diversion and respite from this veil of tears, indeed.
Alright, I suppose I will have to force myself to take a break for Christmas. I need to regroup and start collecting materials for my next project anyway. I cannot see myself leaving my Shakespeare project entirely, and I hope to reread everything again someday. There is always more to discover. More to do.
Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing. -Troilus & Cressida, Act I Sc. II
Comments