- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

Hope you all had a pleasant Pi Day yesterday!  Real news coming soon-ish someday.

Brutus:
Remember March, the Ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touch’d his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What! shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers,–shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a Roman.

- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

It’s a homework-filled weekend for me, but sometime in the next week I want to make time to go see Avenue Q while it’s in town…

As we walked to the subway afterwards, C. admitted to sometimes confusing Benvolio and Horatio (from Hamlet). In the end, we decided that they might be the same person. Out of grief, Benvolio left Verona, changed his name, and enrolled in the university at Wittenberg, where he met Hamlet. After all, isn’t Horatio a very Italian-sounding name for the northern-Europe world of Hamlet?

I think he might have become King Lear’s Fool in later life.

Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. Episode called “Ghost Machine”. Hasn’t aired yet in the U.S., don’t know if it will, but it’s on YouKnowWhere. Actor: John Normington.

He played the Fool in King Lear when I was in Stratford, and this is not an instance of fangirl squeeing. In my opinion, Lear was the RSC’s clinker of the season, and casting seemed to be part of the problem. Lear was played by Colin Redgrave, who was about 65 at the time, but looked younger — in fact, looked too young to be moaning about his age and death and decay and senility, especially when he so often shared the stage with Normington as the Fool.

Imdb.com tells me that Normington is only two years older than Redgrave, but to look at them on stage, I would have sworn there was a ten to twenty year age gap (though what really killed their scenes was the chemistry gap).

So it should surprise no one when I say that a bit part as an old man in an armchair suited Normington perfectly.

As for Torchwood itself, I’m not thrilled with it. It seems to have gotten pretty decent ratings in the UK when it aired last fall, but it seems to be missing something. It isn’t cohesive somehow, and though the characters are all okay, they’re a bit vanilla somehow. Maybe the show just needs time to settle into itself.

Mostly I watch it because I’m curious about what they’re going to do with Captain Jack, who is a very different person than the one who flirted with Rose and called it business. Not sure what’s gotten to him between there and here — responsibility, death? The next interesting question is: Given that he’s going to appear back on Who later this season, will we see the lighthearted Jack of season one or the shoot first, ask questions later, super-enigmatic Jack that he often is in Torchwood? And how much does the pre-/post-watershed scheduling difference between the two programs play into the difference in his characterization?

The Harry Potter jokes come from the episode broadcast on April 7, the title of which grabbed my attention: “The Shakespeare Code.” Definately a fun romp through Elizabethan England, with several scenes filmed at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, whee! Besides the HP amusement, there are no less than six instances in which the Doctor quotes Shakespeare to Shakespeare (though Will comes up with “to be or not to be” on his own), as well as other references to the Macbeth witches and their “blasted heath,” the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, and the scholarly debate concerning Shakespeare’s sexuality (”Ooh, fifty-seven academics just punched the air…”).

I particularly appreciated that the episode revolved around a Shakespeare play that is not Romeo and Juliet! Instead, they used the less known Love’s Labors Lost, playing on the fact that there may have been a sequal, now lost, called Love’s Labors Won. [Tangent: Now I want to read Love's Labors Lost next month, it's one I don't know.]

After so much Renaissance lit in college, though, a few things jumped out at me as odd. Though the Doctor and his companions sometimes dress to be period-appropriate when they time-travel, but this time they did not, meaning that Martha was wearing jeans throughout. When we discussed plays like As You Like It or Twelfth Night, in which the heroine spends most of the play pretending to be a boy, it was suggested to us that crossdressers like Rosalind and Viola might not have seemed so absurd: because no women wore pants, anyone wearing pants would have been assumed to be male. Of course that sounds ludicrous now, but let me suggest this: if someone is wearing a skirt, even if the person has boyishly short hair and a flat chest, at a glance, wouldn’t we assume that the person is female? And of course, the more layers you wear, the easier it gets. Confusion over Martha’s gender would have been an interesting twist, but this episode didn’t go there.

Another cultural detail involved the Doctor’s constant quoting. Though most of it was Shakespeare, in one instance he referred to “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas. Shakespeare liked the line and said he might use it, to which the Doctor replied “You can’t, it’s someone else’s.” The line is funny, but it’s also true that Shakespeare and his contemporaries borrowed (and stole) from each other like mad. At the time, copyright existed to protect printers’ profits from being undercut by unauthorized editions, not to protect authors’ intellectual property. So while the Doctor’s tone of voice might have deterred Will, his words alone probably would not.

I also wonder whether the writer of this episode has ever tried to write with a pen and inkwell: twice we see Shakespeare writing late at night, ending up with his forehead on the pages in front of him. He should have had ink spots all over his face from that!

Spiralling down to the most nitpicky bit of the episode, we see Shakespeare reciting “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” to his “Dark Lady,” when in fact that sonnet is one of those addressed to a “fair youth.” The writer got major kudos from me for avoiding Romeo and Juliet, but he did lose a few for choosing one of the most well-known sonnets.

Before I sound bitter, though, let’s end with a bit of fan love.

Shakespeare: And I say, “A hart for a hart, a deer for a deer.”
Martha: I don’t get it.
Shakespeare: Then give me a joke from Freedonia.
Martha: Ok. Shakespeare walks into a pub and the landlord says, “Oy mate, you’re Bard.”

Image credits: LJ users ladybrick (”fan boy”) and atellix (all the others).

Brutus:
Remember March, the Ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touch’d his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What! shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers,–shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a Roman.

- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

I hope this doesn’t bode ill for the phone interview I have set up for this evening. One of my profs has designed an assignment for which he wants us to interview an editor, so that’s what this is. Eep. From our correspondence, she seems very friendly, though. More on all that life stuff presently…

Paying for laundry sucks more.

The bright side: yes, there is an elevator. And at least the washers and dryers are efficient.

I’ve been letting the tv entertain me this evening. ‘Course, only a nerd like me would go from Willy Wonka to Richard III… I have yet to see the Johnny Depp Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it was fun to watch the old Gene Wilder one again. I forsee an age divide in coming years — I suspect many in my generation and older will always picture Willy Wonka as Gene Wilder.

However, it was a bit trying to fold clothes in front of the Chocolate Factory when there is no chocolate in my kitchen. A situation that must be remedied!

Richard is the 1995 version with Ian McKellan in the title role — the one Pug and I watched for my Shakespeare course last May. Who knew Gandalf could be so evil? I love it, but it’s so creepy! Don’t look at me like that, Richard!

They perform in an amphitheatre (there’s that word again…once again, we really mean “outdoor theatre”) in a gorgeous park right on the Reedy River in downtown Greenville. The weather was great tonight, so the setting was a huge plus. And as the title suggests, the price was pretty sweet, too, though it’s considered polite to offer a donation.

The show itself was well done — in general, Greenville seems to do very well by the arts for a city of its size. Though definately amateur actors, by and large, they were good amateur actors. (I don’t mean to sound snobby when I say that. Keep in mind that the other Macbeths I’ve seen have been a the ASF and the RSC; I would love to be in this sort of production at some point.)

I always get caught up in the witches in Macbeth – partly because I was one when we tweaked 1.2 for that project in 10th grade, but also because there are so many neat things a director can do with them in terms of design and concept. At the ASF, each witch was visibly handicapped in some way, emphasizing that they were outsiders from society. One was blind, one had a bad leg, and one had something wrong with her arms. That was cool.

Tonight, the witches were given a motive, which made all sorts of things interesting. The play opens with a battle, so the witches were shown to be mourning the death of the play’s first victim (Person X), who had just been killed in front of our eyes by Macbeth and his men.

(Tangent: There was a lot of killing-in-front-of-our-eyes tonight. Am reminded how much I like the subtle suggestiveness of the doomed person getting dragged offstage just before the fatal blow falls.)

Anyway, that brief twist at the beginning set the whole play to be about the witches’ revenge on Macbeth and their manipulation of his life. Which then helps him — suddenly he has an excuse for going bonkers and murderous: they’re almost always on stage, watching, constantly working on him, instead of just putting a thought in his mind and leaving it to fester. Makes him less culpable, perhaps.

Macbeth himself was quite good, as was Lady M., though she could get a bit screechy — the sleepwalking scene was all screechy. I worried a bit about her and one or two of the witches in that regard: they were doing a lot of screechign and rasping and growling, and sometimes it sounded painful. As in, will-make-you-hoarse-and-hurt-your-voice painful. Damn, this is getting to be full of all kinds of patronizing. Well, let’s go out with a bang, then: Malcolm, the Scottish prince who saves the day and is crowned at the end, sounded like he’d wandered out of the hills of West Virginia. He seemed to be trying to change his accent, but if he had too much to say, he slipped into Hillbilly. A bit distracting….yet overall, a fine evening.

For those who might be in town, I hear they are doing Love’s Labors Lost in July/August, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in October (so it’s not even all Shakespeare). Free storytime in the park! Can you ask for more?

Reports of my graduation are still premature. (I have three more days of class. I get my piece of paper on June 3.)

So hello again! Carmen can stop frothing (geez, get a rabies shot!) and perhaps my rabid fans will be appeased.

Charlie Brown went off pretty well. Out first performance was out in the amphitheatre as planned — the forecast had been scaring us all week, but the only possible back-up location was already booked that first night. But the show went on! In fact, it did drizzle a little during the first act, but it cleared up after five or ten minutes and then it was lovely. Miraculously, the crowd didn’t leave!

Since we did have McAlister reserved for Friday and Saturday, we went ahead and moved to the auditorium Friday afternoon — and it did rain off and on all weekend, so we were glad we did. The show went better inside anyway (depite the fact that we were thoroughly turned around at first), so that was good. And there it was, my exit from Pauper Players. Sort of…I had set up a couple of video cameras during the last show, so I’ve been editing and burning copies of the video ever since. Finally got the last of those done this afternoon.

I also sang with Furman’s oratorio chorus (basically all the choruses combine to do a major work at Christmas and again in May) for the last time. I hadn’t been in women’s chorale since sophomore year (partly time constraints, partly personalities), so it was fun to be in a big chorus again. The performance was the day Pug arrived up here after his exams, so he got to come!

It was great fun to have my boy up here for a week, and he insists that he had a good time, despite the fact that he had to entertain himself while I went to class, worked at the CCLC, and wrote a research paper. I guess I even believe him, since after all I had a lovely time, despite going to class, working, and writing a research paper…

Some Linkages:

The Plains of Abraham: There is a Canadian classicist whose specialty is the performance aspect of Homeric poetry. So what does he do but write his own epic in the Homeric style about an event in Canadian history. And he goes around and performs it! He came to Furman the week between Charlie Brown and the oratorio — really cool!

NY Times on Da Vinci: Whatever you think about The Da Vinci Code, book or movie, check out this movie review from the New York Times. Harsh — but very funny! I thought the book was a good read and want to see the movie sooner or later, but it might wait for video. We shall see.

Speaking of movies, the group that brings films to Furman has been doing well this spring after performing way sub par for most of the year — they spent about two months advertising Saw 2 this winter. Ewww!! But now I’ve seen nearly everything I kinda wanted to see over Christmas but didn’t get around to:
Pride & Prejudice: pretty good; worth seeing for cheap; hated the final scene they wrote in.
Brokeback Mountain: I like it. And I think it’s really cool that they can make a tasteful movie about gay cowboys. Really cool.
The Producers: good funny! Though some scenes feel constrained, as though the blocking was pulled straight from the stage version and the camera angle is too narrow.
Good Night and Good Luck: I love black and white. Required viewing for anyone who thinks the Constitution is being trampled on. It doesn’t actively draw parallels between McCarthy and anything modern, but its very presence suggests them. Possibly just me. Also really neat to see the movie and then see a clip of the real 1950’s newscaster who is the main character of the film.

Those of you who remember a certain tenth grade English project may be amused to know that my Shakespeare class is doing something very similar! This time, though, we have to stick to the plot as given, though we may pull from multiple scene or overlay bits to make a point, provided that the point is substantiated by the text in the first place. My group is doing Richard III, a play I didn’t know much about until a few weeks ago. (However, now I can tell you if you don’t already know that the film of Richard III from about ten years ago starring Ian McKellen is phenomenal and you should all see it. So creepy!!) Anyway, I was experimenting with costume bits for this, and then I started playing with my camera and the mirror…ending up with this, which is kind of fun…
Odette casts magic missile.

- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

It occurs to me that maybe I should find a new way of celebrating the Ides of March. Or not. I mean, three years, dude! That’s tradition.

n.b. I will not be reading Julius Caesar for my Shakespeare, nor Antony and Cleopatra. However, for a Roman fix we are doing Titus Andronichus next week (I’m planning to take a mop to clean up all the blood). Syllabus also includes Troilus & Cressida, The Winter’s Tale, and Richard III, of which I know nothing; Lear and As You Like It, which I know, but not well; and Taming of the Shrew and Othello, which I do know pretty well. I am well pleased.

Watched Brannagh’s Othello tonight for class – I don’t think I’ve seen this one before and enjoyed it though I’ve watched his Much Ado too many times, I think. Difficult for me to see him as Iago.

Our first assignment in my writing class is to write a story with characters based loosely one two people we know, but who don’t know each other. Bwahahaha.