The Epilogue in Julie Taymor's Tempest

Music is a central to Shakespeare's romances. In Pericles, Gower calls the story a "song," and Marina "sings like one immortal." Cymbeline has the beautiful songs "Hark, hark! the lark " and " Fear no more the heat o'th' sun," and The Winter's Tale has Autolycus's songs and a pastoral dance. The Tempest was turned into an opera less than a hundred years after it was written; composers who have written for it include Purcell, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Vaughan Williams.

Eliot Goldenthal's music is one of the highlights of Julie Taymor's 2010 film, which ends with the epilogue being sung rather than spoken. During a question-and-answer period at the New York Film Festival, Taymor explained that she thought a spoken epilogue wouldn't work in film as it does in the theater, where the actor sheds his character as he bids the audience farewell.

Bryce Dallas Howard does just this in Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (2006), and it's an effective strategy. But Taymor didn't want to break the illusion of the world of her film and so didn't film Helen Mirren speaking the epilogue. Instead she had Goldenthal write music to be sung by Beth Gibbons of the trip-hop band Portishead. The music plays as we watch Prospero's sinking books and the credits roll.

Here it is, though not—alas—Taymor's imagery. Below the video, I've printed the epilogue with the words missing from Goldenthal and Taymor's version in italics.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint. Now 'tis true

I must be here confined by you

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands.

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Introduction to Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood

Many directors of Shakespeare films have not been great film innovators and stylists—they've been stage directors with a deep understanding of the plays. That combination is enough to produce a great Shakespeare movie. But there's another group of directors who have both a deep understanding of the plays and who are also great film stylists and innovators.

At the summit of that group are two directors: Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa. Welles had directed most of Shakespeare's history plays by the time he was fifteen, and he reread the plays throughout his life. His three feature-length Shakespeare films are the best things he ever did. He thought, and I agree, that his greatest film wasn't Citizen Kane but The Chimes at Midnight, his mash-up of the Henry plays.

Similarly, Kurosawa's appreciation of Shakespeare began early, when he was an art student, and continued throughout his life. Three of his best films are versions of Shakespeare plays. The Bad Sleep Well loosely follows Hamlet, resetting it in contemporary Japan. Ran ("Chaos") is an adaptation of King Lear set in feudal Japan. And Throne of Blood is a Macbeth adaptation, also set in feudal Japan, that follows Shakespeare more closely than either of the other two films.

Still, Throne of Blood changes Macbeth in a number of ways. Most important, Kurosawa's Washizu is not as evil as Macbeth, and his Lady Asaji is more evil than Lady Macbeth.

Let me give you two examples.

Othello Scenes on YouTube

Complete Movie

• Orson Welles's 1952 film with Welles as Othello, Michael MacLiammoir as Iago, and Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona. 

1.3

• Oliver Parker's 1995 film with Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Kenneth Branagh as Iago, and Irène Jacob as Desdemona. Branagh manipulates Michael Maloney (Roderigo) and delivers Iago's first soliloquy.
• Bob Hoskins does the same in Jonathan Jonathan Miller's 1981 television production with Anthony Hopkins as Othello, Penelope Wilton as Desdemona, and Rosemary Leach as Emilia. (Cuts off early.)

2.1

• Bob Hoskins delivers Iago's second soliloquy.

2.3

• Kenneth Branagh's Iago soliloquizes after destroying Cassio's reputation.

3.3

• Fishburne and Branagh. 

4.3

• Irène Jacob sings the willow song and gets advice from Anna Patrick (Emilia).

5.2

• Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith in Stuart Burge and John Dexter's 1965 film, starring Olivier in a disturbing blackface performance. With Joyce Redman as Emilia and a very young Derek Jacobi as Cassio. 
• Fishburne delivers Othello's last words.
• Willard White does the same in Trevor Nunn's 1990 television production with Ian McKellan as Iago, Imogen Stubbs as Desedemona, and Zoë Wanamaker as Emilia. 

Other

• Filming Othello, a documentary in which Welles discusses his movie in detail. 
• Paul Robeson describes the role of Othello.
• Scenes from O, Tim Blake Nelson's adaptation, with Mekhi Phifer as Othello/Odin, Josh Hartnett as Iago/Hugo, and Julia Stiles as Desdeomona/Desi. 
• The Reduced Shakespeare Company does the Othello rap. 
• Jerry Lee Lewis channels Iago in Catch My Soul, a rock musical adapatation.

(Image from kyleesplin.com)

"To Be or Not to Be" Smackdown

Who does it best? Vote on the right.

Branagh:

Gibson:



Hawke:




Olivier:

Titus Andronicus on YouTube

Julie Taymor directs Anthony Hopkins in Titus.

Scenes from Julie Taymor's 1999 Film

• Overimaginated has posted all of Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), with Anthony Hopkins as Titus, Jessica Lange as Tamora, Harry J. Lennix as Aaron, Alan Cumming as Saturninus, Laura Fraser as Lavinia, Colm Feore as Marcus, James Frain as Bassianus, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron, and Matthew Rhys as Demetrius. 
• Here's a selection from act three, in which Titus tells his sorrows to the stones, and here's the play's gory climax.

Other

• The Reduced Shakesperare Company does Titus Andronicus as a cooking show. 
• A horror-movie version of 5.3, from Theatre of Blood (1973), with Vincent Price as Edward Kendall Sheridan Lionheart (Titus) and Robert Morley as Meredith Merridew (Tamora). 

Robert Morley and Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood.

(image from Eric B. Olsen's History of Horror)

Key Events in Shakespeare's Life

Here's a useful timeline for Shakespeare's life, from PBS's "In Search of Shakespeare."

How did Shakespeare's plays originally sound?

Here are examples from Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to themarriage of true minds"), and Macbeth's dagger speech.

The First Soliloquy in Ian McKellen's Richard III

Ian McKellen begins his 1995 film of Richard III with the Lancasters' defeat and the murder of Prince Edward and his father Henry VI. After an opening title, we see the Yorks celebrating their victory: talking, laughing, dancing, and listening to Stacey Kent singing Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Love." As Kent finishes the song, we hear a squawk from another microphone as Richard prepares to speak. He delivers the first couplet—"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York"—and looks at his brother Edward. The crowd laughs at his wit and applauds his subsequent, triumphant lines.

The mood changes when he says, "Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front" (9). The camera moves closer to his own visage, focusing on his teeth as he talks of frightening his adversaries' souls.

Though still in the speech's first third, in which Richard celebrates peace under the Yorks, we are headed toward something different. When we reach the couplet, "He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (12-13), we move to a different chamber, a men's room, where Richard unbuttons his fly as he talks of "the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (13). The change of setting emphasizes that he describes peace negatively, as being corrupt and "lascivious."

He urinates as he begins the speech's second third—"But I, that am not made for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass" (14-15)—then buttons up and walks stiffly toward the room's looking glass, his gait imitating what he says about "halt[ing]" past barking dogs (23). Before the mirror, he washes his one good hand and dries it, beginning stage business that we'll see throughout the film: the one-handed lighting of cigarettes, putting on of gloves, taking off of rings, pouring of drinks, and so on. When he speaks of looking at his shadow and "descant[ing] on [his] own deformity" (26), he illustrates his words by looking at himself in the mirror. He then leans closer, examining his face as speaks lines from the character's first soliloquy, in The Third Part of Henry VI:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And wet my face with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

                                                            (3.2.182)

As he contemplates one of his best weapons, his face, he seems to realize that we've been watching. He looks at us in the mirror, then directly at us as he begins the soliloquy's last third: "And therefore since I cannot prove a lover / . . . I am determinèd to prove a villain" (28, 30).

He goes to the door, opens it, and says, "Plots have I laid" (32), then gestures with his little finger, inviting us to see the results of his schemes.

We then move outside, above a dock, where Richard finishes the speech by telling us that he has set the king against their brother Clarence.

Shakespeare's Henry V and the Effects of Botox

In yesterday's New York Times, the science section included a review of Eric Finzi's Face of Emotion: How Botox Affects Our Mood and Relationships. According to Finzi, injecting botulinum toxin into someone's face can cure her depression by preventing her from frowning. If someone can't frown, she's happier.

Facial expressions don't merely express emotions—they create them. Finzi cites recent research and thinkers like Darwin and William James to describe this as a physical, neurological effect.

Shakespeare's Henry V uses this effect at the siege of Harfleur when he tells his soldiers to "[d]isguise fair nature with hard-favored rage." They should make their faces resemble weapons and violent seascapes:

            lend the eye a terrible aspect,

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon, let the brow o'erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

If he can get them to do this, and to "set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide," then their spirits will rise to their "full height," and they will be ready to charge "[o]nce more unto the breach."