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A Candidate for the "Scariest Moment in Shakespeare"

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  Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in Roman Polanski's 1971 Macbeth   Two years ago, Andy McLean asked me to be part of a panel for Bell Shakespeare, the national Australian Shakespeare company. We were asked to vote for Shakespeare's greatest death scene and greatest lovers . Choosing the death scene was easy—I think it's hard to top Cleopatra's suicide. Choosing the lovers was tough. I went with Romeo and Juliet, though when I saw the winner, Shakespeare and the "lovely boy" of the sonnets , I wished that I had thought of it.   This year, I've been asked to choose a candidate for the " scariest moment in Shakespeare ."  I simplified my decision by eliminating moments that are not merely scary, but horrifying, like Lavinia being dragged away to be raped and mutilated in Titus Andronicus .   Macbeth has its moment of pure horror—when the Macduff boy is murdered in front of his mother—but much of the rest of the play is "scary," in the s...
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Why Do Shakespeare's Plays Make Great Movies? Part Three—Imagination

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This is Part Three of a series. For Part One, click here ; for Part Two, click here . Richard Sheridan Willis as the Chorus in a 2013 Folger Theatre production of Henry V . In Part One , we saw that Henry V 's Chorus wishes that his theater, actors, and audience were better. To properly present the play's subjects, he says, he would need "A kingdom for a stage, princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene." He criticizes his theater as too small and his actors as uninspired, but though he wishes that his audience were made up of monarchs, he doesn't denigrate it. Instead he calls the spectators "gentles all," meaning that they're all ladies and gentlemen. We might suppose that choruses, and characters who serve as choruses, always speak with this kind of courtesy, but two of Shakespeare's actually insult their audiences: the character who delivers the epilogue in Troilus and Cressida says that he will transfer his vene...
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Seven Times that Shakespeare Refers to Lunar Eclipses

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Sunday's big astronomical event made me wonder how many times Shakespeare refers to lunar eclipses. I can think of six. 1-2. In Sonnet 35, the speaker forgives his beloved by saying that everything has a bad side—"Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun"—and in Sonnet 107, he says that, like his love, some things last: "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured." 3. In Hamlet 's first scene, speculating about the Ghost, Horatio describes the portents that presaged the fall of Julius Caesar, one of which was a lunar eclipse: "the moist star / Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands / Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse" (106.11-13).
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Michael Fassbender's Macbeth Meets the Witches

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One of the Weird Sisters seems ready to kiss Michael Fassbender's Macbeth. The Guardian has posted this clip from Justin Kurzel's upcoming Macbeth . In this bit of the play's third scene, Michael Fassbender's Macbeth meets the Weird Sisters, who have a little girl with them. He asks what they are—stealing Banquo's "Live you, or are you aught / That man may question?" (1.3.40-41)—and they hail him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and future king.
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New Posters for the Fassbender-Cotillard Macbeth

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This week, Empire released these new posters for the Justin Kurzel's Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
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Teaser Trailer for the New Macbeth

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The trailer gives us a sense of the film's Braveheart -like atmosphere. It also shows that Duncan's murder is handled much as in Polanski's version, with Duncan awakening just before he's stabbed. This really is a "teaser." For a better sense of what's in the film, check out Peter Bradshaw's review .
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New Stills of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Justin Kurzel's Macbeth

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Empire magazine has published three new stills from Justin Kurzel's upcoming Macbeth  movie with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
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How did Shakespeare's plays originally sound?

Here are examples from Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"), and Macbeth's dagger speech .
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Chico State's University Film Series to Present Orson Welles's Macbeth on April 17

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Orson Welles's Macbeth will be shown as part of Chico State's University Film Series on Tuesday, April 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Ayres 106. Using ideas developed for earlier stage productions, Orson Welles shot this film on the Republic Studios' back lot in twenty-three days, creating a kind of Dark-Ages surrealism to present Macbeth as a clash between Christianity and Celtic paganism. The studio later forced Welles to cut the film by twenty minutes and to have his actors redub their parts without Scottish accents. The Film Series will show Welles's original version, uncut, with the burrs intact.
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Chico State's Humanities Center Will Host a Discussion of Orson Welles's Shakespeare Movies on April 12

On Thursday, April 12, at 4:00 in the Chico State Humanities Center (Trinity 100) Shakespeare professor Robert O'Brien will give a talk on "Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Why Creative People Shouldn't Try to Make Movies." This  thirty-minute   talk will be followed by a discussion of Welles's Shakespeare movies, especially his 1952 Othello and 1948 Macbeth .
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Which Shakespeare Plays Do Students Read in High School?

I surveyed the students in my upper-division college Shakespeare course to find out which plays they had read in high school. Most had read Romeo and Juliet (70%) and Hamlet (68%); fewer than half had read Macbeth (39%) or Julius Caesar (36%) . Three plays brought up the rear: Othello (31%), A Midsummer Night's Dream (24%), and—surprisingly— The Taming of the Shrew (21%). The other thirty canonical plays were untouched or had been read by one or two students.
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Accurate List of Hamlet's Soliloquies

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Though Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is his fourth soliloquy, many websites call it his third. They're skipping the twenty-line speech that follows his interview with the Ghost, which in my view is a particularly bad mistake since Hamlet's monomaniacal vow there is at the heart of his tragedy. The internet's cosmic sinkhole of misinformation will never be filled, but it's worth throwing some dirt in when we can, so here's an accurate list of Hamlet's soliloquies, with a short description of where they occur and what they say, along with a few observations.
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Seven Reasons Why Someone Who Doesn't Usually Read Epic Fantasy Might Want to Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy

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I gobbled up a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I went to college. Though I still read SF&F by "literary" writers, for years I didn't read anything that might be found in a bookstore's science-fiction-and-fantasy section. I even sold my collection of SF&F paperbacks, something I regret, much as Ray Bradbury regretted selling his collection of Buck Rogers comics . About fifteen years ago, I began reading science fiction and fantasy again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps what happened to me was what C. S. Lewis told his goddaughter might happen to her—I became "old enough to start reading fairy tales again" (dedication in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ). Or perhaps I was inspired by reading fantasy children's books aloud to my daughters (the greatest reading experience of my life). Or perhaps the change came when, prompted by good reviews, I read Susanna Clar...
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"To Be or Not to Be" in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet

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I once asked readers of this blog to vote for the best of four movie performances of Hamlet's fourth soliloquy (3.1.58-90). (If you'd like to compare them, they're posted here .) I now regret not asking about more than the acting since other elements contribute so much to these interpretations. For instance, each rendition is reinforced with a different setting. Franco Zeffirelli puts Mel Gibson's melancholy musings in a crypt, while Kenneth Branagh, who won the poll, has his Hamlet rage at a one-way mirror behind which Claudius and Polonius are hiding. Michael Almereyda—like many of you, I'm eager to see his Cymbeline —has Ethan Hawke meditate in voiceover while walking past the "ACTION" shelves in a Blockbuster, a contemporary setting in 2000 that now looks as dated as rotary phones and typewriters. Elsinore Laurence Olivier sets the soliloquy on the castle tower that he first shows us at the beginning of his 1948 film. As I described in my p...
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