ShakespeareFlix

Adam Driver, behind the mask, as Kylo Ren, and Kenneth Branagh as Henry V . Spoiler Alert: This post mentions a plot twist in The Force Awakens. George Lucas directed Star Wars Episode 4 and produced Episodes 5-6 before making Episodes 1-3, just as Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (which tell a later part of his story) before writing Richard II , the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V (which tell an earlier part). Just as people sometimes call Episodes 4-6 "the first Star Wars movies" because they appeared first, Henry VI-Richard III  is called the "first tetralogy" because Shakespeare wrote it first. Richard II-Henry V  is called the "second tetralogy" because he wrote it second. The second tetralogy's last play, Henry V , ends with an epilogue linking it to the first tetralogy, creating a single, continuous epic that tells the story of England from the late fourteenth century to the late fifteenth. That sto...

Music is 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 first performed; composers who have written for it include Purcell, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Vaughan Williams. Beth Gibbons of Portishead Eliot Goldenthal's music is one of the highlights of Julie Taymor's 2010 film of the play, 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 ...

In my post on Hamlet's soliloquies , I provided a close reading of his seventh, which begins "How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge!" (4.4.9.22-23). This speech, arguably the play's most complex, doesn't make it into Laurence Olivier's 1948 or Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 films since neither includes Fortinbras, whose imminent attack on the Poles is the "occasion" most on Hamlet's mind. Without the attack, the soliloquy makes no sense. Kenneth Branagh includes the soliloquy, the attack, and all of Fortinbras's story in his 1996 film, just as he includes everything that would be found in a conflated Second-Quarto/First-Folio Hamlet . In this text's first scene, we hear how "emulate pride" made Fortinbras's father challenge Hamlet's father to single combat (1.1.79-83). Hamlet's father accepted, and the two kings agreed that the winner would take the loser's land, which is what happen...

For years I've said we need more films of Shakespeare's romances, which are perfect for this era of fantasy spectacles. Those films often look great because of CGI, a technology that works well for Shakespearean romance, as Julie Taymor proved with her 2010 Tempest . We could use similar treatments of Pericles and The Winter's Tale . Cymbeline , with its evil queen, pagan god, clash of armies, decapitation, and far-flung settings in the first-century British court, corrupt Rome, and misty Wales would make an excellent Game-of-Thrones -style epic. Instead, Michael Almeyreda is giving us a contemporary crime thriller, with the Britons as bikers and the Romans as cops. We lose the original setting's sweep but gain a gritty immediacy that should work well for the play's jealousy and war stories. Unlike the trailer for 2013 Romeo and Juliet —which brought high hopes crashing to the ground with Julian Fellowes's ridiculous, spell-it-all-out dialogue—the Cymb...

In 1909 the Vitagraph  Company shot the first Midsummer Night's Dream movie in the wilds of Brooklyn, using a forest and the architecture at a waterworks and park entrance ( Halio  85). The actor Charles Kent may have directed the film alone or with Vitagraph's cofounder, J. Stuart Blackton. Like many of Blackton's films, the Vitagraph Midsummer is filled with stop-action effects, but Kent, who didn't use ordinarily use these effects, may have adopted them to make the film's fairy scenes more magical.

Gloucester's enhanced interrogation. Image from S hakespeare's Staging . Shakespeare would have agreed with the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion that torture doesn't produce useful information . At the end of Othello , Gratiano says that "torments" will make Iago explain his villainy (5.2.312), but we don't see this, and Ludovico orders Cassio to torture Iago (5.2.377-79) for the same reason that Lucius orders that Aaron be tortured in Titus Andronicus (5.3.178-82) and Benedick proposes torturing Don John in Much Ado About Nothing (5.4.121-22)—as a punishment. In the only play in which we see torture used in an attempt at gaining intelligence, it gains nothing. King Lear 's Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril tie Gloucester to a chair and pull his beard to get him to tell them why he sent the king to Dover. But Gloucester doesn't reveal that Cordelia and French army are there, and even if he had, the villains knew this already. Having ...

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...

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.

Salvador Dali's set for Spellbound 's dream sequence. Spellbound 's opening title. When Laurence Olivier released his 1948 Hamlet , psychoanalysis intrigued many moviegoers. It featured prominently in films like The Dark Past , which was released the same year, and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound , which was released three years earlier. Spellbound included a trippy dream sequence, with sets by Salvador Dalí, and starred Ingrid Bergman as a psychoanalyst who solves a murder by analyzing Gregory Peck's dream, as if psychoanalysis were forensic science rather than speculation and intuition. The film begins with a Shakespeare quote, a title reading "THE FAULT . . . . . IS NOT IN OUR STARS, BUT IN OURSELVES," words that come from Julius Caesar's second scene, in which Cassius tries to talk Brutus into joining the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. Cassius tells Brutus that their present position under Caesar isn't determined by astrolo...

When I recently showed Laurence Olivier's 1948 Hamlet to a class of college students, two things surprised them. First, because of what they had had heard about Olivier, they had expected great acting, but they initially found the performances hammy, like "old-fashioned stage acting." After a while, they became used to this more theatrical style, and by the time we reached Hamlet's "get thee to a nunnery" confrontation with Ophelia, most were too caught up in the story to think about the performances. I stopped the movie at this point—embarrassing some students with tear-stained faces—and we discussed what we had seen. A few students still thought that the acting, especially that of Jean Simmons as Ophelia, was overly theatrical, but they all admired the subtlety of Olivier's performance, how, for example, in the "nunnery" scene, his facial expressions tell us that Hamlet finds what he's doing painful. Some students who had seen Mel Gibs...

In the opening of his 1948 Hamlet , Laurence Olivier identifies indecisiveness as the prince's tragic flaw, the "particular fault" that brings about his downfall. As the film unfolds, Olivier provides a Freudian explanation for that indecisiveness. Though I don't buy this interpretation of the play, the film remains one of my favorites. Its unforgettable performances and creative camera work make it one of the best Shakespeare movies, and if I had to choose a single Hamlet to take to a desert island—along with a solar-powered DVD player—I'd choose this one. I've come to enjoy its Freudianism the way I enjoy the clothing or cars in a film noir , as an entertaining artifact of mid-twentieth-century culture. Read more on Substack (free).

Jane Shore's presence in the busy opening scenes of Olivier's Richard III gives us a sense of King Edward's vulnerability —the next scene shows us his brother's strength and determination. At the same time, the scene establishes a powerful sense of intimacy between Richard and the movie audience. READ THE REST ON SUBSTACK .

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. Read the rest on Substack .

ShakespeareFlix is moving.     READ THIS POST ON SUBSTACK!

Branislava Nijinska never attained the fame of her older brother Vaslav Nijinsky, whose dancing with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes made him an international sensation. Branislava's career began the same way, dancing for the Russian Imperial Ballet and then the Ballets Russes. In 1921 she became Diaghilev's choreographer and for four years worked with him and other luminaries of the Parisian avant-garde—Cocteau, Stravinsky, Picasso—creating performances that helped make ballet central to modernism. Portrait of Nijinska by Man Ray After leaving the Ballet Russes, she worked for various directors, including Max Reinhardt, whose 1920s and early '30s Berlin productions represented modern theater's sharpest edge. For his 1931 production of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman , Nijinska designed dances that were performed on a revolving stage in front of three thousand people ( Nijinksa 521, " Stupendous Production "). The following year she settled in...

The pickup artists in Neil Strauss's The Game aren't a patch on Shakespeare's Richard III. In the play's second scene, which takes place at the funeral of a man he murdered, Richard seduces the widow of a man he helped murder. The scene begins with Lady Anne following her father-in-law Henry VI's funeral procession. She tells the pallbearers to set down the corpse so she can mourn this saintly king, but her laments soon turn into violent curses for Henry's murderer, Richard Gloucester, who with his brothers also killed Anne's husband Edward. When Anne finishes cursing Richard—for the moment—she tells the pallbearers to pick up the coffin. Richard appears and orders them to set it down. As the corpse's wounds bleed afresh—a victim's wounds were thought to do this near his murderer—Anne rages at Richard, calling him a "fiend," a "devil," and a "minister of hell." Read the rest on Substack!

David Garrick's Heir Laurence Olivier opens his 1955 Richard III with stirring tympani and trumpets and titles reading "Laurence Olivier Presents Richard III by William Shakespeare With some interpolations by David Garrick Colley Cibber etc." Viewers unfamiliar with English theater history might suppose that Garrick and Cibber were screenwriters and that the title resembles the one that supposedly opened the 1929 Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford: "Written by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor." ( Erskine 341). In fact, Garrick was an eighteenth-century actor and Cibber an eighteenth-century playwright, and Olivier's reference to them gives us our first hint about the relationship between his movie and Shakespeare's play. Read the rest on Substack!

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 t hinkers like Darwin and William James to describe this as  a physical, neurological effect. Shakespeare's Henry V uses this effect a t 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 ju...