Best of 2024, #8: The Wild Robot

The primary reason this movie is here is that it made me laugh and cry, which, as I get older, is more and more what I look for in a movie (though it’s not true of several of the movies I have coming up.)

Another thing I loved about this movie was its mastery of dialogue-less storytelling. Of course, that brings up the fact that the main problem with this movie was that it was superficially similar to WALL-E, but not as great, so I kept unfairly comparing them the whole time, but, judged on its own merits, this is a really well-made movie about parenthood and other existential dilemmas.

(My mother-in-law’s main problem with this movie was that she didn’t believe that the predators wouldn’t eat each other when cooped up for the winter. For some problem, that was more of a problem I had with Zootopia, where they had built a whole society where the predators seemingly had no ability to eat. In this movie they just had to get through a shorter amount of time.)

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of an Ironic Title

I talk in my first book about how the best way to convey that you have an ironic concept is to have an ironic title. When this book came out, I heard the title and immediately knew I had found one of the great ironic titles. How can a robot be wild? They’re the opposite of wild. Put a robot in the wild and a great story writes itself.

This is a high concept movie. As I say in my book, high concept can refer to wild sci-fi stories like this, or dead simple stories like Wedding Crashers. What they have in common is that the title writes the movie for you.

Best of 2024, #9: Anora

It was embarrassing watching this movie with my wife, but not as embarrassing as it would have been watching it with anyone else! There are maybe 10 different lapdance scenes and 20 different sex scenes? It was all a little much. But in the second half of the movie, the heroine got to keep her clothes on more and the movie became quite funny and charming. Mikey Madison does a great job as a very foul-mouthed Cinderella-story heroine and I hope this earns her some roles that don’t require this, uh, much of her.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Heroes Don’t Call Their Lawyers

Anora, who has married a billionaire’s son without a prenup and now faces annulment, would have ended up a lot better off if she had ever called a divorce lawyer, but of course that would have brought the movie to a screeching halt. Great heroes tend to be those that don’t call their lawyers, even when they really ought to. Sometimes a great story (this episode comes to mind) consists of the viewer just pleading to the screen saying “Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer!” the whole time. (Anora finally mentions a lawyer as the movie is almost over, but by that point she’s too firmly in the clutch of the villains and has to meekly back down.)

Best of 2024, #10: Conclave

This is one of those movies where nominating it for Best Picture does it no favors. It’s a fun little twisty election drama, based on an airport paperback bestseller. It’s well worth watching, but ultimately there’s not much to it. It’s not meaty enough for a Picture nomination. Ralph Fiennes is more overdue for an Oscar than any other actor, but I think it would be a shame if he won for this. It would clearly just be a career-recognition win, because he doesn’t get enough to do here. He definitely should have won Supporting last year for The Menu instead, but he wasn’t even nominated.

Straying From the Party Line: The Twist Has to Affect the Hero

This movie has a doozy of a twist at the very end, but our hero’s internal journey (admitting to himself that he wants to be pope and then accepting that he shouldn’t be) has already concluded, and the news he finds out at the end is shocking but not life-changing. If it surprised us that he was willing to hide this revelation, that would be one thing, but it entirely fits with his behavior before that. It’s not reversible behavior. So the twist felt more like an extra punchline than a climax.

Not on the Best of 2024 List: Emelia Perez

At the beginning of Emilia Perez, an evil Mexican druglord transitions to female. She is told by her doctor that this transition will also transform her soul. For the next few years of her life, it seems as if this is true: She has gone from being a totally evil male to a totally saintly female, now employed running a foundation for victims of cartels. In the last half hour of the movie, things are complicated somewhat as some of her former behavior begins to resurface, but only slightly, and when it does, it’s clearly supposed to be shocking to us that she’s acting anything like her former self.

But why would it be? When friends of mine have transitioned, their personalities haven’t changed, and why would they? By all reports, the writer-director of this movie does not seem to have known many trans people, and is simply assuming that it also involves a brain-transplant. I’m not trans, but it’s my understanding that a transition is just an external change. Inside, a transwoman has always been a woman, and a transman has always been a man. They’re just choosing to share their true self with the world.

The bizarre twist, of course, is that the trans star of Emilia Perez has had her Twitter feed exposed and it turns out she was a pretty terrible person before and after her transition, which certainly didn’t make her saintly. She wouldn’t be the first racist to win an Oscar of course, and she does give a good performance in the movie, but the narrative that giving her the award would be a step toward justice is long gone.

Now let me say, I found this movie very watchable. Unlike many others, I thought the musical element mostly worked. Who knew that Zoe Saldaña could dance? I didn’t find the lyrics very catchy, because they were written in French, crudely translated into broken Spanish, and then subtitled in English, but the music is good, and the choreography and production design are excellent.

But ultimately, this movie is snake-bit. The director has made himself look bad in various ways, the star has made herself look awful, and everybody else seems tainted by association. It’s a shame. There’s a great version of this movie that could have existed, if made by actual Mexicans in Mexico, rather than by French people (and Americans and Spanish people) in France.

Best of 2024, Introduction and Four Movies Not on the List

Welcome to the Best Movies of 2024! As usual, I will begin by pointing out some movies I didn’t see and explaining why some movies aren’t on the list. I didn’t see Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, The Apprentice (all too depressing given what’s going on) and Flow (which I’ve heard is great but haven’t gotten around to seeing.) Now let’s get to some (but not all) of the movies not on the list:

• Hit Man: This is an excellent script, directed by an excellent director, so it should have ended up on the list, but the movie had one glaring flaw that kept it off: the star. The hero is a nerdy professor type who ends up going undercover for the police and getting transformed into the sexy hit man he only pretends to be, steaming up the screen with the target of his sting. The challenge for the casting director was to find an actor who could do both, but unfortunately, they cast Glen Powell instead. Powell was great as a cocky asshole in Top Gun: Maverick, and he's good here when his character becomes a red-hot-loverman, but he’s utterly unconvincing when his character is a nerdy professor type (see above). I didn’t see Powell’s two other leading-man-tryouts this year, Twisters or Anyone But You, but based off of this one, he just doesn’t have the range.
• Deadpool and Wolverine: This threequel was very similar to another recent Marvel movie: Ant-Man 3: Quantamania. Once again, after spending the first two movies on relatively grounded Earthbound adventures, they spend the entire third movie on sci-fi worlds, forgetting all about the Earthbound supporting cast, which was disappointing in both movies. That said, this movie was a lot of fun, and it was great to see so many surprising actors pop up in limbo, or show up in different roles than we expected them to play. The music was great, too.
• The Substance: This was a very powerful movie with a lot to say about society. The sequence in which Demi Moore prepares for her date is one of the best scenes of the year and she deserves Best Actress for it. But this movie is just too much. It’s by far the grossest movie I’ve ever seen, which is fine, but it’s also 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is unforgivable. No movie this gross should be this long. I would have been happy to cut 30 minutes out if they’d just given me a few days to edit it.
• Dune Part 2: I had completely forgotten Part 1, so I spend all of Part 2 trying to remember who all of these people were. The result is that, a year later, I’ve completely forgotten Part 2, too. All I remember was that the hero surprisingly ditched Zendaya at the end for a more advantageous marriage, which was an interesting twist. 

Tomorrow: One more movie that’s not on the list (Yes, it’s that one)

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 27: Richard III

The Tragedy of Richard III, first broadcast January 23rd, 1983

• When was it written? Somewhere between 1592 and 1594, possibly his fourth play (and the earliest of his plays that still gets performed a lot)
• What’s it about? York’s son Richard is determined to seize the crown, so he manipulates the crowds and murders his way to the top, including killing two innocent princes in the Tower of London, but Henry VII finally kills Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field and brings an end to the War of the Roses
• Most famous dialogue: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (or “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”)
• Sources: Hall and Holinshed, of course
• Best insult: “Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog, Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity the slave of nature and the son of hell; Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb, Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins”
• Best word: They keep saying that one character was drowned in a barrel of malmsey-butt, which I guess is a kind of wine?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a great production in Stratford, Ontario, with a female Richard. The Ian McKellen movie is also great.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: A very young Patsy Kensit (Lethal Weapon 2, Angels and Insects) shows up in a small part, Zoe Wannamaker (Harry Potter’s Madame Hooch) is Lady Anne

How’s the cast?

• Ron Cook continues to do a great job as Richard, Julia Foster continues to steal the show as Queen Margaret and everybody else does a good job falling like chaff before Richard’s scythe. Howell has everyone who died in previous plays come back as different characters in small roles, then appear to Richard as hallucinations, then finally appear in a pile at the end, with Margaret (still alive!) cackling atop it.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Still excellent. I would say that this is the weakest of the four, but only slightly. (More on this below) All told, this and the three Henry VI plays come together to form an exquisite 15 hour saga, and it’s well worth watching on Britbox. I know, you thought you were badasses for sitting through all three and a half hours of The Brutalist, but this makes that movie look like a music video by comparison.

Straying From the Party Line: Evoke Pathos

These days (and indeed ever since Shakespeare died) everyone stages (and films) Richard III over and over and nobody stages (or films) the Henry VI plays, unless they’re doing all four together. But why? In this production it seemed like the weakest of the four.

Henry VI and several of the people surrounding him in the previous three plays were tragic figures, meeting sad ends, but Richard in this play doesn’t evoke much emotion. He’s just unreservedly evil, and he’ll be the first one to admit that. Shakespeare does not attempt to wring much pathos from his death. As a study of the nature of absolute evil, this is still a great play, but it’s not as morally meaty as the previous three.

So why does this one get staged so much more often? Most obviously because it’s not identified as Part 1, 2, or 3. Its title implies it’s a standalone play, and indeed, this one doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Also, because actors love putting on a hump and limping.

But if I were running a Shakespeare company, I would be more drawn to doing the Henry VI plays, and I do believe that each can be staged independent of each other (or this play). Each of the four is great in its own way, and each deserves a chance to shine on its own.

(Of course one of the problems is that this is the only one of the four in which Shakespeare had to pick a side. His own queen was descended from Henry VII, who had to seem legitimate and blameless, while Richard III had to be pure evil. That bring us to…)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: All Writing is Propaganda

One problem with enjoying this play is that there’s another piece of classic English literature which exists for no other reason than to insist that this play is bogus.

Josephine Tey was a mystery writer who had written several novels about a detective named Alan Grant, solving murders in modern-day England. But for the fifth Grant novel, she broke with the formula. In “The Daughter of Time”, Grant is in the hospital and happens to see a portrait of Richard III. He believes he can spot criminals easily, and Richard’s eyes don’t look villainous, so he determines to prove Richard’s innocence. From his bed, he does a bunch of research and concludes that Richard was actually a good guy. But what about the Princes in the Tower? Grant concludes they both survived Richard and were actually slaughtered by Henry VII himself once he seized power.

Grant (and Tey herself?) makes the case that Shakespeare was a propagandist for the Tudors, so he had to shift the blame from Henry VII to Richard III, but now we can look back dispassionately and see that it was all lies.

Both the play and the novel are great, but surely we have to pick one, right? We can’t like both, when one completely impeaches the other. Well, not so fast. Grant makes a strong case that Shakespeare’s case was specious, but Grant’s own logic, founded on his ability to spot guilt in an official portrait, is dubious as well, and it’s not clear that Tey backs him up.

And, ultimately, as someone who is admittedly not an expert, I side with Shakespeare. My understanding of the current state of the historiography is that Richard, not Henry, was the true villain. But what do I know?

All writing is propaganda. Often, it is intentional propaganda for the writer’s chosen cause, but, at the same time, it might be unintentional propaganda for a cause the writer doesn’t even know he’s promoting.

On the surface, Arthur Miller is condemning the Salem witch hunts in “The Crucible”. In the intentional subtext, he’s really condemning the 1950s Red Scare. But looking back on it today, we see that, by portraying a man as the victim of the witch hunts and a teenage girl as the victimizer, he was also unintentionally exposing his era’s sexism and panic about teenage girls’ sexual independence.

So there are three levels of text: The text, the intentional subtext, and the unintentional subtext. All three are present in just about every work of literature. It’s good to be suspicious of all three in everything we read. Tey gets a great book out of a detective’s attempt to investigate and reverse Shakespeare’s verdict. Ultimately, she doesn’t need to convince us she’s right to remind us that skepticism is always a good thing to maintain.

Anybody Out There?

Well folks, we’ve been on a good run, and I tried to watch Richard III this week, but it was just too depressing, giving what’s going on. Hopefully this is just one week off and I’ll be back next Thursday. Meanwhile, let me just ask, is anybody actually reading these? Is anybody getting anything out of them?

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 26: Henry VI, Part 3

The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, first broadcast January 16, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his second play (after Part 2 but before Part 1)
• What’s it about? The Duke of York and Henry VI’s Lancasters continue to vie for the throne. Both of them (and thousands of others) end up dead, with York’s son Edward on the throne, but Edwards’ brother Richard is plotting to take that throne from him in our next play…
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Hall and Holinshed again
• Interesting fact about the play: According to Wikipedia, “the first major American performance was in 1935 at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.” So apparently no one produced this play during the American Civil War?? That is insane! In the play’s best scene, Henry strays onto a battlefield, where he finds that one father has accidentally killed his son in the heat of battle, and, nearby, a son has accidentally killed his father. It wasn’t uncommon for libraries in Civil War times to have the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Nobody read this play? Nobody thought they should maybe stage it? Of course, if they had, it might have had one of the Booth brothers in it, and wouldn’t that have been ironic!
• Best insult: Henry has Richard’s number: “The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top, And chatt’ring pies in dismal discord sung; Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope, To wit, an indigested and deformed lump.”
• Best words: Orisons, quondam, malapert
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it or read it until now.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Bernard Hill again

How’s the cast?

• They just get better and better. Peter Benson as the title character and Julia Foster as his queen suffer more than in the previous two plays and really get to show how great their performances are. Lots of actors get to have tear-jerking death scenes.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Excellent. The set and costumes have all turned black to show that the party’s over. The many, many battle scenes are all well-portrayed, with the final one being gloriously fought in the (indoor) snow. This is a fifteen hour epic, shot on video in 1983, but it’s shockingly watchable.  She has made the case here that the Henry VI plays are among Shakespeare’s best. 

Storyteller’s Rulebook: We Don’t Need Another Hero

When we read the history plays today, we read them in chronological order. Certainly the BBC did them in that order, as does everybody else who does the work of staging all eight. But it’s important to me to remember, as I watch these “Henry VI” plays, that these came first. The “Henry VI” plays were, in all likelihood, the first three plays Shakespeare ever wrote. And that’s wild.

The specter of Henry V looms large over these plays. “Henry VI, Part 1” begins with the nobles standing around Henry V’s coffin and lamenting that they’ll never see his like again. And indeed, when his son turns out to be too mild-mannered to hold the country together, everyone is constantly contrasting him with his father. Everyone on every side claims that they will bring back Henry V’s greatness.

As he half-heartedly fights for power and his life, Henry VI’s whole pitch is, “I know you dislike me, but you can’t impeach my claim to the throne without impeaching my father too, and he’s practically England’s patron saint!”

As viewers, this all makes so much more sense if we’ve seen “Henry V” first! We know what they’re talking about! We’ve seen the greatness! But when these plays were written and performed, this specter was entirely immaterial. Henry V was much discussed, but never seen.

When you have all eight plays, you’ve got a rise and fall narrative, peaking right in the middle with the Battle of Agincourt, then sliding down precipitously for the next four plays. But, when first performed, these plays were all fall and no rise.

Why did Shakespeare choose to begin his career by writing three plays about a horrific civil war with not a single hero to be found anywhere? Why did he not write about Henry V for many years later? At least at the first, the Bard was hardcore. Let others write about heroes, he’s writing about gory, grimy degradation, where every single character dies horribly (and first has all their dignity stripped from them.)

One can’t help but feel that he might have been a little disappointed in himself when he finally caved and wrote about Henry V later. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll write a bunch of prequels and give you a hero, but I prefer wallowing in the muck.”

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Write Beyond Good and Evil

Watching the first two “Henry VI” plays, it did occasionally occur to me “Oh yeah, isn’t Game of Thrones based on this same war? I’m not really seeing it.” It was only when I got to the plot point here when Edward impetuously decides to break from an arranged marriage and marry a common woman (pissing everybody off) that it all snapped into place:

• Evil, cheating Queen Margaret (a Lancaster) became Cercei Lannister
• Her trusting dupe of a husband, Henry VI, became Robert Baratheon
• The beheaded Duke of York became Eddard Stark
• York’s son’s Edward became Rob Stark
• And Margaret is always trying to install her son Ned, so that must be Joffrey
• So I guess Edward’s brother, the future Richard III, is… Jon Snow? Theon? I’m not sure. That’s where George R. R. Martin breaks with the true story.

What makes it so fascinating is that these two TV series tell such similar stories, with so many of the same plot points, but I rooted for different families in each one. In GOT, I boo-hissed Cercei, as I was supposed to, but in this BBC series, Queen Margaret, despite her lying, cheating ways, eventually won me over to her side. (It helps that her son Ned isn’t a monster like Joffrey!) In GOT, I liked the Starks, but here I just never liked the family they were based on, the Yorks. There’s just something slimy about them, at least in this portrayal.

Shakespeare, unlike Martin, writes such rich texts that I’m sure you could stage this in such a way that I was rooting on the Yorks and not the Lancasters. Certainly the Lancasters, like the Lannisters, do many revolting things. My choice to root for them was uncertain.

GOT is ultimately a fairly straightforward good-vs.-evil story, albeit very well written. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are far more ambiguous about good and evil. There’s not a good family and evil family here, just a bunch of very flawed human beings lashing out at each other for hundreds of different conscious and subconscious reasons.

(I suppose I’m being unfair to GOT, because the presence of Tyrion does morally complicate things, but even then, it’s clearly supposed to be ironic that this ultimately-good character could come from such an evil family.)

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 25: Henry VI, Part 2

The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, first broadcast January 9th, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his first play.
• What’s it about? Everything goes wrong for poor Henry VI. His terrible wife plots with various nobles against him, falsely accusing and executing each other one by one until there are almost none left. The Duke of York encourages Jack Cade to mount a bloody populist uprising, then, when that fails, returns from a trip to Ireland with his own army, eager to depose Henry. The play ends indecisively after the first main battle in that war.
• Most famous dialogue: One of Cade’s mob leaders yells, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
• Sources: Once again, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548). He also drew upon the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) I hadn’t noticed until now how new the Chronicles were. He was dramatizing a recent bestseller.
• Interesting fact about the play: Obviously, if this was his first play, it had a different title.  (This wasn’t a George Lucas type situation.)  It is possible that its original title was “The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and York,” or “The Contention” for short.
• Best insult: “Blunt-witted lord, ignoble in demeanour! If ever lady wronged her lord so much, thy mother took into her blameful bed some stern untutored churl, and noble stock was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art!”
• Best word: Guerdoned and conventicles are both good words, but I really love the word that is often used to describe this production. To quote Wikipedia: “Many critics felt these set design choices lent the production an air of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it or read it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Despite the fact that this play has Shakespeare’s largest cast, and appears to be uncut, they didn’t add any future stars to the cast, just Bernard Hill (Titanic, Lord of the Rings) returning as the Duke of York.

How’s the cast?

• Everyone is excellent. Trevor Peacock played the noble Talbot in Part 1, but returns as the evil Jack Cade here, to equally good effect. Peter Benson is really heartbreaking as the right-man-in-the-wrong-time Henry, and Julia Foster seethes well as Queen Margaret.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• She once again does a great job, using the same set as Part 1 but now dingier and more beat-up, as is the rest of the production design. It’s a much darker play and even more violent, filled with many severed heads. (The mob holds two of them on pikes and makes them kiss.) Howell is less amused and more sickened by the clashes this time around, but that works equally well.

Rulebook Casefile: Every Part Deserves a Satisfactory Wrap-Up.

On the very rare occasions that this play is staged today, it’s because companies are staging the whole trilogy, or the tetralogy by including “Richard III,” or the full octology by including “Richard II,” the “Henry IV” plays and “Henry V,” or even, in one case, all ten Histories by including “King John” and “Henry VIII.” Virtually no one has staged it by itself since it was first performed.

I’m encountering these plays for the first time, and writing them up as I watch them. I would agree with the general consensus that this play is more sophisticated than Part 1 (though many of those same critics insist this was written first), but I feel like Part 1 can easily be staged as a standalone play, and this play’s fatal flaw is that it cannot. It clearly ends right in the middle of the story with no satisfactory wrap-up.

Don’t do this! Don’t make movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, which just ended arbitrarily. Make movies like Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 which had a satisfactory ending while still including some cliffhanger elements. (Yes, I know S-M: AtS was a hit and M:I:DRP1 was a flop, but the real goal of movies is to please me, and I disliked the former and liked the latter.) (I’ll discuss Wicked: Part 1 and how it did soon.)

As I’ve said before, Voldemort dies in the first Harry Potter book. And in the second. If you’re selling any time of media that takes longer than 90 minutes to consume, give us something satisfying to go home with.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Why Does Shakespeare Always Have to Be So Timely?

It was very hard to watch this play, given what’s going on in America. England is dying in the play, and America is dying around me right now. When I wrote about “Timon of Athens,” I talked about all its parallels to what was going on then, which seemed to be the ignominious downfall of Donald Trump. Now Trump has surged back to power, eager to rape us all as surely as he raped E. Jean Carroll, and this now seems to be the far more timely play.

Jack Cade mounts a populist rebellion by rousing the rabble with xenophobic and anti-intellectual rhetoric, ludicrously overpromising about what he will deliver (“And here, sitting upon London Stone, I charge and command that, of the city’s cost, the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign”) and even though he is flat-out telling them that he will be an even worse dictator than the people who are supposedly holding them down, they still get wrapped up in it and mount a bloody insurrection that installs him as mayor of London.

Until November, I might have given the play the standard Socialist Criticism reading: Shakespeare is a royalist and his anti-populism is to be criticized as fundamentally anti-democratic. But I’m not feeling very small-d-democratic right now, and I’m with Shakespeare: Fuck the rabble. Those people are stupid and dangerous, and they’ll just destroy everything. So I’ve got no problems with anything Shakespeare has to say here.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Let Smaller Scenes Foreshadow the Meaning of Larger Conflicts

The line “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war” is from “Julius Caesar,” but it perfectly sums up this play. This play is very episodic, as a progression of things goes wrong for poor Henry, a godly, innocent, trusting man who can’t cope with the destruction of his country.

To a certain extent it’s just one damn thing after another, but it’s actually pretty beautifully constructed, as the dogs of war slip a little bit looser in scene after scene. In one of the earlier scenes, one workmen accuses another of sedition, and the royals have them fight it out in trial by combat, which is quite brutally portrayed here. It seems like a vicious distraction from the plot, but in Howell’s brilliant staging, the whole play is right there. The whole war is bloodsport, and all talk of chivalry by each side is a sick joke.

The Tudors were descended from both the Yorks and the Lancasters, so Shakespeare didn’t have to pick a side in this war to keep his bosses happy. Instead, he damns both their houses. It’s all spiteful, brutal, and pitiful.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Exception That Proves the Rule

As we’ve been going through, I’ve been tracking Shakespeare’s tendency to focus on women that are falsely accused of adultery (and the danger that puts them in). He used that plot at least five times. But I’ve also been looking for any exceptions to the rule. Titania? Not really. Cressida? I wouldn’t say so. Well, folks, I’ve found her: Our first truly cheating wife, hiding all this time in what might be Shakespeare’s very first play. Maybe he got it all out of his system here with Queen Margaret and focused on falsely accused wives and lovers for the rest of his career.

Shakespeare could write great female characters, and he knew that falsely accused women, nobly attempting to withstand their accusations, were great characters to root for. But it’s fascinating that he started with this character, also well written, that was so despicable.