37 Days of Shakespeare, Epilogue: The BBC Power Ranking Countdown

Already, kids, I spent years doing my Shakespeare series, and you thought it was done, but I wanted to do one final wrap-up today, where I rank the whole BBC series, in countdown format. My opinion of the plays themselves and these productions specifically are all mixed up with each other here. Unfortunately, the series is no longer easy to watch, as it has just disappeared off BritBox, so you’ll have to get the DVDs (perhaps from your local library) or acquire it in, ahem, other ways.  Click on the title to see my write-up of each production. 

• In 37th place, Titus Andronicus: Director Jane Howell, who will also be seen near the top of the list, cannot overcome the tastelessness of the material, and “spooky” cross-dissolves just feel tacky.
• 36th, Troilus and Cressida: Director Jonathan Miller stages the whole thing as a comedy but nothing is remotely funny, causing the play to feel like a tonal disaster. Broad gay stereotypes don’t help. And it’s just a weak play. It surely seems like Shakespeare didn’t finish it. It has no ending!
• 35th, King John: Not so much bad as completely forgettable. I may remember a scene outside a castle?  A few months after watching it, I would not be able to pass any pop quiz about this play.
• 34th, Henry VIII: Shameless Tudor propaganda that distorts history to a ridiculous extent, but a somewhat nice production shooting on actual outdoor locations.
• 33rd, Cymbeline: Plagued like so many of these plays by Elizabethan dress despite Roman times setting, this production failed the capture the nuttiness or martial thrills of Shakespeare’s play. That severed head was never going to look good in close-up.
• 32nd, The Taming of the Shrew: It’s fun to see John Cleese doing Shakespeare, but it just spotlights the essential problem of the text, which is that we no longer consider spousal mental abuse to be funny. Sarah Bedel as Katherine plays it rather serious, resulting in a major tonal mismatch.
• 31st, The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare’s other super-offensive play gets a rather lively adaptation, with some genuine comedy thrown in there, but the inherent anti-Semitism of the material is only highlighted, not recontextualized in any way.
• 30th, All’s Well That Ends Well: Director Elijah Moshinsky’s only real mistake is to play the king scene as a sex scene, but he makes up for it with a very funny gibberish scene. The Helena - Bertrand reconciliation is unconvincing, of course, but it always is.
• 29th, Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Period-appropriate dress for once, and epic filmmaking on a shoestring video budget make for a rousing production of a weak play.
• 28th, Antony and Cleopatra: Director Jonathan Miller said in an interview that Cleopatra was just a “treacherous slut” and that attitude infects this production. More respect for her character would have gone a long way. Colin Blakely makes a fine Antony and the dress is once again blessedly period appropriate.
• 27th, Coriolanus: One of the weakest plays gets a glow-up from Moshinsky, with the most gorgeous lighting of the series. The homoerotic interpretation of the not-particularly-gay text is certainly …interesting.
• 26th, The Tempest: We’re getting into the better ones here. The cheapo special effects and homoerotic (there’s that word again) choreography on this one were both charming, and Michael Horden is excellent as Prospero.
• 25th, The Winter’s Tale: Jane Howell’s abstract stagework makes a weird play even weirder. It’s beautiful, but can’t smooth out the play’s wild tone shifts and egregious violation of the Aristotelean unities.
• 24th, Measure for Measure: Gravely serious performances from Kate Nelligan and Tim Pigott-Smith as the leads, alongside funny work from the other actors, somehow all comes together for a zesty final product.
• 23rd, Julius Caesar: Our first great text we’ve gotten to on this list receives a decent adaptation, with a good Brutus, Cassius and Anthony. Poor Cinna the Poet ends up being the only really sympathetic figure, but that doesn’t violate the text.
• 22nd, Macbeth: A great text, and well-acted, but tacky sets, lighting and camerawork undercut the performances. There are much better adaptations of this play.
• 21st, The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Ignore the Shaun Cassidy hair on the lead actor Tyler Butterworth, and this is a very engaging staging of an underrated play, mixing drama and comedy perfectly.
• 20th, The Merry Wives of Windsor: How wonderful to get to see Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, a part he was born to play, and Ben Kingsley is excellent as well as Frank Ford. Not Shakespeare’s best comedy, but the cast and director David Jones mine it for all its humor.
• 19th, Henry IV, Part 2: The first half of this play is quite forgettable, but it’s always good to just watch Falstaff be Falstaff. Anthony Quayle is great as the cowardly knight, and David Gwillim and Jon Finch are quite good as father and son Henrys.
• 18th, Love’s Labour’s Lost: Another underrated play gets a brilliant adaptation by Moshinsky, playing up the similarities to the works of Moliere by setting it late in the 17th century. Genuinely funny and sharply satiric of the enlightenment that was on its way.
• 17th, Much Ado About Nothing: One of Shakespeare’s best plays gets a lively adaptation with great sets. It can’t withstand comparison to Kenneth Brannagh’s version, but that’s an unfair standard. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, and they handle that nicely as well.
• 16th, Romeo and Juliet: The first episode got the series off to a rousing start, with lots of swordplay and swooning. Authentically casting 14-year-old Rebecca Saire as Juliet reminds us that this relationship isn’t a great idea, even before it ends so badly. And of course it’s great to see Alan Rickman as Tybalt, promising a lot more “no small parts” cameos to come.
• 15th, Henry V: Gwillim as Hal doesn’t have Quayle as Falstaff to support him this time, but he proves he can carry a production by himself as an inspiring-but-still-somewhat-callow king.
• 14th, Richard II: For the most part, the series failed to land the legendary Shakespearean actors I really wish we could have seen, but this and Hamlet, both starring Derek Jacobi, are exceptions, and they don’t disappoint. One of the big benefits of the series is to do the histories with consistent casting, so we get to meet Finch’s Henry IV here at the beginning of his journey and follow him to his death two plays later.
• 13th, Othello: What do we do with this play? Really, it should be ranked dead last for the egregious sin of doing the part in blackface, but once we roundly condemn that, there’s the uncomfortable fact that, other than that, this is an excellent adaptation, with Anthony Hopkins doing his typical great work in the lead and Bob Hoskins even better as a bitterly-laughing Iago.
• 12th, King Lear: One of the greatest plays, certainly, but I’m ranking these based on both quality of the play and quality of the production, which drags this down a bit. Director Jonathan Miller once again uses Elizabethan costume and the sets are tacky, but the performances are great.
• 11th, Henry IV, Part 1: One of the all-time great plays gets an excellent adaptation. Griffiths was so good as Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, and it would have been fascinating to see if he could have carried off the, ahem, heftier version of the character in the History plays, but I can’t complain about Quayle, who plays the character with an emphasis on the sadder side of the comedy.
• 10th, Twelfth Night: One of the best plays is blessed by a sprightly performance by Felicity Kendal as Viola, including a very funny swordfight. Director John Gorrie’s production is almost too boisterous, but that’s not a bad problem to have.
• 9th, The Comedy of Errors: The brilliant decision to do it Patty Duke-style, with the same actors playing each set of twins, completely transforms the play, making it believable for once that everyone would get so confused. A very funny performance on a beautiful set. Roger Daltrey of The Who is shockingly good as both Dromios.
• 8th, Hamlet: Derek Jacobi is back and it’s great to get his melancholy Hamlet preserved on film (well, video anyway). And Patrick Stewart (with hair!) is fascinating as an even-keeled Claudius. It’s a long full-text version of this usually-cut-down play, and overstays its welcome a bit, but you can’t complain with a great cast and interesting minimalist staging from director Rodney Bennet.
• 7th, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The teenagers and the players are both very funny in this high-spirited performance (kept under two hours by overlapping the dialogue.) Puck, meanwhile, is an angry punk, which is a fascinating interpretation. It would have been great to set this one outside, but director Moshinsky does a fine job with the interior sets he has.
• 6th, As You Like It: The one production that matches what the original plan was for the series, before they gave up on shooting outside. A youthful Helen Mirren leads a cast cavorting on the grounds of Glamis Castle. With David “Darth Vader” Prowse as the wrestler! My one objection is that they make no attempt to make Mirren look like a boy when she’s in drag.
• Tied for 2nd place, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III: Ultimately, I just couldn’t break up this brilliant 14-hour quartet, all directed by Jane Howell, so all four are sharing the #2 spot. All done on one set, we start with a brightly colored child’s playroom and then follow the doomed country of England as it goes from playful contests of chivalry to unleashing hell on earth. The set is gradually degraded until it’s pitch black, and in the end we end up with Julia Foster as Queen Margaret cackling atop a mountain of corpses. If you had asked me to guess before I started what my top five would end up being, I wouldn’t have been able to do it in a thousand tries. I had never seen the Henry VI plays, which are almost never staged. Having them share this spot on the list only reinforces the impression you probably have that they are inseparable. Indeed, this series makes a strong case for the greatness of these plays together, but I was left with the impression that they should be staged more often and that they could be staged individually. If Part I was simply retitled “Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc”, surely it would get staged more.
• 1st place, Timon of Athens: This is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s worst plays, if not the very worst, but here it is sitting atop my list. Director Jonathan Miller makes a strong case for the play’s inherent greatness, but the quality of this production must be primarily credited to Jonathan Pryce’s bitterly rueful performance in the lead role. Miller’s daring decision to stage most of the second half as long unmoving takes creates a huge acting challenge but Pryce more than meets it. 

 Okay, folks, that’s it for Shakespeare posts! Hopefully the new 89-part follow-up series (I’m not even kidding) starts next week!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Anne of Green Gables!

I got Jonathan to read a candidate for Great American Novel, so now Jonathan makes me read what might be the Great Canadian Novel, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Will I embrace my neighbors to the north? 

 Check it out on Spotify here or Apple Podcasts here:

 

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 37 (The Series Finale!): Titus Andronicus

The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, first broadcast April 27th, 1985 

• When was it written? Perhaps sometime between 1588 and 1593. Maybe his 6th play and probably his first tragedy.
• What’s it about? I’m too disgusted to regurgitate this loathesome plot. Suffice it to say that it has a horrific rape, a woman forced to eat her own sons, and not one, not two, but three behandings.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Bits of the Gesta Romanorum, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s play Thyestes, etc.
• Best insult: The only insult that stood out was really racist and I don’t want to reprint it here.
• Best word: None stood out.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read it or seen it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Trevor Peacock returns as Titus.

How’s the cast? 

• They’re all fine. They actually cast a Black man as the Moor this time (unlike when they cast Anthony Hopkins as Othello) and Hugh Quarshie relishes the evil role.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Howell, who did such a great job with the Henry VI plays, can’t save this terrible, terrible play. Unlike those plays, the set and production design here are drab and unimaginative. The pseudo-spooky cross-dissolves between scenes feel tacky in that BBC Doctor Who sort of way.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always Good Reasons to Go Chronologically

So now that we’re all done, let’s return to a question we began with, all those years ago when we began this series: Should I have done these plays in the BBC order or in the order they were (maybe) written? In some ways, it’s worked out to do the BBC order, but in other ways it hasn’t.

It’s a real problem when it comes to a play like this, which is in conversation with Othello (almost surely a later play). In retrospect, I can see how Othello revisits this play and tries to do a better job. Both plays feature white women in love with Moors, but in this early play Shakespeare clearly finds that union inherently revolting, while in Othello, though the relationship is equally doomed, the possibility that it could have been a good thing is very present. Othello is a deep, rich, three-dimensional character, capable of both good and evil, whereas Aaron the Moor in this play is as black-hearted as he is black-skinned, in a two-dimensional all-too-easy way.

Likewise, when we did our penultimate play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I found myself wishing I’d seen it before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which replicates elements of it. And I’d become convinced that all of Shakespeare’s wives were innocent of adultery before I finally watched his first three plays (the Henry VI plays) and found that he started his career with a very untrue wife indeed. And there are other things I could have traced the development of, such as his feelings toward democracy or homosexuality.

So, in the end, I think I probably made a mistake, and would have gotten more out of this series if I’d read the plays in their probable order. (But it sure would have been rough beginning with three four-hour Henry VI plays. I ended up really enjoying when I got to them later, but if I’d had to start with them, this thing might have ended before it started.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: If Something Is Tasteless, Can It Still Be Tasty?

I had been warned about this play for years, but nothing could have prepared me for how stomach-churning and tasteless it is. Utterly gruesome and deeply unpleasant to watch.

If you’ve been listening to my new podcast “A Good Story Well Told,” you know that I couldn’t stand the Kill Bill movies because of the rape and other violence toward women. Well this play makes those movies look like Strawberry Shortcake. The only reason I finished watching the Kill Bill movies was because I felt I had to for the podcast, and, to put it mildly, the only reason I finished watching this play was because I felt I had to for this blog, especially because it was the last one and I was already massively invested in this project.

But here’s the thing: The Kill Bill movies are wildly popular and even this play has its defenders. When Julie Taymor moved from Broadway to movies she was given a blank check to do anything in the world she wanted. She used up that whole check and then some on an adaptation of this play.

She seemed to be saying, “Sure, it’s tasteless, but also tasty.” Surely, as a mature adult, she must have found the play revolting on some level, but she seems to have found it revolting in an appealing way.

Personally, I don’t get it. For me, tasteless almost always means taste-less. I never enjoy feeling revolted, or revolting others. James Kennedy kept trying to get me to watch Rick and Morty and I couldn’t even handle that (though, once again, it’s very popular). If you write something like this, you’re going to lose a lot of good people as fans (not all good people, but some). To what end? I don’t understand the impulse.

I am hereby declaring this to be Shakespeare’s worst play. I would say that it’s a bummer to end this way, but it’s not surprising. The BBC let directors choose their favorites, which is why we ended up with a lot of duds towards the end. This was the figurative bottom of the barrel, and you can tell from that broadcast date that it aired long after episode 36, bringing the series to a belated, revolting end.

But this has been a good series! I’ve learned a lot and I hope you have, too. If you haven’t read the whole thing, now’s a great time to explore them.  And I may have a few wrap-up posts coming next.

After that: I launch a new(ish) 89 part series. I’m not even kidding.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 36: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost, first broadcast January 5th, 1985

• When was it written? Maybe 1594 or 1595. Perhaps his 9th play.
• What’s it about? Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, and three companions swear off women for three years to devote themselves to study and fasting, but when the Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive, the boys break their vows and fall in love one by one. In the end, all the couples are about to marry, but the princess then finds out her dad has died so she declares a one year period of mourning and all of the other ladies decide to put off their men for a year as well.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: None! This seems to be mainly original.
• Best insult: Too many to choose from:
• “that low-spirited swain, that base minnow of my mirth, that unlettered, small-knowing soul, that shallow vassal”
• Or: “This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This Signior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces, Sole imperator and great general Of trotting paritors”
• Or: “His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.”
• Best word: Well, thrasonical is good, but I’ll go with “God dig-you-den” which was apparently a greeting?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it nor read it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: David Warner is Don Armado and the always-lovely Jenny Agutter is Rosaline

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. Despite the unhappy ending announced by the title, the cast plays it as a very sprightly comedy until the very end, and they’re all very funny.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• This is the fifth one Moshinsky has done and he’s always been good. He makes the rather brilliant decision to set this one 100 years after Shakespeare’s time, which makes it feel more like a Moliere play than a Shakespeare play, especially since it has a lot of rhyming dialogue. Being a big fan of Moliere, I didn’t mind at all.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One Up Yourself

We really wish we knew for sure what was written first, this or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the two plays are so clearly in conversation with each other, and it would be great to know which was responding to which. Notably, both plays get their lovers together early, only to have them sit down to heckle a buffoonish play-within-a-play.

But they also contrast each other in key ways. In Midsummer, it’s implied the new lovers will marry right away, but this play puts off all the marriages by a year at the end. Puck in Midsummer says “Jack shall have Jill” but Berowne sums up this play as “Jack hath not Jill” (or to put it another way, Love’s Labours have been Lost). The best guess we can hazard is that this play came first, which is fascinating because it really feels like this one is a twist on that one, but I guess that’s just because that’s the order I encountered them. If this one came first and Midsummer is the rewrite, then it’s an even-better rewrite of an already-excellent original.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Spying Upon Spying Is a Good Source of Comedy

The funniest scene is a scene that Shakespeare went back to over and over, and other playwrights would borrow from him (even for non-comedic plays, such as The Lion in Winter). Each of our four scholars reveals his feelings of love in a soliloquy, only to have to hide as another enters, slowly filling up the hiding places in the room as they’re all spying on each other as each breaks their anti-love oath, then they get to leap out and accuse each other one by one, until they all realize that they’re fools. Double or triple-spying is a good source of comedy gold.

(Of course, this asks a lot of your set decorators, who have to create three believable hiding spots. This production fails to do that, and at least one could be easily spotted, harming the scene.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Satire is Superior to Spoof

Most of Shakespeare’s comedies would best be described as farces.  Is this the only one that could best be described as satire? 

Google offers some challengers to the title: Some call Troillus and Cressida a satire of heroic narratives in general, but I would consider it to be more of an (unsuccessful) spoof of Homer and Chaucer specifically (though I realize the distinction is fine). Some cynics find Romeo and Juliet so unconvincing as a serious love story that they declare it to be a satire (intentional or not) of romances. But no, I don’t count either of those, so I would declare Love’s Labours to be Shakespeare’s only true satire.

Shakespeare is lovingly mocking those who would have us live by reason alone. He’s essentially writing a satire of the Enlightenment, which hadn’t begun yet, which is why it’s so brilliant for Moshinsky to set the play late in the 17th century.

Satire is a higher art form than spoof because it doesn’t just make sport of pre-existing works, it explores the human condition, impeaching extreme characters in order to impeach milder impulses in that direction that we all have. Satires also tend to have happier endings, as everyone lives, loves, and learns to admit their faults now that they’ve been made fools of. It can be sharply barbed but is often gentler in the end.

This play looks forward to Moliere not merely because it rhymes more than any other Shakespeare play. Moliere was a master satirist. Shakespeare just dabbles at that here, but shows that he could have done more great work using those tools if he had chosen to.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Beloved!

It’s a new episode of “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier! We’re nearing the end of our Shame Shelf series, where we shame each other into reading or watching things the other somehow missed. This is the big one, where I force Jonathan to finally read the most acclaimed American novel of my lifetime, Beloved. It’s a heavy novel about slavery, but also a thrilling ghost / haunted house story and a touching romance.  Will I win him over to it?

Here it is on Spotify and here it is on Apple podcasts:

 

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on the Kill Bill Movies!

Can you believe I never saw the Kill Bill movies? Jonathan shames me into finally watching them and I have a strong reaction! Discussion is had of repeated beats, “Save the Cat” moments, and characters believing in themselves.

Here’s the episode on Spotify…

…and here it is on Apple Podcasts!

 

Check it out!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!

In this episode, I shame Jonathan into finally watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly! Note for clarity, since we use actor and character names interchangeably: Clint Eastwood plays Blondie (The Good), Lee Van Cleef plays Angel Eyes (The Bad) and Eli Wallach plays Tuco (The Ugly). Keep that in mind as you listen!

Here it is on Spotify!

And here it is on Apple Podcasts!  

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 35: Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing, first broadcast December 22nd, 1984

• When was it written? Probably 1598 or 1599, possibly his 17th play
• What’s it about? Soldiers return from war to a lovely palazzo in Messina, Italy. Young Claudio quickly falls in love with a young lady named Hero, and Benedick loves Beatrice too, but neither of them will admit it. Benedick and Beatrice’s friends trick them into admitting they like each other. Evil Prince John tricks Claudio into thinking Hero has cheated on him, which Claudio takes badly, so Beatrice makes Benedick swear to kill Claudio, but bumbling sheriff Dogberry eventually solves the case and all ends happily.
• Most famous dialogue: I’ll go with “Man is a giddy thing”
• Sources: Matteo Bandello’s Tales, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and others …but the Beatrice-Benedick romance seems to be original to Shakespeare!
• Interesting fact about the production: You may have noticed that these final plays are all bottom of the barrel, with the big exception of this one. If they were starting with the most appealing plays, how did it take them so long to get to this stone-cold classic? Well, the story is very interesting. They originally intended to start the entire series with this play and shot it with Michael York and Penelope Keith! (Yes, Margo from The Good Life / Good Neighbors!) For some reason that has been lost to time, the BBC decided they didn’t like the result and canned it, starting the series with Romeo and Juliet instead, which was originally supposed to be the second episode. After that, it just never worked out to reshoot it until they had almost finished the series, so here we get it as the antepenultimate episode. Hey, I’m not complaining, it’s nice to get one more classic in amongst all these forgotten ones.
• Best insult:
• Beatrice and Benedick say many cruel things about each other, and Claudio says many cruel things about Hero at the wedding, but somehow my favorite is when Benedick insults someone who is singing a song: “An he had been a dog that would have howled thus, they would have hanged him.”
• I’ll also note: “Scambling, outfacing, fashionmonging boys, That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander, Go anticly and show outward hideousness”
• Best words: unhopefullest, vagrom
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve seen lots of great ones. The best one was probably at the Globe in London, with a bicycle-riding Dogberry zipping through the groundlings. But of course my heart lies with a Barbie-themed production wherein my daughter made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Jon Finch as Don Pedro.

How’s the cast?

• They’re delightful. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, then they play the weightier scenes just as well.

How’s the direction by Stuart Burge?

• He does a great job eliciting strong performances and the show looks great too. This is the only episode of the ones I’ve seen so far with really gorgeous realistic sets. All shot indoors of course, but it seems to have 10x the budget of other episodes.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Give Them Layers of Text to Play

My favorite filmed Shakespeare is the Kenneth Brannagh version of this play, so this had a lot to live up to. As it turns out, this is also excellent, but can’t compete. Most obviously because that one could shoot outdoors, but really on every level. The performances are all good here, but in the hands of all-time great actors like Denzel Washington and Emma Thompson, the parts shine a little brighter.

Brannagh finds little moments to add more kick to. When Don Pedro suddenly says to Beatrice “Will you have me, lady?” it’s usually played as just merry banter, but Washington and Thompson have a delicate moment. The two characters manage to both play it off as a joke but they both also recognize that it’s potentially serious, and the performers let that all play on their faces, lightning fast.

(The only element where this production is superior is Prince John. Keanu Reeves can be a great movie star, but Shakespeare is not his happy place.)

Rulebook Casefile: Look for Ironies

Benedick and Beatrice are always sparring whenever they meet each other. Their friends think they really love each other, deep down. So a group of men contrives to be overheard by Benedick saying that Beatrice is secretly in love with him, and likewise a group of women let themselves be overheard by Beatrice saying that Benedick loves her. As it turns out, that’s all it takes.

What makes it delightful is that this is an elaborate deception, but no one’s actually lying. The friends really believe that each loves the other already.

After hearing about Beatrice’s hidden feelings for him, Benedick is suddenly besotted and, when he takes his usual abuse, he sees nothing but hidden meanings …and he’s right. She is thinly veiling her love for him in her abuse. He has been deceived in a way that reveals the truth.

Straying from the Party Line: Does This Play Shoot Down Advice I Had in My Book?

In this post from 2013 (and in my first book) I complained about stories with couples who might say “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor-sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” I point out that screenwriters might cite His Girl Friday as their source, but they’re misreading that movie, because the man and woman there don’t just have conflicting personalities, they also have conflicting goals.

But of course, it now occurs to me that I should have pointed out that the real origin of such couples was this play. And this is more of the platonic ideal of the trope, because Beatrice and Benedick really don’t have conflicting goals, just conflicting personalities. As soon as they are tricked into seeing each other differently, they realize there’s nothing keeping them apart (yet).

So why does this play work so well, when I said in that post (and my book), that it shouldn’t? One key reason is that Beatrice and Benedick haven’t just met. They are reuniting after the war and resuming a quarrel they’ve had going for years. We don’t see the origin of this bickering, which may have once had a good reason that no longer exists.

In the negative examples I cite in that post (including Daredevil and John Carter), we see this dynamic emerge instantly between men and women who have just met.

But let’s try to find other exceptions. What about the “Cheers” pilot? That certainly falls into the category of “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” and that’s a case where they have just met, but that script is great. But again, that’s a case where they do have conflicting goals.

I’m finding myself disagreeing with my old post. The basic point was sound: conflicting goals are stronger than conflicting personalities, but as this play shows, you can get great stories out of conflicting personalities. But just to be safe either give them conflicting goals (Cheers), or make it a long-time conflict (Much Ado) or both (His Girl Friday).

37 Days of (Maybe) Shakespeare, Day 34: Pericles

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, first broadcast December 8th, 1984

• When was it written? 1607 or 1608. Possibly his 33rd play
• What’s it about? Pericles tries to win the hand of a princess in a neighboring kingdom, only to discover she’s in an incestuous relationship with her father. Pericles goes on the run with this secret, chased by assassins, and ends up going all over the world for the next twenty years. (I can’t begin to summarize everything that happens.) Along the way, he has a wife, Thaisa, whose seemingly-dead body gets thrown into the sea (only for her to survive) and he has a daughter, Marina, who is seemingly killed but actually ends up in a brothel, where she never has to sleep with anyone because she saves their souls instead. In the end, the whole family is happily reunited.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Primarily the Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, an English poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. (Gower appears onstage to narrate this play.) A second source is the Lawrence Twine prose version of Gower’s tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, which was from 1576 but had just been reprinted in 1607.
• Interesting fact about the play: As with Timon of Athens, there is much debate about whether or not Shakespeare had an uncredited co-writer, possibly George Wilkins. Once again, some give full credit to one or the other, and others use computers to analyze word usage to divvy up the scenes.
• Best insult: Thou hold’st a place for which the pained’st fiend of hell would not in reputation change. Thou art the damned doorkeeper to every coistrel that comes inquiring for his Tib. To the choleric fisting of every rogue thy ear is liable. Thy food is such as hath been belch’d on by infected lungs.
• Best word: “but I will gloze with him”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read nor seen it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: A very young and cute Juliet Stevenson is Thaisa! (see above) Trevor Peacock returns brielfly as Boult.

How’s the cast?

• They’re good. Mike Gwilym suffers mightily as Pericles. Amanda Redman shines as Marina, a role that must make you believe she is saving the soul of every man in a brothel with her pure goodness (and persuasive power)

How’s the direction by David Jones?

• If this production were properly budgeted, with all its far-flung locations and epic storms at sea, it would have cost gazillions of dollars in 1984.  Jones, instead, has to make it all come to life on a typical BBC shoestring budget, but he does a shockingly good job. And can I say how glad I am to have ancient tunics instead of ruffs, as some of the directors in this series would have done?

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Sometimes You Should Skip the Irony

So I start watching this recording, knowing nothing about it, and boom, we start out with a lot of incest, and my first instinct is to say, “I don’t want to watch this play, maybe I can skip it.” Then I thought, “No, I’m committed to watching every play, I have to watch it.” Then I said, “Well, how much incest is there exactly? Is this whole play going to be about Pericles trying to win this girl away from her father? Because that would be very unpleasant.” So then I decide to read the plot in advance to get myself prepared to watch it, and hoo boy, what a plot.

I was very relieved that incest was just a brief red herring at the very beginning to get the plot going and then was forgotten after that. Whew. Instead our hero flees from that unseemly situation and goes on an epic 20 year journey.

But here’s the thing: Wouldn’t it make sense if incest returned at the end? At the end, Pericles is reunited with his beautiful grown daughter and doesn’t recognize her. Wouldn’t it be nicely ironic if the play began with Pericles discovering an incestuous relationship, and fleeing lest he be killed for discovering it, and going on this epic 20 year quest, only to end up reuniting with his daughter at the end and sleeping with her, and then realizing that the very thing he’d been running from all this time has caught up with him in an ironic way?

The answer is no. That would be perfectly ironic, but it would be gross and unpleasant and I wouldn’t like it. Sometimes perfect is bad. Sometimes ironic is bad. Thank you for not doing that, Shakespeare.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Was Aristotle Right?

One of the major criticisms of Shakespeare at the time, and for many years afterwards, was that his plays did not observe the Aristotelian Unities.

The three Unities were Unity of Time, Unity of Place and Unity of Action. Aristotle had said that little time jumps between scenes were fine, but the total time period covered by a play could not exceed 24 hours (You can see this in Moliere’s plays, written after Shakespeare’s time). Likewise, everything should take place in roughly the same location, and should all serve one main plot.

Shakespeare was, above all things, a Man of the Renaissance, and we associate the Renaissance with an increased reverence for the Greeks and Romans, rather than Christian thinkers, but Shakespeare has no respect for the Aristotelian Unities. In play after play, we jump from year to year, or continent to continent, or plot to seemingly-unrelated plot as easily as turning a page.

On the one hand, I greatly admire Shakespeare for breaking free from the arbitrary shackles imposed on him by a problematic slavery-defending dude from almost 2000 years prior. And indeed, if you look at the plays of Moliere, you can feel Moliere straining under Aristotle’s constraints, trying to cram stories into one setting and one 24-hour period that really should have had some space to sprawl.

The two Shakespeare plays, of the ones I’ve seen so far, that make the biggest hash of the Unities are Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, both of which follow families that are separated only to be reunited 20 years later. But here’s the thing: I don’t think either of these plays really work. They’re too sprawling. They’re too unwieldy. Was Aristotle right?

Ultimately, no, he wasn’t. If Shakespeare had observed Aristotle’s rules, we not only would have lost these two plays, we would have no Othello, which jumps continents. We would have had no Lear, which covers many months. We would have no Falstaff, a character who is hardly germane to the plot in the Henry IV plays.

Pericles and The Winter’s Tale stretch the artform to its utmost limit of Time, Place and Action, and, to my eyes, fall apart in the process. But they show the brashness of Shakespeare’s genius. These plays expanded the artform and created a freedom that other, better plays took advantage of.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 33: King John (I’ve made it to the final five!)

The Life and Death of King John, first broadcast November 24th, 1984

• When was it written? Who knows? Somewhere between 1587 (when Holinshed was published) and 1598 (when someone mentioned this play in print.) It’s possibly his thirteenth play.
• What’s it about? After the death of his father Henry II and his brother Richard the Lionheart, weak King John is beset by enemies, including the French, who want their lands back, and the Pope, who wants more control over archbishops. His mom Eleanor of Aquitaine adopts Phillip, the bastard son of Richard, who becomes a loyal retainer of the king, even after Eleanor dies. John orders Arthur, a boy who is one of his rivals for the throne, killed, but then changes his mind, but then Arthur falls and dies while trying to escape, causing everyone to turn against John. John is poisoned by a monk and his son Henry becomes king. At no point is the Magna Carta signed!
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Holinshed, of course, but there was also a play around the same time published anonymously called The Troublesome Reign of King John. Either that one was based on this one or this one was based on that one.
• Best insult: a beardless boy, a cock’red silken wanton
• Best word: None stood out.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I had never read it or seen it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Claire Bloom is back, as Constance, and Phillida Law shows up as Lady Faulconbride.

How’s the cast?

• They’re fine. Leonard Rossiter (who died before the show aired) is an appropriately arrogant Richard. George Costigan stands out as Phillip the Bastard.

How’s the direction by David Giles?

• Tacky (see picture.) In interviews, Giles referred to his stylized sets as “emblematic” and “heraldic,” but they just look cheap. And there’s never any real sense that there’s a war going on. We get distant reports of battles, but with no immediacy.

Notes on Shakespeare’s most forgotten play:

The oddest thing about this play, is that it plays like a sequel to James Goldman’s 1966 play The Lion in Winter, but that’s a much better play. John and especially Eleanor are much more compelling there. It’s so odd to have Shakespeare playing second fiddle to another playwright.

This may be Shakespeare’s most forgotten play. To the degree that people on the street recognize the titles of Shakespeare plays, King John is the one they’re least likely to recognize. Does it deserve that fate? I would say no. The play is worth watching and not the weakest one I’ve seen as part of this series. The weakest thing about it is that so much of it (including all the fighting and John’s mysterious poisoning) happens off-stage.

The other big problem with this play is that, even though it’s a relatively early work, it’s already revisiting earlier, better plays. John is an odd combination of Henry VI (weakness in the face of the French) and Richard III (killing a kid to claim the throne) but not as compelling as either one. He doesn’t get a lot of soliloquies and generally lacks interiority. He ends up being somewhat unknowable.

Another oddity: John is primarily remembered for two things today, signing the Magna Carta and being one of the bad guys in the Robin Hood stories, but neither is mentioned in this play (though Robin Hood was name checked in the last play we looked at, The Two Gentlemen of Verona).

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Always Have an Exception to Your Rules

We’ve had lots of bad bastards in our 33 plays and no good ones, so I confidently declared earlier that there would be no exception to prove the rule, but not so fast! Shakespeare never wrote a play about Richard the Lionheart, but he does get to write about his bastard son here, and right away, he’s different from Shakespeare’s other bastards.

He’s witty, self-deprecating, and canny, quickly dropping his claim to legitimacy when he gets a better offer, then skillfully navigating choppy waters as things turn chaotic. He’s by far the most likable character in this play and our default hero.  He gets the concluding lines.  

Shakespeare was very supportive of primogeniture and traditional lines of succession, but here he shows us a way that even a bastard can make good, given some very unique circumstances. It’s always good for a writer to find ways to challenge their own prejudices.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 32: Coriolanus

The Tragedy of Coriolanus, first broadcast April 21st, 1984

• When was it written? Probably around 1608 or 1609, possibly his 31st play
• What’s it about? Around the time of the founding of the Roman republic, general Gnaeus Marcius defeats the Volscian army at Corioli and gets the nickname Coriolanus. Returning home, many people encourage him to become a consul, but after he gives a disastrous speech his political rivals turn the common people against him and get him banished. He teams up with Aufidius, the Volscian general he defeated, and declares war on Rome, but his family is able to talk him out of it. He makes peace instead, and then Aufidius kills him.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Source: The “Life of Coriolanus” in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579).
• Best insult: “You are no surer, no, than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hailstone in the sun,” or “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens, who loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt my air”
• Best word: mammocked
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I had never seen or read it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Noted ‘80s bad guy Joss Ackland does a great job as Coriolanus’s only steadfast friend in Rome, Menenius. (His reading of “Down with that sword” is chilling.)

How’s the cast?

• Alan Howard is a little stiff (no pun intended) as Coriolanus. Irene Worth is great as Coriolanus’s mother.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky? 

•  This is the most beautifully lit play I’ve seen so far, looking very cinematic.  And Moshinsky makes a clever decision to have cramped sets that look dangerously crowded even with just a few people, to create the sense that the roiling mobs are always a threat.  But Moshinsky’s biggest decision is to make the production so homoerotic, so let’s talk about that below…

Storyteller’s Rulebook: I Say Again, Not Everything Has To Be A Sex Scene

Earlier in this series we had Derek Jacobi’s Richard II, who was coded as possibly gay, and was a little fey. Then we had Troilus and Cressida with three gay-coded characters, all of whom seemed like caricatures. Now we get this play. With less support from the text, Moshinsky has decided to portray Coriolanus and Aufidius as two very masculine gay men whose every scene together, including their scenes of violence against each other, are played like sex scenes.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have two gay characters where neither is coded as effeminate, but on the other hand, it’s a brutal vision of male love. The intense homoerotic atmosphere of their scenes never seemed to me to be supported by the text, and always felt like an imposition, perhaps motivated by a belief of Moshinsky’s that there just wasn’t enough to this play without it.

I don’t know enough about this play to know how common this choice is. Tom Hiddleston was filmed in the role recently, and now I want to check that out to see if he played it this way too, or if the role could be made rich enough without it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Play For Our Times

As with Henry VI, Part 2, this play was hard to watch, given what’s going on in the country right now. Shakespeare served at the pleasure of his monarchs, and one of his recurring themes was the inherent stupidity of democracy. He had already written about the downfall of democracy in Rome in Julius Caesar, due to the fickleness of crowds, and now we jump back 500 years earlier and find that, even at the beginning of Roman democracy, the crowds were just as jittery and easily swayed for evil purposes. (“The beast with many heads,” as Coriolanus calls them)

(Of course, if you’re going to play a Shakespeare lead, you have to know how to give a speech well, but this role is unique because it also requires that you know how to give a speech poorly. Coriolanus’s clumsy attempt at public speaking is the turning point of the play, and actors must love the chance to get to blow it for once.)

I know that, as a citizen of a democracy, I should be offended by Shakespeare’s wild-eyed contempt for voters, but given what’s going on right now, it’s hard not to see these two plays, bookending the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, as accurate depictions of the inherent idiocy of voters.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Never Let Me Go!

Hey, everybody, it’s a new episode of my podcast “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier! In this episode, he shames me into finally reading Kazuo Ishiguru’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. We get much discussion out of it, including the power and peril of basing your stories on pre-established conspiracy theories. I hope you enjoy it! 

 Here it is on Spotify.

And here it is on Apple Podcasts!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 31: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, first broadcast December 27th, 1983

• When was it written? Sometime between 1589 and 1593. Some have made the case that it’s his first play, but others say it’s more likely to be his eighth play.
• What’s it about? Valentine and Proteus are best friends in Verona, both in love with women they aren’t allowed to love (Valentine loves Silvia and Proteus loves Julia.) But then Proteus meets Silvia and instantly decides to ditch Julia to pursue Silvia instead, and goes so far as to snitch on Valentine and get him banished to clear a path. In the forest Valentine joins a group of Robin-Hood-esque outlaws. Julia decides to dress as a boy and win Proteus back. Silvia isn’t interested in Proteus, so he considers raping her until Valentine stops him at sword-point. In the end, everybody ends up with who they started with and the friends are reconciled.
• Most famous dialogue: No famous dialogue here.
• Sources: Primarily The Seven Books of the Diana by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor, with a bit of Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour
• Interesting fact about the play: Those (in the minority) that conjecture that this was actually Shakespeare’s first play cite as their primary evidence how bad it is. I would argue the opposite: I found this to be very sophisticated, so I doubt it’s his first. It seems like a much more ambitious undertaking than A Comedy of Errors, which is more often listed as his first comedy. Writing about anti-heroes is hard. You generally want to master writing about likeable heroes first. I would argue that, since Proteus is a compelling and complex anti-hero, this is unlikely to be the first.
• Best insult:
• “She is peevish, sullen, froward, proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty”
• “Thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man!”
• Worst insult: “Silvia, witness heaven that made her fair, shows Julie but a swarthy Ethiope.” Well that’s problematic.
• Best word: sluggardised, braggardism
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read or seen it before.
• Notable names in the BBC Adaptation: None

How’s the cast?

• They’re wonderful. Tyler Butterworth has very unfortunate 1983 hair that makes him a dead ringer for Shaun Cassidy, but other than that gives a great performance as one of Shakespeare’s most callow anti-heroes, John Hudson shows nice range as Valentine goes on his big personal journey from gentleman to criminal. Tessa Peake-Jones, as is always true in this series, is unconvincing as a boy, but does a great job otherwise. Tony Haygarth is very funny as Proteus’s servant Launce (and the dog playing Launce’s dog is great too) Paul Daneman is a real standout as a worldly wise Duke, about whom I will say more below.

How’s the direction by Don Taylor?

• Excellent. Shakespeare has many perfectly fine plays that are miscategorized as comedies and directors have to strain to squeeze jokes out of them, but this very funny production does not feel strained at all, and makes a convincing case that this is actually a very funny play (despite the possibility of rape at the end, which ends the comedy real quick, but I think that’s the point.) Taylor wanted realistic sets, but when he realized that the BBC couldn’t deliver, he decided to go in a more stylized direction, with aluminum poles for trees, and it works surprisingly well.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of an Ironic Title

Look at that plot description again, then answer me: Who exactly are the gentlemen here? The one who betrays his friend and then considers raping that friend’s true love? Or the one who goes to live as a robber in the forest? Surely the title is intentionally ironic. Of course, these men are technically gentlemen, since that was merely an accident of birth, but to the degree that behavior can be described as gentlemanly, these guys lack it.

This is a play about how a new lust/infatuation can cause a man to betray not only his previous lady-love but his male best friend as well, which is unfortunately an evergreen topic. Valentine (named after the patron saint of love) and Proteus (a name that means changeable) begins the play with much lyrical talk about true love (as opposed to Launce, speaking in prose, giving a hilariously mercenary account of his own lover’s qualities) but one betrays his love and his friend, and the other proves to be a crook at heart.

The title drips with irony. The word “Gentlemen” might as well be in quotes, and the power of that ironic title adds new layers of meaning to the play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: When Should Actors Be Allowed to Play Things That Aren’t Necessarily in the Text?

Shakespeare wrote rich texts, densely packed with meaning and overflowing with subtext. But that’s never enough for actors or directors. In production after production, you find actors injecting new meanings into scenes that simply aren’t supported by the text. (I’ve talked before about the urge to turn perfectly innocent scenes into sex scenes.)

But then you also have examples of great actors who push it right to the edge, delivering an unorthodox interpretation that is, in retrospect, justified by the text, but was invisible until the actor (and/or director) dug it out.

This production has a wonderful example. Valentine is illicitly in love with the Duke’s daughter, but so is Proteus. Proteus wants to steal his friend’s girl, so he betrays his friend to the Duke. It would have been easy to stick to the text and have the Duke be entirely appreciative of this warning that his daughter is about to run away with Valentine.

But Paul Daneman as the Duke gives us a lot more than is seemingly on the page. In this version, the Duke sees exactly what’s really going on. He can see what a scoundrel Proteus is and he’s disgusted by it, but has to pretend to be thankful for the tip. It’s an excellent example of playing against the surface text in a way that does not contradict the underlying text at all.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Props

Props are one of the most powerful tools any writer can have. I’ve written and made videos about how powerful it can be to invest objects with meaning, and create more meaning every time those objects are exchanged.

And yet, Shakespeare does not do this very much. It’s not uncommon to have whole scenes with no props.

This play, however, is a big exception. It struck me in the first scene, where there’s a lot of business with Proteus’s letter to Julia, that this was uncommon. Later, there is a hilarious scene where Valentine has a rope ladder hidden under his cloak that the Duke contrives to reveal.

Perhaps this is an indication that the play really did come earlier than is commonly supposed. We’ve seen with other early plays that Shakespeare didn’t understand Elizabethan stage conventions yet, sometimes to good effect. Was the tendency in his later plays, which were all-dialogue-no-business, a stage convention at the time but he didn’t grasp it yet? If so, this is a delightful departure.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Slaughterhouse-Five!

It’s a new episode of “A Good Story Well Told” with co-host Jonathan Auxier! We’re still doing our “Shame Shelf” series, and in this episode I shame Jonathan into finally reading Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Much discussion is had about whether it’s good or bad to write a novel that is very much a product of its time.

We also discuss the New York Times review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant in Times Square, written by Pete Wells.  Here that is (or here, if you’d prefer not to give any clicks to the Times.)
 

Here’s this week’s episode on Spotify and here it is on Apple Podcasts: 

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Treasure Planet

Hey everybody, it’s time for a new episode of A Good Story Well Told. In this episode, Jonathan gets me to finally watch the notorious Disney flop Treasure Planet! Will I end up saying “I haven’t missed much” or “Where have you been all my life??”

Here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts…

…And here it is on Spotify!

   

I am no longer cross-posting the episodes on the Secrets of Story feed, so you’ll have to subscribe to the new feed to get them from now on!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Vertigo!

Hi everybody! As you may recall, I’ve launched a new podcast called “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier. We released an intro episode and a first full episode where Jonathan shamed me into finally reading the book “The Giver.”

I’m glad to say that both episodes got great ratings and lots of positive attention! Thanks to everybody who gave them a listen. Please feel free to rate and review us on iTunes to help people find the podcast! (Here’s an interview with Jonathan and me that my wife conducted for School Library Journal’s website, if you want to learn more about us!)

Well now we’ve released our second full episode, where I get to shame Jonathan into finally seeing the movie Vertigo. I think the episode turned out great!

You can find it here on Apple Podcasts!

And here on Spotify!

Announcing a new podcast: A Good Story Well Told, with Jonathan Auxier!

Hi everybody!

So I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that James Kennedy and I have decided to shutter the Secrets of Story Podcast for the foreseeable future. As you may have noticed, we only did two episodes in the last year, and now things have sputtered to an end, partly because James is so busy with all his exciting writerly endeavors.

So does that mean less content for you? It does not!

You may remember that our most frequent guest on The Secrets of Story Podcast was acclaimed children’s author Jonathan Auxier. Well I overheard Jonathan on a Zoom call with my wife lamenting that he’d like to do a podcast but it was too late to hop on board that train. I gave him a call and said, “Not so fast! I need a new podcast partner!”

Instead of continuing Secrets of Story, we decided to start a new podcast called “A Good Story Well Told”. This will be similar to The Secrets of Story, and everyone who enjoyed that one will enjoy this one too, but there will be changes. The biggest change is frequency. For each season, we’re going to put out a new episode every two weeks no matter what!

The great news is that two episodes are available to listen to right now! The first is an intro episode where we talk about how we met and what we’ll be doing on the podcast. The second is the first episode in our “Shame Shelf” series about what you can learn about writing from the book (and terrible movie) The Giver.

(I’ll be cross-posting the first episode to the Secrets of Story feed, so all 1000 followers or so know about the new show. To hear the second episode and follow along for the whole first season, you’ll have to find and subscribe to the new podcast feed “A Good Story Well Told” on your podcatcher of choice. So please, go right now and subscribe to “A Good Story Well Told” so that you won’t miss the avalanche of new content you’ll have thundering your way!)

Okay, so here’s the first two episodes of the new podcast!

Episode 1 on Apple Podcasts!

Episode 2 on Apple Podcasts!

Or, if you prefer Spotify:

Episode 1 on Spotify!

Episode 2 on Spotify!

Shakespeare, New Sidebar Items, and My Own Personal NaNoWriMo

Well, folks, we have 7 Shakespeare plays left. They are:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Coriolanus
• The Life and Death of King John
• Pericles
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love’s Labours Lost
• Titus Andronicus

As you may have noticed, one of these things is not like the others. You have the legendary Much Ado and six of his most forgotten plays. The production history here, in case you hadn’t guessed, is that they let directors pick their Shakespeare plays and these are the ones nobody picked (with the big exception of Much Ado which was supposed to be done earlier but kept getting cancelled and pushed back for various reasons.) Are the six I haven’t seen all duds? I hope not. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some I was unfamiliar with as we’ve gone through these, and I’m hoping that will happen again here.

But I’m intimidated to continue, and, more importantly, I need to rewrite my novel, so I’m turning April into my own personal National Novel Writing Month (which is usually held in November.) I’ve got thirty chapters, there are thirty days in April and I’m going to rewrite a chapter a day.

I also have big news announcing new material coming up but I’m not quite ready to announce that yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re starved for content in April, you’ll note that I’ve been doing what you should be doing, exploring the 15 years of archives of this blog, and I’ve discovered some posts that never ended up in the sidebar. Check them out in the bottom of the sidebar over there, or just click on them here:

• How to Write a Memoir (I had forgotten I’d had a series with this title. My novel is semi-autobiographical, so I’ve been studying memoirs intensely for a year, so I should expand this series with what I’ve learned.)
• Have at Least Six Big Decisions (One question I wish I could go back and add to the checklist)
• Can a Computer Do My Job?
• Secrets of Dungeon-Mastering
• My Top 20 Films! (Or at least what they were 15 years ago, the list would be different today. I was really into Tales of Manhattan at the time!)

Appearance on Jon Spurling Write in the Head YouTube Show!

Hey everybody, I made an appearance on Jon Spurling’s incredible “Write in the Head” YouTube Show! I reiterate my long held belief that the first act should most consist of a longstanding personal problem becoming acute, often though a social humiliation, then an intimidating opportunity presenting itself, then an unexpected conflict immediately arising. On in shorter form: “Problem / Opportunity / Conflict.” We discuss lots of examples and have fun. Unfortunately, I do have to apologize for the quality of the video and audio, which, entirely my fault, are not great. So sorry that a few words drop out, but you can pick them up from context clues. Check it out!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 30: The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors, first broadcast December 24th, 1983

• When was it written: Possibly in 1594, perhaps his fifth play and first comedy.
• What’s it about? Two sets of twins, two young lords both named Antipholus and two slaves both named Dromio, are separated at youth and know nothing of each other. When their father is about to be executed for a debt, they all end up in the Greek city of Ephesues, where there are many mix-ups but everything ends happily (except for, y’know, the two slaves who are not freed and still constantly beaten)
• Most famous dialogue: Oddly, this is a beloved and often-staged play, but no one piece of dialogue has really become famous.
• Sources: The play is a modernised adaptation of Menaechmi by Plautus, a Roman playwright.
• Interesting fact about the play: This is the only play to mention America, despite being set in ancient Greece. Jones cuts the line here, possibly because it’s so jarring.
• Best insult: “He is deformèd, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere, Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.”
• Best word: This play had no words that were unfamiliar or strange to me, which is one reason it can be staged so widely.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw an excellent production at Chicago Shakespeare Company as a play-within-a-play set during the Blitz (and I saw a fine production at Earlham College way back in the day)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Roger Daltry of “The Who” is both Dromios! Michael Kitchen, whom you’ve seen in things, is both Antiphili. Charles Gray also returns as the befuddled judge who has to sort everything out.

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. As an actor, Daltry is only remembered for playing the lead in the movie of Tommy, but this proves that he was a very gifted comic actor who could have had a good side career if he hadn’t been so busy rocking. Kitchen does a great job playing the two Antiphili slightly differently despite dressing the same. The ladies are great, the old people are great, everyone’s great.

How’s the direction by James Cellan Jones?

• Absolutely delightful. Everything is bright and colorful, befitting the sprightly text. The town sprawls around a massive map of the peninsula and circus performers prance about at all times doing their tricks. Ultimately, Jones’ best decision was the casting, which I’ll discuss more below.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Stories are Better When Everybody Isn’t Dumb

Usually, this play is staged by casting two pairs of actors who look similar but not identical to each other as the two pairs of twins. This makes all of the townspeople who stare one Dromio in the face, and then stare the other Dromio in the face five minutes later, and can’t tell them apart, look like idiots. Jones does something different, simply casting one actor as each set of twins, dressed and styled identically.

Normally, this doubling cannot be done, because all four are together on stage for a long scene at the end, but this is, of course, TV, and Jones can simply do the ending Patty Duke-style, which works fine.

But there were complainers. According to Wikipedia: 

• “This production used editing and special effects to have each set of twins played by the same actors. However, this was not well received by critics, who argued that not only was it confusing for the audience as to which character was which, but much of the comedy was lost when the characters look identical.”

Allow me to say, those critics were bozos. I’ve seen this play many times, always with actors that looked kind-of-similar as the twins, and it’s never worked this well. Yes, every time Dromio or Antipholus appears, it’s a bit confusing for a moment about which one this is, but then the fun of it is figuring that out from context clues. It never took me more than a minute to get caught up on which one I was watching, and I’m famous for my failure to follow complex stories.

As for “much of the comedy” being lost, the implication here is that a key source of laughs in the play is that these idiotic townspeople can’t tell these not-entirely-similar actors apart. But Jones’ comedy is a more generous comedy. There are no idiots here. Anyone would be very confused in this situation, and these mix-ups are entirely understandable. The comedy arises from our frustration at understanding a situation that they couldn’t possibly understand, and I found it hilarious.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Let Yourself Get Boxed In

There’s a certain “Dylan goes electric” feel to this play, where we have an artist suddenly branching out in a new direction and hoping his audience goes along.

We’re fairly certain that Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays first (in one order or another), then Richard III. That quartet has very little comedy (unlike his later history quartet, which has Falstaff to lighten things). This was a badass playwright writing brutal history plays on blood-spattered sets. Then, it’s possible that this was the fifth play, an adaptation of an old Roman comedy. The result is a brilliantly funny farce, but theatergoers must have been totally unprepared for this very silly comedy, if we’re right in our suppositions about play order.

(Curiously, there’s almost no subplot. In almost every scene the two Dromios are mistaken for each other or the two Antipholi are mistaken for each other. It’s a dozen permutations of a single joke.)

I wrote a blog post 15 years ago advocating that writers might want to stay in their lane, but this play argues the opposite. You can yank your audience in radical new directions, if you have total confidence in your genius as a playwright, which thankfully Shakespeare did.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t, Y’know, Endorse Beating Slaves

My daughter just made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. It was wonderful, but watching this, I kept wondering if they should have staged this one instead. Much Ado is the better play, of course, but this one is, I would say, funnier, and certainly shorter (It’s Shakespeare’s shortest play). The only reason not to stage it is that owning and beating slaves is not condemned, and the “happy ending” leaves the Dromios still enslaved. (And one of the two without a love interest.)

And how do you cast it according to modern gender-blind and colorblind casting? It’s tempting to not have the four of them be white men, but as soon as you change either pair to women or another race, then the constant beatings the Dromios receive at the hands of the Antipholi become something that’s much harder to take.

Ultimately, I think you’d have to take out all the beatings, which I think would work fine. Ideally you would free the slaves at the end too, but I don’t think you could do that without altering the text, which I usually do not endorse.

Personally, with a large cast of 8-13 year olds, I would have done Midsummer, but this one would have been tempting (the lack of unfamiliar words would also help) but, in the end, it’s probably too problematic.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 29: Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth, first broadcast November 5th, 1983

• When was it written? Nobody knows. Probably after 1603, because the new King James saw himself as a direct descendent of Banquo and the play seems to have been written to flatter his bloodline. Possibly written in 1606 during the Gunpowder Plot trials, from which some language may have been drawn.
• What’s it about? Scottish thane Macbeth is told by witches he’ll be king. He tells his wife, who convinces him to go ahead and kill the king to speed the process along.
• Most famous dialogue: Probably the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles, of course, and Hector Boece’s History of the Scottish People, but also The Daemonologie, a pamphlet written by King James himself.
• Best insult: “Not in the legions Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned In evils to top Macbeth.” “I grant him bloody Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name.”
• Best word: “Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries!”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I just saw one unmemorable production, and I’ll be missing it in Stratford this year. (I’ve also seen the Welles, Polanski and Coen films, all of which are very good.)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Nicol Williamson from Excalibur is Macbeth

How’s the cast?

• Williamson and Jane Lapotaire as Lord and Lady Macbeth are both captivating but a little broad for TV. I’ve been sticking to this one series of plays, but on YouTube you can apparently watch Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in the parts, and it was tempting to watch that one instead.

How’s the direction by Jack Gold?

• Everything feels a little cheesy and tacky, from the sets to the lighting to the camera movement. It feels a bit like an old Doctor Who episode. I enjoyed watching it, but there are better options for viewing this play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not All Killers Are Psychopaths

On the surface, Macbeth has a lot of similarities to Richard III. They both kill to gain a kingship, then keep killing women and children to hold it, finally dying on the battlefield as the proper order is restored. (In fact, Richard’s rise was also prophesized by a witch way back in Henry VI Part 2, wasn’t it?)

But it is a sign of Shakespeare’s greatness that the characters are so different. The easy reading of it is that Richard is a psychopath whereas Macbeth is not. Killing is easy and fun for Richard, whereas it’s torturous for both Macbeth and his wife. They’re riven by indecision, horrified by the act, and wracked by guilt afterwards. Each blames the other for getting them into this mess, and can’t forgive them or themselves. She is driven mad and kills herself, and he comes to feel that his life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To paraphrase Twelfth Night, some are born murderous, some become murderous and some have murderousness thrust upon them. The Macbeths are clearly not in the first category, but it’s probably too generous to put them in the third. The witches don’t even tell them to kill the king, the Macbeths just pretend they did.

Ultimately, this is a greater play than Richard III because Macbeth is so torn up inside. Richard III is an excellent portrayal of how unreserved evil works, but this is an even better portrait of how evil is waiting to swallow any of us up at any time.

 
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Unsex It, Please

 
There is much debate about how bawdy Shakespeare really was. We have many dirty interpretations of his work today that may or may not have been what he intended. Was he really making a c-word joke in Hamlet? We’ll never know.

But undoubtedly many directors take moments in Shakespeare that were not intended to be sexual and make them sexual. Lawrence Olivier turned Hamlet’s bedroom scene with his mother into a real bedroom scene with his mother. (This would have been daring if he had cast someone old enough to be his mother in the role, but instead he cast an actress who was 11 years younger than him!)

In this series, I haven’t been focusing on these moments but they’re here and they’ve been annoying me. In the BBC All’s Well That Ends Well, the scene with the king is made very sexual even though there seems to be no justification for that in the actual text.

In this play, Lady Macbeth calls on spirits to “unsex her”, by which she means just make her more like a man and less like a woman, but they could stand to unsex her in other ways too, because she’s quite hot and bothered at times. When she says “Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,” she starts to build to a fit of emotion that can only be described as orgasmic.  When she concludes the speech with “Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” then falls back on the bed, she leaves little to the imagination. 

Lapotaire has fun with it, and it almost works, but ultimately it tips over into the unintentionally comic. Not everything is a sex scene, people, and injecting them into Shakespeare where he didn’t intend them is not doing him or yourselves any favors.