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.

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 to 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!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 2: Richard II

King Richard the Second, First broadcast December 10th, 1978

• When was it written? 1595. Chambers has it as his 11th play.
• What’s it about? King Richard II keeps pissing off Lancasters John of Gaunt and his son Henry Bolingbroke. John dies and Harry gets banished, but comes back and overthrows and imprisons the king, making himself Henry IV. Richard is killed in prison in sketchy circumstances and Henry seemingly feels bad.
• Most famous dialogue: The “this sceptre’d isle” speech.
• Sources: Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York and Samuel Daniel’s poem on the civil wars.
• Interesting fact about the play: Richard actually just starved to death in prison, but that’s not very dramatic, so Shakespeare contrives a big fight and a stab in the back. Basically Shakespeare is stealing the story of Henry II and Thomas Becket from 200 years earlier, having Henry muse aloud that it would be great if Richard were dead, and then feigning horror when one of his supporters decides to make that wish come true.
• Best insult: Of the Irish: We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns which live like venom where no venom else
• Best word: No unfamiliar words in this one.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it on stage, but the TV version with Ben Whishaw from 2012 that aired as part of The Hollow Crown is excellent. I’ll see it on stage in Stratford, Ontario later this year.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Unlike most of the BBC adaptations, this one has a big name cast: Derek Jacobi as King Richard, John Gielgud as John of Gaunt, Jon Finch (Macbeth, Frenzy) as Henry Bolingbroke, Charles Gray (Blowfeld in Diamonds are Forever, the Narrator in Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Duke of York

How’s the cast?

• Jacobi and Grey are broad, but still excellent. Their performances would be fine onstage, but are a little much for television. Finch and Gielgud, both of whom had worked more onscreen, are more restrained, and come off the better for it. The question with this play is whether or not Richard should be indicated to be gay, and Jacobi has decided to definitely indicate it, but subtly, similar to what Wishaw did many years later.

How’s the direction by David Giles?

• One should always blame the director when the performances are pitched at different levels. Neither the cast nor the camera move very much, making for a fairly leaden show. The sets and costumes are great. It would have been great to see armies ranged on the field, instead of shooting the war party scenes on sets, but, given the restraints of the BBC’s all-stage ethos, Giles does what he can and creates some sense of scope.

Rulebook Casefile: Every Character Should Pursue Their Self-Interest

This is a play with no one to root for. Richard is feckless, avaricious and arbitrary, and we understand why he would inspire a revolt, but Henry quickly proves himself to be just as much a villain. In the scene where Richard very reluctantly hands over the crown, we feel Henry’s frustration at having to deal with this agonizingly overwrought king, but when Henry then immediately abuses his power against the newly abdicated king we seethe with hatred for him and feel intensely for Richard, who then keeps us reluctantly on his side until the end.

Both men simply pursue their self interest. They are both entirely believable and thus compelling. We tend to empathize (but not entirely sympathize) with each one when he’s on stage, and feel torn in the few scenes they have together. It helps that both are surrounded, when the other is not around, by men who lack their strength of will, so they are able to dominate those scenes, creating anticipation for the scenes in which they will collide.

It’s a great play because it understands the demands of power, and how power can turn you more vicious than you set out to be. It’s a remarkable play for someone to stage who was at the mercy of a fickle queen. The play concludes that monarchs can be replaced when they no longer have the consent of the governed, and they’re fools if they think divine right will protect them. Richard, like Elizabeth, refers to himself in the plural, and we know he’s given up when he finally refers to himself in the singular. Elizabeth never had to do that, but this play indicates that she had a sword of Damocles above her head.

The Tudors did not consider themselves to be Tudors, they considered themselves to be Lancasters. It’s only historians who concluded that they were a different family altogether. These plays support the legitimacy of the Lancasters but not their nobility. Shakespeare called it as he saw it, and let the chips fall where they may.

I talked yesterday about my decision to do the plays in the BBC’s order, but watching this, I found myself wishing I had gone in the order they were possibly written, not caring so much as to whether the histories were in historical order and more caring about the progression of Shakespeare’s views on kingship throughout this career. I’ve never read nor seen the Henry VI plays (possibly the first three plays Shakespeare wrote) and I found myself wishing I had, so that I could see how that first stab at history-writing contrasted with this follow-up, though this was the prequel.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 24: Henry VI, Part 1

The First Part of Henry the Sixt [sic], first broadcast January 2nd, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his third play (the first two being the plays that are now known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, so it’s possible that there was a sequel followed by a prequel.)
• What’s it about? With Henry V dead of dysentery, England falls into squabbling and begins to lose its French lands. A French girl named Joan of Arc (or “Joan La Pucelle”, as Shakespeare calls her, which means “Joan the Maid”, and is what she actually called herself) raises an army, comes to the attention of the Dauphin, beats him in one-on-one combat, and is basically handed the whole army. (And he beds her. And proclaims her the new patron saint of France.) Meanwhile, contentious Englishmen, led by noble-but-weak Henry VI, decide to pick sides, some represented by the red rose and some by the white rose. This divide eventually affects and impedes the war against Joan. After much back and forth, her forces kill the great English general Talbot, but she is eventually captured and burned at the stake. Cut back to Henry, who turns down a good marriage for a bad one, in a way that will allow him to be controlled. To be continued!
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York and, of course, Holinshed’s Chronicles.
• Interesting fact about the play: The Wikipedia page for this play is a lot. Drama drama drama! Was the play co-written? If so, was it with Marlowe, Nashe, Kyd, or someone else entirely? Is it not Shakespeare at all? If it is, is it his first play? If not, did he start with the three Henry VI plays, but in a different order? 1,2,3? 2,1,3? 2,3,1? Nobody knows!
• Best insult:
• Thou most usurping proditor
• Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf! It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp should strike such terror to his enemies
• Thou art a most pernicious usurer, Froward by nature, enemy to peace; Lascivious, wanton
• Best word: So many!: Proditor, extirped, reguerdoned, immanity, periapts
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: Never seen it or read it until today.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: I hadn’t mentioned that Brenda Blethyn (Secrets and Lies, Vera) was in Lear, but I’ll mention her this time because she’s the biggest name here, doing a great job as Joan. A young Bernard Hill (Lord of the Rings) also shows up in a part that will continue on to the next two plays.

How’s the cast?

• Everyone is excellent. As we learned with “Troilus and Cressida”, it’s very hard to play roles that are equal parts Comedy, Tragedy, and History (That play failed utterly onscreen), but here everybody does an amazing job, creating a play that is fun, meaningful, and riveting, despite a 3:06 runtime.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Howell had previously directed “A Winter’s Tale”, which was quite beautiful, but couldn’t overcome a weak text. She impressed enough, though, that they decided to entrust her with a big four-parter, the second half of the Henriad. The result, at least from this Part I, is glorious. Brilliantly staged on one set painted like a child’s playroom, with pompous knights riding ridiculous hobbyhorses, she lets everybody have their say, but brilliantly skewers them all, exposing this war, at home and abroad, for the childish spat that it is. (Until the blood starts flying)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Humanize the Supposedly-Superhuman

In the endless debates over who wrote the play and what order it came in, the one thing everyone seems to agree upon is that this is one of Shakespeare’s worst plays, if not the very worst. Well, no one told Howell that. She clearly loves the text, and makes it delightful.

This play should actually be called “Joan of Arc” (and I suspect it would be staged a lot more often these days if it was!) Henry VI is barely in it, not even appearing until Act III in the text (though Howell has him appear first here to sing a prologue). Joan is the character here with a full and satisfying arc (no pun intended).

And she is fascinating. The history plays, are, of course, pro-English and anti-French, so you would expect Shakespeare to be less enamored of Joan than non-English writers have been, and indeed he is not, but, being Shakespeare, he can’t help but make her very complex and human.

Of course, that’s part of the problem some people have with this play: We’re used to seeing Joan as super-human, or at least unearthly, but Shakespeare is having none of that. The possibility of superpowers is there (When the Dauphin tests her by putting someone else on the throne upon first meeting her, she immediately sees through it) but she eventually proves to be all too human.

Shakespeare does her no favors by naming her after her professed maidenhood, because it just sets us up for when she bewitches the Dauphin and beds him immediately, only to be embarrassingly forced out of bed by a raiding English army. But she recovers quickly and continues to show amazing leadership abilities.

She certainly believes herself to be godlike, and her martial prowess is almost superhuman, and she can certainly bewitch almost everyone she meets, but is she a Macbeth-style witch or merely a Cleopatra-style witch? Eventually, when she loses her way, she says that her “fiends” have abandoned her, and apparently some performances show actual fiends doing that, but Howell and Blethyn would never give us any such visual clues that Joan is anything but a brilliant madwoman.

Shakespeare’s ultimate humiliation of her comes after she’s captured, and, realizing she’s not a goddess, begs for her life, lying (?) that she’s pregnant, then claiming various men are the father, in order to see which one would please the English and save her life. It’s certainly below the dignity of any other portrayal of Joan of Arc you’ll see (Falconnetti this is not) but I love it. She’s never anything less than canny, and professing pregnancy in the courtroom is a tale as old as time from Beulah Annan (fictionalized as Roxie Hart) to Elizabeth Holmes. In this case, her ploy fails, but I love that she goes down fighting using any tools she can.

Joan sees herself as superhuman, and perhaps simply because of that self-confidence, performs spectacular feats, but she proves to be all-too human in the end. In the hands of Blethyn and Howell, it feels like it’s brilliantly written. In lesser hands, maybe I would have hated the character as much as other critics do.

(I will add that it’s fascinating to compare Shakespeare’s Joan to his Cleopatra, another great woman leader from history who Shakespeare also paints as a bit of an overrated strumpet. It’s also fascinating to compare Joan to Shakespeare’s actual boss, Elizabeth the first, who also professed that her authority sprang from her maidenhood. Shakespeare doesn’t buy that from Joan. Did he buy if from Elizabeth? Certainly, many at the time did not. By doubting one, is he doubting the other?)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Mimetic is Better Than Diagetic (And Sometimes Writers Write Better Before They Know How to Write)

Apparently, another reason that some critics insist Shakespeare didn’t write the play, or that it was his first play, is that there’s so much violence on stage. To quote Wikipedia: “critics such as E. M. W. Tillyard, Irving Ribner and A. P. Rossiter have all claimed that the play violates neoclassical precepts of drama, which dictate that violence and battle should never be shown mimetically on stage, but should always be reported diegetically in dialogue.”

I had not realized this was a rule, but now I see it everywhere, and it always seem so dreadfully dull to me in plays like “Julius Caesar” or “Antony and Cleopatra” when people keep running in and describing battles we never see. Give me a bloodfest like this any day, especially with a badass swordswoman onstage hacking away.

My suspicion is that Shakespeare did write the whole play, and that this was simply a glorious example of how exciting something can be before a writer learns to, ugh, write.