Salon.com > Shakespeare http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 06:12:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 How Shakespeare got me through unemployment http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/how_shakespeare_got_me_through_unemployment/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/how_shakespeare_got_me_through_unemployment/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10282796 Three years ago, at one of the lowest moments of my life, I started doing something I never thought I'd do.  I'm reading every single play William Shakespeare ever wrote.  And I'm reading most of them aloud. From the three dour Henry VIs, through all of your Macbeths and Romeos and Hamlets, all the way to nutty Cymbeline and beyond.

I'm not a Shakespeare scholar. Or an actor. I read them as part of a Nashville Shakespeare Festival program called "Shakespeare Allowed!" which invites a group of strangers to gather at a giant square table in the downtown library and read one speech or line at a time, round-robin-style, regardless of gender or acting ability. (Others silently read along in the periphery, except during crowd scenes, when everyone homina homina hominas.) Over the years, people have tried to read lady parts in high voices (embarrassing) or French parts in French voices (disastrous) or ghost parts in, I don't know, ghosty voices, but it never pans out. Eventually people settle down into their normal reading voices, because it's really about the text and the simple act of reading in front of other people. It sounds as tedious as a toothache -- but it's been thrilling.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/how_shakespeare_got_me_through_unemployment/feed/ 25 Joss Whedon takes on Shakespeare http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/joss_whedon_takes_on_shakespeare/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/joss_whedon_takes_on_shakespeare/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10144208 Maybe it's atonement for "The Avengers." On Sunday night, actors Nathan Fillion and Sean Maher, along with costume designer Shawna Trpcic, cryptically tweeted a link to a Web page featuring a photo of Fillion toting a martini glass, somewhere in the middle of a lake. The image announced the completion of a new movie from Joss Whedon, the genius whose "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel," "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," "Firefly" and, to a lesser extent, "Dollhouse" are the very definition of awesome to nerds everywhere. According to the clues, the film stars a veritable who's who of Whedon alums. And it's "based on a play." A Shakespeare play. Oh God. Ohmigod. Then on Monday, Bellwether Pictures officially announced Whedon's "Much Ado About Nothing." That thud you heard was everybody in America with a liberal arts degree fainting dead in excitement.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/joss_whedon_takes_on_shakespeare/feed/ 11 “The Tragedy of Arthur”: Shakespeare or not? http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/tragedy_of_arthur/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/tragedy_of_arthur/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/04/24/tragedy_of_arthur Arthur Phillips may or may not resent Shakespeare; it's hard to say for sure. But "Arthur Phillips" certainly does bear a grudge against the bard. Phillips is the author of four novels, including the sparkling debut, "Prague," and Arthur is a character in the most recent of them, "The Tragedy of Arthur." Arthur shares much of his creator's history: He's also the author of a novel titled "Prague" and has the same editor, agent and publicist as the real-life Phillips. But presumably the real Phillips is not the son of a small-time con man and the reluctant editor of a play experts have anointed as a long-lost work by Shakespeare.

As a rule, I'm leery of novels in which one of the characters has the same name as the author. Once upon a time, this seemed a clever gambit, calling attention to (among other things) the too-common tendency for readers to confuse novelists with their creations. By now, however, it's gotten a bit stale, and provokes many readers into rolling their eyes and muttering darkly about "postmodern tricks."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/tragedy_of_arthur/feed/ 9 The Shakespeare film canon http://www.salon.com/2010/12/11/shakespeare_canon_slide_show/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/11/shakespeare_canon_slide_show/#comments Sat, 11 Dec 2010 01:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/10/shakespeare_canon_slide_show

"The girls today in society Go for classical poetry, So to win their hearts one must quote with ease Aeschylus and Euripides. But the poet of them all Who will start 'em simply ravin' Is the poet people call The bard of Stratford-on-Avon." -- "Brush Up on Your Shakespeare," from "Kiss Me, Kate."

In honor of the release of what must be the 265 millionth adaptation of a Shakespeare play, Julie Taymor's version of "The Tempest," we've put together a list of memorable Shakespeare adaptations for film and television. Because the playwright is infinitely adaptable, we've divided each slide into two categories: "Traditional" and "Wild Card." The former refers to an adaptation that sticks somewhat close to the original story, characterizations and language (although the setting might have been changed or "updated"). "Wild Card" refers to an adaptation that takes a particular Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point, then does its own thing.

If we've omitted any obvious candidates -- or neglected major Shakespeare plays that you believe have been filmed in enough varied ways to have merited their own slide -- tell us in the comments. And rest assured that the author will cop to any grievous error of judgment or fact. "Oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse."  -- William Shakespeare, "King John."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/11/shakespeare_canon_slide_show/feed/ 120 “The Tempest”: Helen Mirren’s sadly elegant mom-magician http://www.salon.com/2010/12/10/tempest/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/10/tempest/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/12/10/tempest It's difficult, but not impossible, to wreck a Shakespeare play completely, and if there's a reason to be grateful for Julie Taymor's muddled, middling production of "The Tempest," it lies in the fact that she doesn't do that. A wizard of the Broadway stage who created the long-running "Lion King" musical (and the now-previewing Spider-Man musical), Taymor has what you might call a mixed record as a film director: I mean, everything she makes is a mixed bag. (Her last two movies were the Beatles musical "Across the Universe" in 2007, and the biopic "Frida" five years earlier. Make sense of that, if you can.) This is her second big-screen attack on the Bard, and it's a whole lot friendlier than her gory, deranged "Titus" from a decade ago.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/10/tempest/feed/ 13 “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” http://www.salon.com/2010/03/28/contested_will/ http://www.salon.com/2010/03/28/contested_will/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/03/28/contested_will "It bristles with difficulties," observed Henry James about the "authorship controversy," the 200-year-old argument over who wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare. You can count James (along with Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and such notable actors as John Gielgud and Derek Jacobi) among the anti-Stratfordians, those who question the conventional view. The majority of experts may feel confident that the author "Shakespeare" was none other than the man Shakespeare and not some aristocrat or intellectual using the celebrated Elizabethan actor as a front, but those who disagree — a small but vocal minority of academics, independent scholars and outright cranks — will not be deterred.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/03/28/contested_will/feed/ 207 Shakespeare’s theater gets a woman http://www.salon.com/2010/02/18/shakespeare_theater_first_female/ http://www.salon.com/2010/02/18/shakespeare_theater_first_female/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2010/02/18/shakespeare_theater_first_female It only took 400 years. London's Globe Theater has commissioned its first play by a woman. This September, Shakespeare's own theater will mount the world premiere of "Bedlam," a musical drama set at another of London's most famous institutions: the infamous psychiatric asylum. 

In fairness, it's not as if the theater where women once couldn't even appear on the stage has spent the past four centuries actively ignoring female playwrights. The Globe was shut down from 1642 to 1997 (a hiatus that puts our current "Glee" anticipation into perspective). Nevertheless, the fact that it's taken them a whole 13 years since re-opening to find one female writer to produce isn't exactly encouraging.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/02/18/shakespeare_theater_first_female/feed/ 4 The undignified near-death of Miramax http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/04/miramax It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "sex, lies, and videotape," "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love," "Chicago," "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men," I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/feed/ 33 The Merchants of Wall Street http://www.salon.com/2009/03/25/shakespeare_economy/ http://www.salon.com/2009/03/25/shakespeare_economy/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2009/03/25/shakespeare_economy Am I surprised that the Bard of Avon foresaw every nuance of today's financial crisis, as proven by law professor Nathan Oman's brilliant, virtuouso deconstruction of "The Merchant of Venice"? No. The details of how complex financial instruments are structured may have changed over the last four centuries, but people are pretty much the same.

This is one of the cases where readers are much better off reading the entirety of Oman's post at the group law blog Concurring Opinions. Excerpts do not do it justice. But here's a taste anyway, to whet your appetite. You may find yourself, like me, reaching for the original source material soon after.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/03/25/shakespeare_economy/feed/ 10 The ultimate Japanese Shakespeare spaghetti western! http://www.salon.com/2008/08/28/sukiyaki/ http://www.salon.com/2008/08/28/sukiyaki/#comments Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/08/28/sukiyaki

First Look Studios / Takeshi Ikeda

Hideaki Ito as a wandering gunman in "Sukiyaki Western Django."

I guess the premise of Takashi Miike's "Sukiyaki Western Django" goes something like this: Given that the Japanese samurai film and the American (and/or European) western are fundamentally the same genre, and that Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah were all drilling in the same well -- and given that a lot of their movies were ripping off Shakespeare's plots in the first place, with less talking and more killing -- why not boil up all those stories and elements and influences in the same pot and see what happens?

What happens is undoubtedly peculiar, and easy to pick apart or dismiss as hipster contrivance if you haven't seen it. "Sukiyaki Western Django" is an ultraviolent gunslinger opera set in a nowhereland that's partly 11th century rural Japan and partly 19th century Nevada, with a cast of Japanese actors speaking English (with varying degrees of success) alongside a supporting performance by Quentin Tarantino. It's got snatches of "Henry the Sixth," large doses of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" and bits and pieces drawn from Peckinpah's, Leone's and Clint Eastwood's classic westerns.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/28/sukiyaki/feed/ 7 To breed or not to breed http://www.salon.com/2008/06/27/wroblewski/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/27/wroblewski/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/06/27/wroblewski Hearty and overstuffed, "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" arrives at bookstores this summer well-positioned to step into the niche pioneered by "Cold Mountain": the chewy yet suspenseful literary bestseller with a taproot in the classics. The book's spine is rock-solid; author David Wroblewski has based his tale of power struggles within a family of Wisconsin dog breeders on "Hamlet" (which was in turn based on Anglo-Saxon legend). It's a shrewd choice, and one that keeps this debut novel from sinking under the weight of its more self-indulgent passages.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/06/27/wroblewski/feed/ 1 The genius next door http://www.salon.com/2004/09/27/shakespeare_6/ http://www.salon.com/2004/09/27/shakespeare_6/#comments Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/09/27/shakespeare In the 1998 movie "Shakespeare in Love," the most recent pop culture incarnation of the bard is a doe-eyed swain with writer's block who drapes himself fetchingly over a series of rough-hewn benches, bemoaning his lack of a muse, until his art and his career are saved by the love of Gwyneth Paltrow. The film's historical details, from the closure of London theaters during plague outbreaks to the layout of the Rose itself (not the Globe; that was later), are solid. However, the main premise is not only sappy but preposterous. A few years later, in a much lower-profile documentary called "Much Ado About Something," conspiracy theorists explained why they believe that William Shakespeare was merely a front man for fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, who supposedly only pretended to die in 1593, the same year "Shakespeare in Love" is set. Not so sappy, but still preposterous.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/09/27/shakespeare_6/feed/ 0 “After Shakespeare” by John Gross, ed. http://www.salon.com/2002/08/07/shakespeare_5/ http://www.salon.com/2002/08/07/shakespeare_5/#comments Wed, 07 Aug 2002 15:47:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/07/shakespeare Some 250 years after his burial, William Shakespeare took the trouble to visit French author Victor Hugo at a Parisian seance. At first the others in attendance were perplexed that, through a planchette, Shakespeare delivered his message in perfect French. But the bard obligingly explained that, with the wisdom of age, he now found their language superior to his own -- a lucky break as Hugo himself spoke no English. Then Shakespeare went on, in measured verse, to say that he read Hugo's writing regularly up in heaven, often aloud for the benefit of the other immortals. Cervantes silenced Molière, in order to savor every last word. Aeschylus quivered, and Dante wept, at Hugo's emotional depth. "Your voice is sacred!" Shakespeare proclaimed. "Carry on the good work!"

Few writers before or since have received such a glowing endorsement from their own mothers, let alone from the author of "Othello," "Macbeth" and "Hamlet." Hugo may be unique among writers in his unstinting esteem for Shakespeare, whom he liked to imagine not only in an all-star reading group with Dante and Cervantes, but also in the spiritual company of Isaiah and Saint Paul.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/08/07/shakespeare_5/feed/ 0 Mystery man http://www.salon.com/2002/03/02/shakespeare_3/ http://www.salon.com/2002/03/02/shakespeare_3/#comments Sat, 02 Mar 2002 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/feature/2002/03/02/shakespeare If you look hard enough, it's possible to find a group of ardent souls, somewhere, who still believe almost any weird idea that might ever have held currency. The Flat Earth Society, for instance, is still very much in business, with headquarters both in America and what they'd hesitate to call the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia. There are groups of people, after all this time, who still think Japanese anime is edgy and avant-garde, and others still devoted to proving that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. Perhaps you know some of these people, or are one of them. For my part, I believe the Shakespeare-authorship thing. I think Christopher Marlowe might've written all the Bard's works instead, and it was Michael Rubbo's new video documentary, "Much Ado About Something," which just completed a two-week run at Film Forum in New York and should appear somewhere near you soon, that smashed my paradigm.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/03/02/shakespeare_3/feed/ 0 “O” http://www.salon.com/2001/08/31/o/ http://www.salon.com/2001/08/31/o/#comments Fri, 31 Aug 2001 19:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2001/08/31/o After Julia Stiles starred in "10 Things I Hate About You," the 1999 high school comedy update of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," the celeb profiles that followed announced she would be playing two more Shakespeare heroines: First, Desdemona in "O," a high school update of "Othello," and then Ophelia in "Hamlet." By the time Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" opened in the spring of 2000, "O" still hadn't appeared. And now, two years after it was supposed to open, it's finally being released.

The movie was delayed because of Columbine. After the Colorado school shooting, Miramax, which was set to release the film through its Dimension division, got cold feet about the picture's depiction of high school violence and reportedly was ready to shelve it permanently. Heated words and threats of lawsuits came from the director, Tim Blake Nelson. Finally, as it did when Miramax got cold feet about another controversial movie it was set to release, Kevin Smith's "Dogma," Lions Gate Films stepped in and took the movie off of Miramax's hands.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/08/31/o/feed/ 0 “Author Unknown” by Don Foster http://www.salon.com/2000/11/02/foster_5/ http://www.salon.com/2000/11/02/foster_5/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/11/02/foster Don Foster is a Shakespeare scholar, but even Shakespeare is a couple of points down the scale from the literary figure he's been studying for the past few years. There is, after all, no more prolific and versatile a writer in all of English than the mysterious Anon., who's been blizzarding the canon with epigrams, essays, documents of state, ransom notes, stories, broadsides and dirty limericks from Saxon times to the present.

Foster made his name by helping to bulk up Shakespeare's C.V. with one more entry: As a doctoral candidate in the mid-'80s, he flagged a neglected Elizabethan funeral elegy as a lost work of Shakespeare's, and gradually invented a computer-assisted method of textual analysis to help prove his case. He's also the guy who fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author of "Primary Colors." He's since worked on the Unabomber and JonBenet Ramsey cases, the Monica Lewinsky fiasco and numerous other high- and low-profile disputes of the who-wrote-what variety.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/11/02/foster_5/feed/ 0 William Shakespeare http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_midsummer/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_midsummer/#comments Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/shakespeare_midsummer English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist the world has ever known and the finest poet who has written in the English language. Shakespeare has also been the world's most popular author. No other writer's plays have been produced so many times or read so widely in so many countries. Much of this popularity rests on his ability to communicate the intricacies of human nature.

This is evidenced in A Midsummer's Night Dream, one of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Though it is a romantic and comic tale of temporarily star-crossed lovers and bewitching fairies, Shakespeare shows us with humor the chaos, confusion and misunderstanding that can ensue when jealousy and egos are not kept in check.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_midsummer/feed/ 0 William Shakespeare http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_2/#comments Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/shakespeare English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist the world has ever known and the finest poet who has written in the English language. Shakespeare has also been the world's most popular author. No other writer's plays have been produced so many times or read so widely in so many countries. Much of this popularity rests on his ability to communicate the intricacies of human nature.

Shakespeare's sonnets represent some of the finest poems ever penned. They are love poems of an extraordinary personal variety, giving us intimate glimpses of the soul behind the genius that was Shakespeare. Listen to this excerpt from the HarperAudio release "Shakespeare: The Sonnets" which features the late Sir John Gielgud's magnificent renderings of 120 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/10/06/shakespeare_2/feed/ 0 Lear meets the energy vampire http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/kurosawa/ http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/kurosawa/#comments Thu, 21 Sep 2000 19:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/srag/2000/09/21/kurosawa For people who grow up loving movies, returning to the work of favorite actors or directors can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we've grown at all, change or deepen. Rediscovery becomes self-discovery, and the sparkle on the screen casts a mysterious tunneling light.

Two wildly different reissues have snared me in that mesmeric spell. Recently rewatching "Ran," Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, I was struck by an echo of David Lynch's marvelous "The Straight Story." The aging hero of Lynch's film illustrates the strength of family with sticks: You can break a single stick, he says, but you can never break a bundle. The tragic hero of Kurosawa's movie says the same thing about arrows -- but his youngest son manages to snap a bundle on his knee. I always admired "Ran." This time I loved it. That's partly because of Kurosawa's refusal in his old age to soften his worldview or his storytelling. What came off as virtuosic in 1985 now also seems valiant.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/kurosawa/feed/ 0 “Shakespeare in Love” http://www.salon.com/2000/06/30/shakespeare_love/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/30/shakespeare_love/#comments Fri, 30 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/dvd/review/2000/06/30/shakespeare_love "Shakespeare in Love"
Directed by John Madden
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush
Miramax Collector's Series; widescreen, 2.35:1
Extras: Shakespeare-in-film documentary, costumes documentary, deleted scenes, more

"Shakespeare in Love," a vastly fictional speculation about what it must have been like for the young William Shakespeare to be broke, lonely and suffering from writer's block, reaps back in pure charm and self-referential wit whatever it might forfeit in historical accuracy. Joseph Fiennes brings matinee-idol good looks to his portrayal of young Will, but he has a meltingly sincere sensuality as well. And Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola, a young woman who loves the theater so much that she disguises herself as a boy to earn a role, is more than just radiant; her performance is deft and delicate, giving off light like a field of fireflies on a summer night, and also touchingly open-hearted. When her nurse summons her after her first night with Will, informing her it's a new day, she replies, with an almost spellbound delight that's probably familiar to anyone who has ever been in love, "It is a new world." The love scenes between Paltrow and Fiennes don't throw off anything quite as gaudy as sparks; instead, they glow with a quiet, luminous shimmer.

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