"Updating" Shakespeare, Part Two

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the short films that adapt/stage/body forth Shakespeare's sonnets. Now, there's an interesting new plan for a different kind of adaptation. Novelists are signing on to "novelize" Shakespeare's plays--and the series will begin to be published in 2015. Two plays have already been chosen, by established novelists who have won awards in their own right. Intriguingly, Jeanette Winterson (who is both a novelist and a screenwriter) has chosen The Winter's Tale; Anne Tyler will adapt The Taming of the Shrew. (The best part of the article, though, isn't necessarily these details: it's the fabulous portrayal of a "hipster" Shakespeare, who looks exactly like someone from our creative writing department!)

Again, this project calls up really interesting questions about genre and accessibility. Unlike the sonnet-film project, though, this project adds the dimension of cultural translation: a sixteenth-century art form is giving way to a twenty-first-century one. Depending on the project's overall guidelines, and on the authors' individual choices, anything from complex Italian names to economic background information, character gender roles, family structures or mythological references could be "translated"--in addition to the language itself. As a translational project, then, this project has fascinating implications: What does it mean to study "Shakespeare," and what does it mean to "translate" his works? How is this process similar to what Shakespeare himself did, as an adapter of source material, and how is it different? (And what do these similarities and differences tell us about the changing cultural status of a "translation?")

Staging the Blazon has landed!

I'm really excited to announce that Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater has just been released! (I know this, because I got a mysterious cardboard package from Sweden today, and my contributor copy was inside.) The essays in the book explore how the blazon--which is a physical description of a person, often head-to-toe, usually found in written poetry--translates onto the stage in Renaissance England. It was a lot of fun to take part in the SAA seminar on Staging the Blazon in Chicago, and also a lot of fun to contribute to the book project.

Night Knitting (or, Knitting in the Dark?)

In his compendious study of nighttime in the Renaissance, At Day's Close, A. Roger Ekirch writes the following:

"Enea Silvio Piccolomni, the future Pope Pius II (1405-1464), while traveling in northern England, observed a large company of women sitting all night by a fire, conversing and cleaning hemp. Less common elsewhere in England, spinning sessions, even in the nineteenth century, remained widespread in the north... Assembling one or two nights a week, work parties could last until one or two in the morning... On frigid nights, the presence of farm animals generated warmth, as did steaming manure. Often, a cottage hearth supplied small quantities of both light and heat... Requiring the sharpest sight, women usually sat up front [nearest to the fire], spinning, knitting, weaving and carding wool either for themselves or for one another" (New York: Norton, 2005, 178-9).

I was intrigued. Given my drawbacks (lack of hearth, lack of female posse, lack of spinning and carding skills, lack of manure), I decided to undertake a modified experiment. Could one really knit in the semi-dark? Would this knitting turn out to be wearable? (Or even recognizable as knitting?)

The procedure: I waited until the sun had almost set, and left the shades partially open. There wasn't much sunlight, but I could still kind of see. (Almost.) Plus, I was using chunky white yarn, which was more visible than, say, a Regia sock blend in dark blue. I knit about seven rounds on a cable/rib hat that I was working on. Then I went to another room, turned on a light, and had a look.

The verdict: Oops. My first cable now had five stitches, instead of six; my second cable had seven, and the strip of ribbing in between looked like something out of a Robert Frost poem. (And not in a good way.)

The analysis: Clearly, I was missing something. How were these ladies, in fact, actually producing garments at one or two in the morning, in minimal lighting conditions, while listening to gossip or fictional tales, with freezing fingers and sleep-deprived brains?

I have come up with three possible theories: 1) They were not, in fact, knitting. That was just a cover for their actual purpose in convening: a plot to overthrow Enea Silvio Piccolomni. 2) The purpose in having the other ladies nearby was to have at least one functioning as a quality control agent. 3) (Possibly the most disturbing option:) They didn't actually care whether their cables all matched. 

So: there you have it. The moral of the story? "Night knitting deserves a well-lit night. I'm not sure all these people understand."

Derek Jacobi was on Frasier!

I think I'm probably quite late to the party. But I'm re-watching Frasier this summer, and today, I came across "The Show Must Go Off" (exciting clip available here). In this episode, Derek Jacobi is a former Shakespearean actor turned sci-fi superstar, and Frasier tries to entice him to go back on stage. When he does, Frasier and Niles realize that he, um, can't act. And it's pretty funny to see Jacobi doing Hamlet 'badly.'

Except, the weird thing is... he does Hamlet badly well. I mean, there are asthmatic gasps every few seconds, and his poses are always overextended--but behind everything, you can hear Jacobi's fabulous intonation, and his sense of timing is precisely honed for the genre(s). And also, he's Derek Jacobi, and there's that ghosting thing going on, which would be a lot of fun to explore on a more critical level. For now, though: I saw Derek Jacobi on Frasier tonight! *geeks happily*

Shakespeare's Sonnet 44, on film

Okay--so I've solved my computer's seeming inability to stream video (or, um, my own actual inability to stream video), and I watched my first filmed sonnet today. It was #44, and it was filmed in front of (and, sometimes, "on") a giant globe called the Unisphere in Queens. I think I've got two levels of reaction to it: a specific reaction, to the filming choices of this particular sonnet-film, and a general reaction--slightly different than yesterday's--to the larger idea of filming the sonnets.

On the specific level: I'm embarrassed to say that I got a little distracted by the mood music, and the camera angles, and the lovely photography, and the movement, and trying to figure out what exactly was happening to the actors (were they being slowly glitter-painted?). So, I didn't recognize the sonnet until maybe the second quatrain, where the word "earth" came in, and I went aha--that's why they picked the big globe setting. On the one hand, it's great to be re-introduced to a sonnet in a totally new way, and to see it completely through someone else's interpretation first. On the other hand, I felt like the music and the lighting and the camera and the scenery choices were sometimes so dynamic, so overpowering, that the words themselves got subsumed. (It's difficult enough to listen to Shakespeare and make sense of his words without reading them, for me--but it's way harder to do that when you're trying to figure out why that actor is becoming a metal robot-villain.) But: I think it's a great exercise in visual rhetoric, and a great chance to talk to students about the impact of lighting/camera movements/words/other choices in a dramatic piece.

On the general level: I don't think the sonnet-film is my favorite medium, and I think it raises some interesting questions about what lyric should be in the age of YouTube. (Not drama, incidentally. I'm building on my argument that drama is conceptually different from lyric here.) If somebody adds moving pictures, sound effects, and grey paint to make a poem "marketable," or to give it mass appeal, that (to me) verges on implying that the poem on its own terms is somehow lacking. And it's not. Far from it. In fact, the poem is so rich that it could inspire ten or twelve different filmed variations. For me, those potential variations only emerge when I read the poem slowly and carefully, going back to check on syntax and shifts that I didn't understand, processing and reprocessing over the course of maybe five minutes. But, again, that's me. The person who spent two hours trying to figure out why her computer (i.e., herself) was incapable of streaming video. Mm-hmm....

Filming Shakespeare's... Sonnets?

When I heard about the new project to film Shakespeare's sonnets--all 154 of them--on the streets of New York, I had a mixed reaction. On one level, what a great idea: drawing attention to the sonnets in a completely different cultural context from the one that students usually expect; enlisting respected actors and actresses; using Kickstarter and the app format to get the public involved. On the other hand, the lyric poet in me went... well, are sonnets actually filmable? I mean, they're not plays, and they're mostly not written for explicit, embodied performance (unless you're writing them as a set of song lyrics, or unless you're Romeo and Juliet--in which case, have at it). But most sonnets aren't drama, after all, and part of their point is that they speak in a different generic mode; one of their voices, for better or for worse, is always the one that you hear in your own head. From that angle, I'm a little worried that the project mashes two distinct art forms together without interrogating their differences, or even pointing out to the public that the differences exist.

Now, I have to admit, I feel a little pedantic writing that. After all, anything that appifies the Bard is a fabulous idea, and it generates discussions like these in the first place. So, I've decided to sign up for the app. There's only one sonnet-film available at the moment, but (for some reason) I haven't been able to access it on this machine. I'll check back once I've figured out the difficulty, and I'll keep you updated on my reactions. For the moment, though, I'm thinking that the sonnet-films are going to be, at the very least, fabulous conversation starters about genre, drama, and inwardness--particularly in the Shakespeare classroom.

Picturing Richard III

I just ran across a picture of Richard III's skeleton, as displayed on people.com. (It was in the trendy "The Royals" gossip section, right near teasers for articles about Prince Harry in America! Which may or may not be how I found the picture.)

Anyway. The picture is a fascinating thing to analyze. Here's why: it shows a skeleton on a table, like the skeletons of murder victims on a show like Bones. Except this skeleton also has a visible curvature of the spine, and the bones look like they're being photographed through murk or fog. They look old--they're the color of coffee stains, and parts of the hip and skull are fragmented--but they're framed in a visibly modern context, like the horror shot of the victim's body after the first commercial break.

All of these elements make the picture a fascinating artifact to close-read in the classroom (maybe juxtaposed with a little Thomas More!) Why is People showing Richard in this particular way, instead of inserting a standard portrait mugshot? What cultural currency do we ascribe to bones--seeing them, evaluating them--and did people feel the same way in Richard's own period? (Or, even, Shakespeare's?) Finally, how is the idea of respect being defined in all of this: respect for the past, for victims/villains/new discoveries, for somebody's relative, for history?

I haven't got the answers, but I'd love to have the conversation.