Showing posts with label The Winter's Tale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Winter's Tale. Show all posts

Thursday 15 April 2021

The #GratuitousLineFromShakespeare Tweets

The #GratuitousLineFromShakespeare Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 April

The #GratuitousLineFromShakespeare Tweets














Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 2 March 2016

Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia (The Winter's Tale*)

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 April

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

* Please be aware that, without giving the plot, there may be significant detail revealed *

Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia

In context, these words - in the opening lines of the first theatre production where I was so involved in the mechanics of the text and how it was delivered that it amounted to immersion in the play's world and language - do many things all at once:

* They introduce Camillo to us straightaway (and by name), because the speech is addressed to him - he has a difficult and all-important decision to make just scenes away, and we need to know who he is

* Established at once, in these words, is that we are in Sicilia, but that Bohemia and it, where Camillo has come as part of an embassy, are - the person speaking to him thinks - poles apart

* So we know immediately that we are in a royal court**, and that it is with the lives of such people and those, such as Camillo, who are employed by them that we shall be concerned

* But my last point is my main point: wherever Bohemia and Sicilia may be (and I had very little conception at the time of that production where they are - after all, I think that finding Illyria on the map might prove rather taxing), they are not here

* It is a depiction of things happening that is openly declared to be somewhere else


Dictynna Hood's first feature (Wreckers (2011)) is, itself, almost immediately and unequivocally established as being set somewhere specific. That place is not specified (except by how David and Nick, who grew up there, speak, if one had an ear for that accent (and there is a credit for the person who worked with them and others to make them sound from that area)), but it is not Bohemia or Sicilia, but rural England.

Which is part, of course, of what makes it so disturbing - just fleetingly, just at times. That feeling is reminiscent of, but also very unlike, Pinter's vision of what could be happening in everyday scenes set in unremarkable streets, maybe does happen. The things that we don't know about, or - more like it - pretend that we don't guess at or are not interested in.

And this is a village in Britain, where (although they would always claim not to be nosy) everyone knows everyone else's business: we are even told, in (I think) a scene on a street in the village itself that a man was known to sleep with his daughter. This place where even incest is something that, although not exactly witnessed, isn't anybody's business to report (just to be aware of), is where a drama plays out that involves Dawn and David, their neighbours, and their not entirely welcome visitor Nick, David's brother (or are we even so sure of that?). So, Dictynna Hood seems to be saying (and I mention this topic, not becase it is what happens, but because sexuality and the urge to have sex, to procreate, is shown to be a strong force).


Slight diversion (but not really)

The veneer of our society is of such a kind that, if an unheard-of businessperson and his or her colleagues and / or business associates or would-be clients, go to a live sex show, then So what? It's a free country!. These claims, perhaps less made now, about freedom, and the reality of when such private matters suddenly become public, do clash, however:

For it would be better for that businessperson not to become a Cabinet minister and continue to do such things, or not to have concealed (as best he or she can, by any means he or she has at his or her disposal) all trace of ever having done them (now or in the past), because politicians, in the UK at least, are meant to be above reproach. (Even if the reproach sometimes comes from members of the press who would have no objection to personally doing whatever they state they are condemning.)


Back to the film...

I hinted at Pinter, but it is an edginess of its own that Dictynna has shown us here, one that inhabits these people, their behaviour, maybe where they live. Much is not spelt out, although (and there may be doubts whether what he says is true) it seems that Nick has some sort of experience of post-tramatic stress, the brothers have lied (but which one?) in a way that attributes their actions to the other and vice versa, and that there are immense and largely unadmitted feelings of jealousy, anger, rage and hatred.

They are almost, without in any way diminshing from how they are drawn, characters who step forward momentarily as if an everyman or -woman, an archetype, and then step back into being the sorts of people that we may find it hard to admit that we are ourselves deep down, in this England where there is still a show of respectability, and what goes on in the bedroom - and who is in the bed - is best not known or talked about.

This sense, quite a subtle one, of one standing for all makes this a powerful and resonant film, and I just hope that I have the chance to see it again, ideally on a big screen.


End-notes

* I have posted already that it is often enough wrongly called A Winter's Tale.

** Not The Royal Court!


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Sunday 29 April 2012

Snippets of Shakespeare (with thanks to Radio 3)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 April

Some responses to hearing (part of - my fault, not Radio 3's!) the new radio production of Romeo and Juliet to-night


1. What are we to make of Friar Lawrence?

Not really what Prokofiev did in that singing melody that he gave to him in the ballet (and the piano suite that derived from it - at least, until I check, I think that it was in that order (not that the piano writing was fleshed out for orchestra)).

I have little idea whether it is still fashionable to call Shakespeare plays such as Measure for Measure (and All's Well that Ends Well) by the name 'problem plays' (or who originated that term), but the Duke's ethics in MfM seem no more dodgy than the friar's!


2. Whisky in Shakespeare

Not that it was called that in this play, but that is, essentially, what the acqua vitae* that is called for when Juliet's body is found, after she has taken the friar's concoction and so appears dead (but might be capable of being revived).


3. Overacting in Shakespeare

As the scene unfolded, it may have been the performance, but the reactions - in particular of Juliet's father - seemed overblown (and even ridiculous) in an age much more used to mortality at any age (Juliet's certainly being no safeguard) than ours.

For me, almost reminiscent of Lady Macbeth's awkwardly incriminating interjection, roundly put down as inappropriate given that the king has been killed, to the effect not in our house!


4. Sun and Moon

For those who have read - or dare to read - Lunch on the moon?, my own lines needfully do not bear comparison with:


Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she

(Act 2, Scene 2)



5. Another link with Macbeth

Macduff, when he enquires after his wife, is told that she is 'well' (meaning, as used, really that she is at rest), and only comes to the realization about 'all my pretty chickens and their dam' a few lines later.

Here, with the economy that we will see below when Juliet kisses Romeo, Romeo introduces the word, in its usual sense:


How doth my Juliet? That I ask again,
For nothing can be ill if she be well.


To which Balthasar, his servant, directly replies:


Then she is well and nothing can be ill.
Her body sleeps in Capels' monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.



6. The apothecary

Since the seeming source, in Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562), not only narrates the story, but gives characters speech, it should be possible to see how much invention there was in Shakespeare's Act 5, Scene 1, when, 60 lines in, Romeo procures poison**...

That said, before he does so, the Act opens with 11 lines' worth of a dream, in which Romeo begins by questioning the 'flattering truth of sleep', but also showing that, maybe, he is tempted to credit it, and, in any case, feels better for it (until the question in line 15, quoted above, to Balthasar):


My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne
And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts


The purchase of the dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear / As will disperse itself through all the veins, put me in mind of a similar transaction in The Canterbury Tales, in the tale told by the Pardoner of the three young men who boast that they will seek out the villain Death to punish him - and find him.


7. The kiss

Brooke's narrative has Juliet kiss*** Romeus, but very differently from Shakespeare's portrayal of the touch of lips:

A thousand times she kist his mouth as cold as stone


Shakespeare's kiss is not only more tantalizing (as Romeo is clearly not long dead, and so might more nearly have been alive****), but there is a telescoping of several elements in barely more than half-a-dozen lines:


What's here? A cup clos'd in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl. Drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.
Thy lips are warm!


Two-and-a-half lines later, Juliet has stabbed herself, not having time for the long speeches and decisions of Brooke's narrative, as she does not want to be prevented from following Romeo in death when she hears voices.

No time for any more kisses than one, no time for farewells, but, more affectingly, the affectionate rebuke of her dead lover, and the conceit of wanting to share the means of death (with all its overtones) in that kiss.



End-notes

* Revd E. Cobham Brewer's delightful A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in an old edition that I have, reassuringly tells us, in the entry before, about Aqua Tofana:

A poisonous liquid containing arsenic, much used in Italy in the 17th century by young wives who wanted to get rid of their husbands.


Fair enough, one might think, but the entry puzzlingly continues (and concludes):

It was invented about 1690 by a Greek woman named Tofana, who called it the Manna of St Nicholas of Bari, from the widespread notion that an oil of miraculous efficacy flowed from the tomb of that saint. In Italian called also Aquella di Napoli.


** Which sounded like a woman, on Radio 3, not a man, make of which change what one will...

*** Sure a Freudian slip, I typed 'kill' just now!

**** I am reminded of Leontes, at the end of The Winter's Tale, kissing what he thinks a statue of his dead wife Hermione, and finding it warm to his lips' touch.


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Thursday 1 March 2012

Russell's Pate and degenerate languages

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 March

Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:

We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.

Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.


End-notes

* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).


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Saturday 29 October 2011

A. E. Housman and God

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 October 2011

The so-called 'scholar-poet', probably best known for A Shropshire Lad*, is said to have opined:


A malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man


Even so, one wonders which dram he had to hand - or, else, in mind - when he wrote (assuming that this was not a Johnsonian quip, noted by another)...


End-notes

* Somewhat tempting, in the reverse tendency to the title of The Winter's Tale, to type The Shropshire Lad - probably because, in the words 'a' and 'the', it is the same dull, unstressed vowel-sound, which peppers English speech (or, at any rate, British English), and so the variant title sounds very similar in my head.


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