We’re classing up the joint with 1 hour and 45 minutes on the Bard Himself: William Shakespeare. Dick jokes can be found…pretty much all over the place.
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Featuring Sonnet 130 as performed by the incandescent Catherine Tate.
Just in case you need them: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on Project Gutenberg
Adaptations we talked about (possibly not a complete list):
Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing
Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing
Reimaginings:
10 Things I Hate About You
Scotland PA
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ShakespeaRetold (Much Ado, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummers)
You can watch Tom Hiddleston’s Corolianus through National Theater Live at a movie theater near you! Alina and Reidan have tickets!
Shakespearean Original Pronunciation video:
Next month we will come at you with all things Olympic! Skating, skiing, curling, biathalon, luge, bobsled, skeleton and snowboarding!
I commend your restraint to not spend half the episode going “HIDDLES SQUEE.” (Although I wouldn’t blame you because…fucking Hiddleston.)
So, I’ve seen the Tennant/Tate Much Ado via the digital streaming (but I know someone who got to see in London and got to MEET Tennant and Tate afterwards and I said “I am full of seething hate for you right now”) and I see your Alexis Denisof and I raise you David Tennant slathering himself in paint. It’s fantastic, you’ve got David and Catherine acting circles around each other and their chemistry is perfection. The production is set in the 80s, so there’s tons of cultural jokes; like there’s a song about Hero that’s set to a “Holding Out for a Hero” knock-off and it’s gloriously cheesy. And David Tennant in Madonna drag. (To note, I just got my DVD of the Whedon Much Ado yesterday, and hopefully I’ll be able to watch it soon.)
And I LOVE Ten Things I Hate About You, which is one of the two movies that I watched incessantly throughout high school and can quote off the top of my head frequently. (“I’ll leave you to Reginald’s quivering member.”) I just found my tape of it a few months ago in the basement and woooow nostalgia. Oh gosh. It’s just so great.
Unfortunately, I have not seen any Shakesepeare live. I want to, but finding people to go with me and not getting teased about is a little difficult and my best friend who once quoted Titus Adronicus at dinner lives four hours away. I’d love to see a play, but again…*sigh* I’m just glad that high school and four years of English majoring hasn’t killed my enjoyment of the Bard. And I took a semester course of Shakespeare. I prefer the comedies, but more the wacky fun ones like Twelfth Night and Midsummer’s.
And to finish, I have two Shakespeare-related recommendations! The first is the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged.” I first heard about this when I was in HS Forensics, and would spend final rounds watching Humorous Interpretation finals, and then I found a full copy of the BBC Radio adaptation of the show. There’s a DVD of the live show and I really recommend it, because they go crazy with the material, such as playing the Histories as an American Football game.
As for reimaginings, my sister heavily recommends RomeoxJuliet. It’s a futuristic/fantasy retelling of Romeo and Juliet, except that it takes place on a floating city, Ne0-Verona, and Juliet is a Scarlet Pimpernel-esque hero. Most of the supporting characters are also taken from various plays, and the English dub not only lift lines from other plays, but the script was actually written with 16th century dialogue and in iambic pentameter (right up until the staff ran out of money and they had to scrimp somewhere). I haven’t watched the entire series, but my sister loves it and I do want to watch the whole thing at some point.
As usual, ladies, fantastic episode. Can’t wait for next month.
Thank you for your first step in repopulating our barren comments landscape!
I haven’t seen any anime adaptations of Shakespeare myself, but I have seen Gankotsuou, the anime adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo. If you and your sister are into that sort of thing, definitely check it out.
Tennant/Tate Much Ado sounds even wackier than I imagined, I definitely have to get around to it.
I just wanted to say that I completely agree about Lawrence Olivier, especially with his version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Or as I like to put it, “walk walk pose, walk walk walk pose, walk walk get on a horse and pose”. Maybe he was so overrated because people didn’t know that Branagh and Tennant and Hiddleston would be coming down the line and blowing him out of the water.
I would just like to proclaim my love for the Much Ado About Nothing-musical with Paul McGann and Claire Moore. Alas there’s no DVD but somebody put some of the songs on YT to scenes from the Brannagh-adaptation. I hearts that one a lot.
Also seconding the awesomeness of Reduced Shakespeare. Our university theatre-group put that one, once.
My first Shakespeare-on-stage experiences were A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, I didn’t enjoy the former very much (I think story and adaptation were equally to blame) and just remember that The Tempest was really weird and they flooded the stage at one point. Yeah.
At school we only read MacBeth and after finishing we watched two film-adaptions, one was riddiculously low-budget and you could see that the crowns were made out of aluminum foil and cardboard…the other one was a cartoon. It really looked like a typical kid’s cartoon…because which Shakespeare-play is more suitable for children? (I have now tried a few times to find it again and find out more about it but failed so far.)
Somehow Taming of the Shrew is the only ReTold version I haven’t seen, yet but it seems like I really need to change that.
One of my favorite modernized adaptations is The Bad Sleep well, where Akira Kurosawa loosely adapted Hamlet as a corporate noir vigilante thriller, which was itself partially an influence on the later Hamlet adaptation starring Ethan Hawke.