I always thought it would be cool to have more films set in the Forbidden Planet universe, each one using a different Shakespearean work as its template. I can't wait to see what Australis comes up with.
Cyberpunk! and the future of Sci-Fi
- Thread starter Yminale
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Agreed.
Your Macbeth Inc. didn't explain very well why Lady M. loses it. Also, how does the prophecy of the kings fit in?
Lastly, how do you make the audience feel that special rightness when the line of the true king is restored? I suppose you could protest that a modern version shouldn't be expected to include such details, but they weren't really details in the original.
Polanski did Macbeth as a straight up horror movie, which is probably the most honest revision possible. But that's not what the play is really about. The Canadian comedy series Slings & Arrows tackled Macbeth in its second season. They pretty explicitly addressed the play's lack of content. I submit that the play had content, a visceral monarchism of a kind and intensity that simply does not exist today.
As for Forbidden Planet. it is not a retelling of The Tempest. If it were, Morbius would have left with the ship, blessing Altaira's impending nuptials. Forbidden Planet is a revision. I strongly suspect most stories that take elements from Shakespeare are on careful inspection revisionist, especially ones taken from The Taming of the Shrew. Takeoffs on Othello I think are also extremely revisionist as well.
There are many bad Shakespeare plays that have nothing to say to modern audiences, but for sheer badness, it's hard to think whether anything could top Pericles Prince of Tyre. (Maybe equal, but not top.) Try modernizing that.
Hm, been a while since I did it, and this from memory, but let's go.
In these financially straitened times, just as mediaeval times, position is prestige is money is power, Lady M is very much... think of any of those stupid "Housewives of..." shows. Not that the people themselves are necessarily stupid, but their venality and vanity are on show in bright lighting. Lady M is of that ilk, and just a little bit mad.
(then: "out, out, damn spot" Now ; "why, why can't I delete these emails?" <ineffectually punches kbd>). The prophecy of the kings was the very first bit I came up with. The three women are following trends, tracking trading, and in effect how, say, board members will vote. All it willtake is a little manipulation to cause the current Chairman to fall...
And so on.
Well, RJ's challenge, in AWTEW, some productions these days make the ending a bitter one, which is an interesting idea to explore. But I digress. Think of it not so much that we'd feel joy that the rightful king is restored, but the joy that the bad king falls. Two words: Bernie Madoff. Yes, yes, he was a criminal, but he was flying very high, then fell so very far. There are a number of CEOs over the last 5 years who could be examples of this.
Forbidden Planet wasn't a direct copy of Tempest, but then few movies faithfully follow any text very closely, and to expect that (Hollywood being Hollywood) is dreaming. I also like Terry Pratchettt's take in the Discworld book Wyrd Sisters, told in effect from the Witches' POV
Mmm, Pericles. I don't know much about it. I'll do RJ's suggestion, and get back to it.
The prophecy of the kings I was referring to was the procession at the feast where Banquo's ghost occurred.
Macbeth was a Scottish play because James I & VI was Scottish and there were witches because James believed in witches and Macbeth was EVIL because he overthrew a king, spilling his "golden blood..." This procession would be the equivalent in a modern movie to a montage of "future" Presidents. Basically a huge flagwaving moment, with gorgeous royal costumes and fanfares.
The trend analysts predicting "Macbeth"'s advancement is much too clever to object to. The thing I see in Lady M is a woman who boasts she would kill her own baby to be queen but still loses it after the horror of the deed. In the context of the time, killing the King would be worse than killing your own child. To be precise, in the context of Tudor tyranny a conformist playwright would falsify characters to show this. So there it makes sense. I think now Lady M gets a free pass a relevant character because, well, it's SHAKESPEARE, he did character better than everybody, ever.
By the way, the real Macbeth ruled about seventeen years. Lots of people in the audience wouldn't have known. But some would have. We don't care today because it's SHAKESPEARE. But back then, they didn't know that. Wonder what the people in the audiences who knew some Scottish history thought of the play?
Macbeth was a Scottish play because James I & VI was Scottish and there were witches because James believed in witches and Macbeth was EVIL because he overthrew a king, spilling his "golden blood..." This procession would be the equivalent in a modern movie to a montage of "future" Presidents. Basically a huge flagwaving moment, with gorgeous royal costumes and fanfares.
The trend analysts predicting "Macbeth"'s advancement is much too clever to object to. The thing I see in Lady M is a woman who boasts she would kill her own baby to be queen but still loses it after the horror of the deed. In the context of the time, killing the King would be worse than killing your own child. To be precise, in the context of Tudor tyranny a conformist playwright would falsify characters to show this. So there it makes sense. I think now Lady M gets a free pass a relevant character because, well, it's SHAKESPEARE, he did character better than everybody, ever.
By the way, the real Macbeth ruled about seventeen years. Lots of people in the audience wouldn't have known. But some would have. We don't care today because it's SHAKESPEARE. But back then, they didn't know that. Wonder what the people in the audiences who knew some Scottish history thought of the play?
For the record, this past summer my wife and I saw the production of Much Ado about Nothing in London with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and it was genuinely one of the most enjoyable times I've ever had at the theatre. It was not a re-imagining, or a revision; it was a straight adaptation, with modern costumes. It was hilarious and entertaining, and absolutely modern in feeling (in other words, in terms of the characterization, the themes, the behaviours, it all could have been written today.)
All of this to say, there was no idolatry or other nonsense - myself, my wife, and it seems the whole audience, based on the amount of laughter, just loved it. Honestly loved it. All romantic comedies written either for theatre or film over the last century should aspire to be as gleefully entertaining as this production was. Some have succeeded. Most have not.
"If you want a really dissident opinion, it is that Shakespeare's tragedies are more like melodramas, but it's the comdies that truly show theatrical genius."
And Kenneth Branagh's movie version was the same. It also was made for $11 million and grossed only $22 million. This was not a hit even in 1993, no matter how good it was.
We'll likely never know if oh, say, Westward Ho! or maybe a Ben Jonson comedy or Mandragola or that Oliver Goldsmith play could be hilarious too. It's Shakespeare who gets revived, at some point pretty much all of him, even though some of it is hopelessly lost in its time and some was just plain bad. But people will go to great lengths to try to make Titus Andronicus even! It's this disparity which shows that Shakespeare is overrated.
And Kenneth Branagh's movie version was the same. It also was made for $11 million and grossed only $22 million. This was not a hit even in 1993, no matter how good it was.
We'll likely never know if oh, say, Westward Ho! or maybe a Ben Jonson comedy or Mandragola or that Oliver Goldsmith play could be hilarious too. It's Shakespeare who gets revived, at some point pretty much all of him, even though some of it is hopelessly lost in its time and some was just plain bad. But people will go to great lengths to try to make Titus Andronicus even! It's this disparity which shows that Shakespeare is overrated.
You are box office obsessed. Nor does it really prove anything.
I've seen them. On stage. Don't forget Sheridan's The Rivals. It's hilarious.
I know I sound all "elitist" to you, but seriously: you are only talking about the movies. Sheridan, Goldsmith, Johnson, Marlowe, Webster, STILL performed on the stage.
OR popular.
Edited to add: It's silly to use the popularity of a film to judge the success of a play. A much better metric would be the number of productions over a course of time.
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The attempt to revive, say, Titus, is totally normal. (The Anthony Hopkins movie is actually very good.) Of course it's not one of his greats, but it is a play written by someone we have seen who is capable of greatness. And works like that (non-genuis works written by geniuses) get far more attention than very good works written by no-names. This is not to disparage the very good works written by no-names. This is just to say that mediocre works written by geniuses ARE well worth time and attention.
You can find the same pattern with any great writer. Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop is almost literally unreadable (I never got past the first half), but because he wrote the genius Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Bleak House, all of his books get Penguin Classics editions, and lots of attention. This is not something necessarily to be mocked. Perhaps examining mediocre works by geniuses is well worth our time, because it is just as interesting and useful to look at why a piece of art didn't work as why it did, when geniuses are involved.
Any writer? Thackeray, rarely read, much less adapted, beyond Vanity Fair. Even Kubrick had problems trying to sell Thackery.
Also from the same period, Charlotte Bronte, also rarely read beyond Jane Eyre. Half of George Eliot. For a US example in novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who for the large majority didn't write anything after (or before) The Scarlet Letter. If you want to go modern, Joseph Heller, who did write more than Catch-22.
Dickens in some respects is like Shakespeare, his books will crowd out even the Vanity Fairs and Middlemarches and God forbid anyone should carry a selection of Smollett or Gissing or Meredith. People will openly argue that Dickens is overrated (particularly people who think he was too anticapitalist
,) so his situtation is not precisely analogous to Shakespeare.
There are Penguin Classics that show up periodically in the classics section of mass market bookstores, then there's the Penguin Classics backlist, that gets ordered or remaindered or dusty in university bookshops. High school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. Hell, middle school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. And maybe Dickens, or everything but Barnaby Rudge. And sorry, some of Shakespeare is as awful as Barnaby Rudge and still gets onto shelves. Sets of Shaw?
It is deemed so important to make all of Shakespeare accessible that there are multiple editions in one volume. Is there a one volume set of Thornton Wilder? Or just endless copies of Our Town (and occasionally The Skin of Our Teeth.)
The great works by "mediocre" writers ignored in favor of twenty copies of Julius Caesar isn't due to a natural tendency to include the full oeuvre of the great writers. The examples above refute that. The full oeuvre of Shakespeare is included because completeness is required for critical study. In other words, Shakespeare is regarded as more or less a requirement for culture, but very little else is, since Shakespeare is more or less the very summit.
To put it another way, Julie Taymor probably could have adapted The Duchess of Amalfi, and had a better movie, because frankly, I think you'd have to be crazy to actually prefer Titus Andronicus to The Duchess of Amalfi. But one's SHAKESPEARE and the other's just a play. This is the sense in which I say Shakespeare is overrated. Expelling Shakespeare from the canon of course would be equally crazy. In some things, Shakespeare did do some things that no one has excelled and some of his work is every bit as compelling and exciting and funny as when first performed.
But the space assigned to him in the canon of literature is too large. The insistence that he has no peers is absurd.
Also from the same period, Charlotte Bronte, also rarely read beyond Jane Eyre. Half of George Eliot. For a US example in novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who for the large majority didn't write anything after (or before) The Scarlet Letter. If you want to go modern, Joseph Heller, who did write more than Catch-22.
Dickens in some respects is like Shakespeare, his books will crowd out even the Vanity Fairs and Middlemarches and God forbid anyone should carry a selection of Smollett or Gissing or Meredith. People will openly argue that Dickens is overrated (particularly people who think he was too anticapitalist
,) so his situtation is not precisely analogous to Shakespeare. There are Penguin Classics that show up periodically in the classics section of mass market bookstores, then there's the Penguin Classics backlist, that gets ordered or remaindered or dusty in university bookshops. High school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. Hell, middle school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. And maybe Dickens, or everything but Barnaby Rudge. And sorry, some of Shakespeare is as awful as Barnaby Rudge and still gets onto shelves. Sets of Shaw?
It is deemed so important to make all of Shakespeare accessible that there are multiple editions in one volume. Is there a one volume set of Thornton Wilder? Or just endless copies of Our Town (and occasionally The Skin of Our Teeth.)
The great works by "mediocre" writers ignored in favor of twenty copies of Julius Caesar isn't due to a natural tendency to include the full oeuvre of the great writers. The examples above refute that. The full oeuvre of Shakespeare is included because completeness is required for critical study. In other words, Shakespeare is regarded as more or less a requirement for culture, but very little else is, since Shakespeare is more or less the very summit.
To put it another way, Julie Taymor probably could have adapted The Duchess of Amalfi, and had a better movie, because frankly, I think you'd have to be crazy to actually prefer Titus Andronicus to The Duchess of Amalfi. But one's SHAKESPEARE and the other's just a play. This is the sense in which I say Shakespeare is overrated. Expelling Shakespeare from the canon of course would be equally crazy. In some things, Shakespeare did do some things that no one has excelled and some of his work is every bit as compelling and exciting and funny as when first performed.
But the space assigned to him in the canon of literature is too large. The insistence that he has no peers is absurd.
Any writer? Thackeray, rarely read, much less adapted, beyond Vanity Fair. Even Kubrick had problems trying to sell Thackery.
Also from the same period, Charlotte Bronte, also rarely read beyond Jane Eyre. Half of George Eliot. For a US example in novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who for the large majority didn't write anything after (or before) The Scarlet Letter. If you want to go modern, Joseph Heller, who did write more than Catch-22.
Dickens in some respects is like Shakespeare, his books will crowd out even the Vanity Fairs and Middlemarches and God forbid anyone should carry a selection of Smollett or Gissing or Meredith. People will openly argue that Dickens is overrated (particularly people who think he was too anticapitalist
There are Penguin Classics that show up periodically in the classics section of mass market bookstores, then there's the Penguin Classics backlist, that gets ordered or remaindered or dusty in university bookshops. High school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. Hell, middle school libraries will carry complete sets of Shakespeare. And maybe Dickens, or everything but Barnaby Rudge. And sorry, some of Shakespeare is as awful as Barnaby Rudge and still gets onto shelves. Sets of Shaw?
It is deemed so important to make all of Shakespeare accessible that there are multiple editions in one volume. Is there a one volume set of Thornton Wilder? Or just endless copies of Our Town (and occasionally The Skin of Our Teeth.)
The great works by "mediocre" writers ignored in favor of twenty copies of Julius Caesar isn't due to a natural tendency to include the full oeuvre of the great writers. The examples above refute that. The full oeuvre of Shakespeare is included because completeness is required for critical study. In other words, Shakespeare is regarded as more or less a requirement for culture, but very little else is, since Shakespeare is more or less the very summit.
To put it another way, Julie Taymor probably could have adapted The Duchess of Amalfi, and had a better movie, because frankly, I think you'd have to be crazy to actually prefer Titus Andronicus to The Duchess of Amalfi. But one's SHAKESPEARE and the other's just a play. This is the sense in which I say Shakespeare is overrated. Expelling Shakespeare from the canon of course would be equally crazy. In some things, Shakespeare did do some things that no one has excelled and some of his work is every bit as compelling and exciting and funny as when first performed.
But the space assigned to him in the canon of literature is too large. The insistence that he has no peers is absurd.
Now you sound more reasonable.
Everything you say here, I agree with, more or less. Except for the inevitable straw man: I don't believe anyone, not even Harold Bloom, believes Shakespeare "has no peer." I teach English lit., and so I spend a great deal of time with people who have chosen literature as their love and profession, and I can't think of one of them, off-hand, who thinks "Shakespeare has no peer." Most of the intelligent people among us love him, of course, but I'd just as gladly teach Octavia Butler's Kindred as a Shakespeare play (I mention that on, en passant, just because I taught Merchant and Kindred in the same class last semester.)Harold "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" Bloom?
The man whose teaching credentials are so massive that he has a bookshelf of critical works sold as a kind of essential literary encyclopedia? If you're out of university classes, Harold Bloom is the number one literary critic to find.
Oh, well, since the existence of Bardolatars is decreed to be a straw man, plainly there will be no changes in the literary canon's massive emphasis on Shakespeare, ever, for none is needed, or even desirable. How does it go again? 9th grade, Romeo & Juliet; 10th grade, Macbeth; 11th grade, Julius Caesar; 12th grade, Hamlet. Sonnets are optional, but a model of the Globe theater is not. Venus and Adonis is sort of like the Trinity, you acknowledge it's there but you never talk about it.
Ain't it grand?
The man whose teaching credentials are so massive that he has a bookshelf of critical works sold as a kind of essential literary encyclopedia? If you're out of university classes, Harold Bloom is the number one literary critic to find.
Oh, well, since the existence of Bardolatars is decreed to be a straw man, plainly there will be no changes in the literary canon's massive emphasis on Shakespeare, ever, for none is needed, or even desirable. How does it go again? 9th grade, Romeo & Juliet; 10th grade, Macbeth; 11th grade, Julius Caesar; 12th grade, Hamlet. Sonnets are optional, but a model of the Globe theater is not. Venus and Adonis is sort of like the Trinity, you acknowledge it's there but you never talk about it.
Ain't it grand?
More to the point, this is rather irrelevant. Much Ado About Nothing had a limited release that peaked at about 200 screens. Compare this to another 1993 release, Jurassic Park, that had a wide release -- a peak of 2,566 screens. There is, obviously, no comparison between the two. In terms of a limited release, the film was a success. (Luckily for Branagh, in terms of the budget, the film was a success, too; his production of Hamlet would have a similar release pattern, but be too expensive to recoup its production budget a few years later).
I think one thing you have to remember about Shakespeare is that he's important linguistically in addition to being important in literary terms.
Leave aside the whole "invention of the modern personality" bit for a moment. He also essentially invented modern English. The sheer number of "first instance expressions" attributed to Shakespeare is mind-boggling.
Did he coin all these turns of phrase? Probably not. But he's the first instance we have of their written use. So the English language itself is different before-and-after Shakespeare.
I also think that Shakespeare benefits from network effects - and the benefits of those effects are real, whether Shakespeare originally deserved the central role he was given or not. Because his complete works have been so ubiquitous for so long, they now constitute a semiotic language among readers of English in a way that Thackeray does not and never could. A reasonably well educated reader of English will know what you mean if you say that someone "is an Iago". Let alone "a Romeo". The Star Trek writers can litter their scripts with lines from Shakespeare, and people will know what the references mean. That just plain old makes Shakespeare more important than Thackeray, whether he's of greater merit or not.
It's like the Bible, or Homer. It doesn't matter what their actual literary merit are. They're too embedded in the architecture of all the art (literary and otherwise) occuring around them in the culture to ignore them.
Leave aside the whole "invention of the modern personality" bit for a moment. He also essentially invented modern English. The sheer number of "first instance expressions" attributed to Shakespeare is mind-boggling.
Did he coin all these turns of phrase? Probably not. But he's the first instance we have of their written use. So the English language itself is different before-and-after Shakespeare.
I also think that Shakespeare benefits from network effects - and the benefits of those effects are real, whether Shakespeare originally deserved the central role he was given or not. Because his complete works have been so ubiquitous for so long, they now constitute a semiotic language among readers of English in a way that Thackeray does not and never could. A reasonably well educated reader of English will know what you mean if you say that someone "is an Iago". Let alone "a Romeo". The Star Trek writers can litter their scripts with lines from Shakespeare, and people will know what the references mean. That just plain old makes Shakespeare more important than Thackeray, whether he's of greater merit or not.
It's like the Bible, or Homer. It doesn't matter what their actual literary merit are. They're too embedded in the architecture of all the art (literary and otherwise) occuring around them in the culture to ignore them.
In this thread, where people are more or less paying attention, the Shakespeare lovers will be more reasonable. I myself am too lazy but if you really want to see how reasonable Bardolators can be, try to find that old thread about the movie Anonymous.
As to the linguistic importance of Shakespeare, it's really hard to think that Shakespeare is taught for that reason. In any event, the observation that Shakespeare was a key component in creating the King's English hardly does away with the idea that Shakespeare's preminence is in some sense political. Creation of a standard national language is intensely political. French vs. Provencal, Castilian vs Catalan, the two varities of Norwegian, etc. So, Shakespeare vs. Spenser.
As to the linguistic importance of Shakespeare, it's really hard to think that Shakespeare is taught for that reason. In any event, the observation that Shakespeare was a key component in creating the King's English hardly does away with the idea that Shakespeare's preminence is in some sense political. Creation of a standard national language is intensely political. French vs. Provencal, Castilian vs Catalan, the two varities of Norwegian, etc. So, Shakespeare vs. Spenser.
"I Can Hath Cheezburger?" 
He also lette the Wookiee winne.