Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken

[sovay]

Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.

I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.

Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.

I really appreciate asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

At some point here I need to start going through film versions of Love's Labours Lost, because I've table-read it twice now on Discord and it has turned out to be one of my favorite Shakespeares. Possibly one of my favorite plays, period. And I absolutely do not trust Kenneth Branagh with it; he wouldn't know a delicate touch if it lightly brushed by him. He's very good at many things and airiness is not one of them.

I don't know how much you know the play, and I don't know how well it comes across read to oneself. Table-read, it became immediately obvious that it would be an absolute nightmare to stage, require a virtuoso to stage well, and be entirely worth it if somebody did. I haven't seen it go by theatres since I've started looking, though I'm sure it will eventually, and I hope it's well done when it does.

Richard II is the other Shakespeare with which table-reading made me fall in love, and I hope and trust someone has already written the thesis on what it says about the divine right of kings which I babbled at everyone about after we read it. But I haven't the strength to go through JSTOR. Sigh.

Anyway, if you ever run into a good Love's Labours Lost, please do let me know ASAP.

[sovay]

And I absolutely do not trust Kenneth Branagh with it; he wouldn't know a delicate touch if it lightly brushed by him. He's very good at many things and airiness is not one of them.

I saw his version when it came out and my recollection is that it was a sort of ephemerally charming 1930's jukebox musical with a Shakespearean frame that I would almost certainly have enjoyed more had it actually been made in 1938. Regret inform it is the only version I have ever seen. I keep meaning to listen to this version because the cast is stupid good, but have not yet done so and in any case it does not solve your problem of wanting to see it well staged. The ASP seems to have done it exactly once early in their existence. In the meantime they just finished their third Macbeth.

(Dang: in 2023 they did an enthusiastically queer As You Like It with a non-binary actor playing Rosalind. At Tufts. I feel like I didn't even know that was happening. I think I was already ill.)

Richard II is the other Shakespeare with which table-reading made me fall in love, and I hope and trust someone has already written the thesis on what it says about the divine right of kings which I babbled at everyone about after we read it. But I haven't the strength to go through JSTOR. Sigh.

The good news is that I have seen its angle on the divine right of kings touched on even in reviews, meaning the body of scholarship that established it must exist. I remember liking the 1978 Jacobi version, although oddly what I remember most is the fragile music of his voice, very little of anything the production did visually. It is also the only version I have seen beyond the scenes included in the ASP's The Coveted Crown in 2010.

Anyway, if you ever run into a good Love's Labours Lost, please do let me know ASAP.

Love, I will.

[rushthatspeaks]

Sounds to me as though Branagh missed the entire point. You could set it in the late thirties, but you'd have to be a genius, and he's just not, in that direction.

I've never seen anything else structured like Love's Labours Lost.

Love's Labours Lost has to be lighter than air, funnier than seems reasonable. It's a confection of a thing, where every character is spinning words like Benedick in Much Ado, everyone is Autolycus in the Winter's Tale. Act after act of that. You should be laughing too hard to think about why you're laughing so hard. More than half of it is literally in rhymed verse and it all scans perfectly. Puns in four languages. And then suddenly it's going too fast, because in the whirl they've all missed that they've gone too far, and they've actually hurt someone, who tries tentatively to express that hurt, and then before anyone can even begin to get that through their heads there is a death, and the whole thing goes down like a shipwreck. The lighter it is the harder it stabs, soap-bubble turned lead cannonball.

And there will be no redress, the flirting will never acquire actual heart, the too-far joke will never receive an apology, because suddenly all of them have to be real people, and cannot admit that reality composed any part of the departed bubble. The more beautiful the bubble, the more artful, the worse the collapse. The final word of the title is Lost, and the final line is separation: "You that way, I this." Because the sequel does not exist, though any number of people have tried their hands at Love's Labours Regained. But I think it is a better play without it.

IRL, though you don't have to know this for the play to work, it was the last time Shakespeare could ever have so many women on stage at the same time, because it was the last time he would have so many boys. There is one solemn note that can, if handled carefully, run subliminally through that bubble, the wand on which the whole thing balances (it must not seem emphasized): the metaphors of plague. It comes up over and over-- people talk about boarding someone in their house for a bad pun, say that someone should have Lord Have Mercy written on his forehead when he writes a bad poem. In the final collapse, one of the lovers is told by his girl that he has to spend the next year in a plague hospital, demonstrating his wit to the patients, and that if he can still laugh then (unspoken: if he is still alive), she will consider him. Off the stage, after the run, the plague killed too many, and Shakespeare never again, literally, had the company to continue.

If you don't come out of Love's Labours Lost crying, or wanting to, they did it wrong. It is not, in the classical sense, a comedy; it ends in fatality, not in marriage. It is and should be treated as one of the problem plays.

Of course Branagh wouldn't get that. And that time setting-- if you make the rise of fascism at all the obvious bubble-popper, it'll come off like the History Channel.

Now that I think about it, there is one thing I've seen structured the same way, and it was even set in that time period, and I'm not sure if I'd call it genius, but damn if it didn't actually work. Love's Labours Lost is exactly the same as The Grand Budapest Hotel, but without the later time period interwoven, as if it were just the entire film as one chronological line from the arrival at the hotel onwards, until the shooting, when it stops. Branagh did not make The Grand Budapest Hotel.