Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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 appreciateasakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.
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.
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Same. I watched a lot of those BBC productions while I was studying Shakespeare in college (because the audiovisual department had them on tape), but my Shakespeare courses covered fewer of the comedies than the other works. I remember especially loving the BBC Twelfth Night.
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Interesting! I had assumed the opposite cause in my case—studying almost no Shakespeare in school and then never filling the gaps in on my own—but maybe the comedies just don't get as much air time. I did attempt a local production of As You Like It in 2011, but it was open-air and there were too many smokers.
I've actually seen very few of the BBC Shakespeares. I watched the 1978 Richard II and 1980 Hamlet in high school because they contained Derek Jacobi, the 1980 The Taming of the Shrew because Theodora Goss wrote amazingly about it in 2009, and then just now the As You Like It on
I remember especially loving the BBC Twelfth Night.
I'll have to watch that one. I've seen gifs of it!
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Those are both extremely excellent!
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I sent you "Scales Will Fall" right before it reached its interlude. I wasn't quite sure what the cinematic storytelling was doing at that point and afterward, but I really liked the first third of it, and the faces, costumes, and landscape were absorbing all the way through. On balance, I think yes! I liked it. (Plus apparently it was filmed in Berwick upon Tweed, where my cousin and your film interest Alex Knox lived.)
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They improved my afternoon!
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Thank you!
On balance, I think yes! I liked it.
I liked it a lot and I am glad you sent it to me!
(Plus apparently it was filmed in Berwick upon Tweed, where my cousin and your film interest Alex Knox lived.)
Hah! That's wonderful. I would not have been able to recognize it from its countryside. (Although knowing that location, now I know its stone circle.)
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I have heard of this production and not seen it; thanks for the link. (I have seen the Flying Karamazov Brothers. For years I had one of the balls from the show.)
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With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
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We shall have a deadly storm.
Tragically, I saw no mermaid, with comb and glass or otherwise.
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The BBC Shakespeare version of this is supposed to be the best (in artistical terms) BBC Shakespeare. The director loves doing tableaux vivant in the style of Jacobean Dutch paintings.
I think by now you can imagine exactly how this went down with me.
(So far the only one I liked less was Timon of Athens (so that was a sentence of yours there, that was, lol), although that went more in the category of: maaybe when it comes to the obscurer and often co-written parts of the canon I should check what it is before I watch it and not just go, ooh, unspoilered Shakespeare! I feel it would definitely have gone better in that case, lol. Also it was one of the later ones where the BBC eschewed scenery. When the BBC Shakespeare are being Artistic in the 'better' later series they tend to a) have no scenery and a lot of canvas on the floor in a giant echoing studio or b) go in for tableaux vivant Dutch paintings).
*hugs as to the rest* May sleep become a boring, regular occurrence! And many more moons to you. <3
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I have a pointer to it!
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I'll take recommendations!
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asjdf;ldjsk ETA: i just realized this whole conversation was kicked off by describing an As You Like It. I can read normally, I'm just extremely jetlagged
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Condolences!
(So far the only one I liked less was Timon of Athens (so that was a sentence of yours there, that was, lol)
I loved the Actors' Shakespeare Project's 2010 Timon of Athens, but it was an irreproducible experience, having undergone some significant textual revision in order to turn it into a real play.
May sleep become a boring, regular occurrence! And many more moons to you.
*hugs*
Thank you! Sleep has not yet become boring, but I think it would be fun!
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I mean, the BBC Shakespeare has Jonathan Pryce and it probably is about as good as you can get with a faithful representation of what it is, and if I had at least read something about it first, I'd have had a much better experience. But up until then, I'd have fun going in blind on the rest, so I just blithely went in knowing nothing. Not a plan!!
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I'd read it beforehand and along with everyone else in my party liked the revision better! We were very impressed with it! The most important alteration was actually a genderswap, which does not have to make that much of a difference in Shakespeare, but here was close to play-saving. Also an incredible bit of business with a parsnip.
But up until then, I'd have fun going in blind on the rest, so I just blithely went in knowing nothing. Not a plan!!
All right, that couldn't have helped.
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I haven't slept, it's fine!
I would have done a hell of a lot more with the gender of it all than the BBC did in 1978, but I very much enjoyed its Rosalind (Helen Mirren), Celia (Angharad Rees), Oliver (Clive Francis), and Jaques (Richard Pasco) on the levels of both characters and performances. I feel for the director who wanted to shoot the production over three-quarters of a year from winter into summer for the psychotropic scenery of the thing and could only get the filming dates for May, which at least on the forested grounds of Glamis Castle looked intermittently cold. I had not actually read the play in ages and remembered the general lineaments without a lot of the timing and possibly due to sleep deprivation as well as extra-diegetic factors was inappropriately entertained by the land speed record of Oliver and Celia's courtship, to the point of Orlando actually checking in that it makes any damn sense which is not a level of reality most characters in Shakespeare are tuned in to. A lot of the comic pastoral counterpoint in this version did not particularly work for me and if you are going to have literal Hymen manifest as the deus ex silva, the numinous quotient needs to be a lot higher than a pretty dude in a chlamys. I have not seen another version unless you count the fifteen minutes or so of Theatre@First in 2011. Do you have recommendations and/or opinions?
[edit] Extra-diegetic factors: earlier this month I finished the first series of the 1975 Poldark which features Angharad Rees and Clive Francis and in the intervening weeks watched both the one available episode of the 1968 BBC Middlemarch and the complete serial of the 1971 BBC Sense and Sensibility which taken all together made it clear that Francis' brand in this era of television was what I described to
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It correctly foretold rain, but so far our house doesn't seem to have wrecked!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've never seen anything that did what I wanted with the gender of it all but I also have not yet exhausted the possibility of my little hoard of Rosalinds gathered as a bonus after receiving this Festivid a few years back; I've only watched the Melbourne as of yet, which was also not as much Gender as I wanted but had an incredibly funny Arden-as-rock-band-Lothlorien energy, but I have high hopes for several of them and I would be glad to share the bounty for any that strike interest. (Unfortunately the RSC 2013, from whence comes the incredible shot of Rosalind and Orlando sharing a cigarette, does not appear to be recorded in full ANYWHERE.)
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I KNEW THEY WERE BOTH IN IT BUT HAD NOT PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD IT WAS AS THE FUNNIEST POSSIBLE PAIRING
(
my little hoard of Rosalinds gathered as a bonus after receiving this Festivid a few years back
That vid is amazing.
(Unfortunately the RSC 2013, from whence comes the incredible shot of Rosalind and Orlando sharing a cigarette, does not appear to be recorded in full ANYWHERE.)
What the hell! It must exist. I've seen recordings of theirs from years earlier. I wonder if it's a situation like the National Theatre's The Habit of Art or Collaborators where I actually wrote in 2010 and 2011 to ask if it would be possible to purchase DVDs of the relevant broadcasts and was told not, among other reasons because of prohibitive rights agreements. (At the time I was given encouragement that it might become possible in future given more interest than just mine, but instead they came up with National Theatre at Home. I don't know if that means they worked out the rights issues or if they differ sufficiently between discs and streaming that the question became irrelevant. I still want a DVD.) Please do share any other productions you manage to get hold of. As noted below to
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interjecting just to say: correction:
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That's a relief!
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The Comedy of Errors might be my most-viewed Shakespeare comedy, if counting that one production I ended up seeing four times last year by individual viewings and also a middle school production from back in the day...? I'll have to check out the Flying Karamazov Brothers version floating around in the comments.
(Also, speaking of Twelfth Night, this year's NYC Shakespeare in the Park production is available online via PBS through the end of the year and VERY fun.)
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Even counting just by productions, it's still two more than me.
(Also, speaking of Twelfth Night, this year's NYC Shakespeare in the Park production is available online via PBS through the end of the year and VERY fun.)
(We already have it on the docket to watch! Pretty much on cast alone. I don't disdain another recommendation, though.)
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A genderswap would definitely make a big difference to it! And I feel that Jonathan Pryce would have loved to have a parnsip to play with, lol. He was hard done by, evidently.
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https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvX-sECzP6pc3DXhmA2dlXOpj74aN-sc
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Thank you! That does not look totally off-topic to me.
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