Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins On Your
Favorite Songs by Erik Didriksen
- This delightful book presents
modern pop songs in sonnet form, as if Shakespeare had written them. I received
it as a gift for Christmas, and a while waiting for a concert to start, I read
a few aloud to see if my girlfriend and brother could guess which songs were
being adapted. It became a fun game. One of our favorites was the George
Thorogood And The Destroyers’ “Bad To The Bone.” Here is a bit of it, in sonnet
form: “The morning I was born, the midwives smil’d,/rejoicing o’er the cherub
they help’d birth./The eldest cast a sharpen’d eye; the child/she new delinquent
was, not cause for mirth” (p. 88). And here is a bit of The Clash’s “Should I
Stay Or Should I Go”: “My dearest, settle thy uncertain mind/and tell me the
conclusion thou hast reach’d!/Will I from here abscond, or shalt thou find/me
fit to loiter ‘round here unimpeach’d?” (p. 49). Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins On Your Favorite Songs was
published in 2015 through Quirk Books.
Shakespeare’s King Lear: The Relationship
Between Text And Film by Yvonne Griggs
- This is a volume in the Screen Adaptations series. Author Yvonne
Griggs talks about some of the film versions and screen adaptations of King Lear, including some that seem a
bit of a stretch, such as The Godfather.
In doing so, Griggs of course offers some thoughts on the play itself. When
discussing Peter Brook’s 1971 film of King
Lear, Griggs writes: “It seems that until licensed by Lear to speak she has
been a far more compliant woman. However, from this point onwards Goneril’s
control of language increases in direct proportion to Lear’s diminished powers
of rhetoric. Lear, resorting to ‘curses’ as his only means of expressing his
fury, further emasculates himself in the wake of female challenges to his
power. During the course of the opening scenes Lear’s language alters
dramatically; the quiet commands of the patriarch, assured of his position and
power, are displaced by the outraged curses of a man who has wilfully brought
into question his own identity and sense of place within both familial and
patriarchal systems” (p. 57). Regarding that same film, Griggs writes: “Lear
goes against cultural expectation when he condones female speech and in so
doing he wilfully engineers his own downfall. At some unconscious level he
desires death and annihilation, and it is this self-inflicted abdication not
only of control but of language itself that propels him to the ‘nothingness’
that consumes him in the blank screen at the close of the film” (p. 61). In the
section on King Lear and the gangster
movie, Griggs writes: “The urban underworlds of the gangster movie inevitably
stand in ideological opposition to the values of the legitimate world and in
this sense explore the same kind of juxtaposition of conflicting values
realised in both the western and King
Lear, the latter exploring the clash between an old feudal order epitomised
by Lear, Kent and Gloucester, and the emerging new order characterised by
self-interest and synonymous with Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund” (p.
118). Shakespeare’s King Lear: The
Relationship Between Text And Film was published in 2009 by Methuen Drama.
Granville Barker’s Prefaces To Shakespeare:
Love’s Labour’s Lost by Granville Barker; Foreword by Richard Eyre - This
is obviously a volume in the Prefaces
series. Regarding costumes for Love’s
Labour’s Lost, Harley Granville Barker has this to say: “But these
scrupulous young men would be purists in tailoring too. And a comedy of
affectations, of nice phrases, asks that its characters should be expressive to
their boot-toes, significant in the very curl of a feather” (p. 45). Regarding
male actors playing female roles, and how that affected Shakespeare’s craft,
Granville Barker writes: “It may influence his choice of subject; he does not
trouble with domestic drama. Without doubt it determines what he will and will
not ask woman characters and boy actors to do. Their love scenes are never
embarrassing. They do not nurse babies. They seldom weep. He puts them, in
fact, whenever he can, upon terms of equality with men; and women have been
critically quick ever since to appreciate the compliment, not well aware,
perhaps, how it comes to paid them” (p. 55). About Costard, Granville Barker
writes: “Costard’s is a nimble wit; we must feel that for diversion he makes
himself out to be more of a fool than he is. And the actor himself must be skilful
of speech and light of touch, as good jesters and stage clowns were” (p. 71).
This book was originally published in 1924. This paperback edition was first
published in 1993. My copy is from 1995.
Makbeth adapted by Richard Schechner - This
play is an adaptation of Macbeth, originating from workshops with The Performance Group. Richard Schechner,
who wrote and directed the play, provides notes on the project at the beginning
of the book. There is also a short piece titled The Makbeth Maze, written by Brooks McNamara. The witches in this
adaptation are referred to as Dark Powers. Several characters are cut from
Shakespeare’s work, and many lines are reassigned, creating different
relationships. For example, Makbeth asks Duncan, not Banquo, “Ride you this
afternoon?” And so Duncan speaks the lines that begin “As far as will fill up the
time between now and supper” (p. 6). And interestingly Banquo speaks the line, “There’s
blood on thy face.” And Makbeth responds, “‘Tis Banquo’s then” (p. 14). So
Makbeth’s line is delivered as a threat. In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth says to
one of the murderers, “There’s blood upon thy face,” and the Murderer responds,
“‘Tis Banquo’s then.” It’s an unusual and interesting adaptation. The play opened
in November of 1969. The book was published in 1978.
Hamlet Globe To Globe by Dominic
Dromgoole - This book recounts the tale of the theatre
company that took Hamlet to basically every country on Earth in a two-year
period. It not only relates interesting anecdotes, but contains plenty of
information about the play itself, and it what it means to us today. About
iambic pentameter, Dominic Dromgooles makes this observation: “There was a
warm, happy energy in the room, and I noticed for the first time what lurks
within the iambic rhythm – a hidden hope. As each gentle upturned stress
occurred and passed from person to person, it pulsed a discreet energy into the
speaker and listener, and beyond into the room. It gave a lift” (p. 47).
Regarding actors touring Europe in the late sixteenth century, Dromgoole
writes: “Amongst that list of actors are some distinguished names, including
Ben Jonson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas
Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore,
which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much about the
tide-splashed rocks without and the cold stone gloom within. Many question how
Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about, while forgetting the
most powerful transmitter of information in history – conversation” (p. 55).
About the narrowing focus of Hamlet
(as well as other Shakespeare plays), Dromgoole writes: “When Ophelia rushes
from character to character handing out rue and rosemary and columbine, it is
not only the flowers she is dispersing, but also the burden of her excess of
sensibility. No one is immune. Claudius disintegrates from a wise,
sophisticated politician to a clumsy murderer. Laertes casts aside all
niceties, social and religious, even before he jumps into his sister’s grave.
Families, political groupings, conspirators… All, if set on the wrong path,
twist and contort each other into instability” (p. 91). Regarding Shakespeare’s
“antic disposition,” Dromgoole writes: “Hamlet knows he is in psychological
trouble, and knows he needs a disguise to conceal his pain. The solution is to
create a mask that is both true and not true, to create a role that fits the
self” (p. 92). About Polonius, Dromgoole writes: “The world of Hamlet gets darker after Polonius’s
death. For Ophelia and for Laertes catastrophically, and their grief is a
measure of the emotional value of their father. In the world of the play,
without Polonius’s fussy, theatrical scheming, the door is opened for the
harder-nosed brutality of Claudius. Much of the wit and the comforting human
smallness is bled out of Elsinore with Polonius’s passing” (p. 120). Regarding
the time when the play was written, Dromgoole notes: “Hamlet the play was born at the moment when chivalry was flailing
its last histrionic limbs (the Ghost is in many ways the emblem and the echo of
that chivalry) before giving way to a new world of trade and globalisation” (p.
268). About the moment when Hamlet hold’s Yorick’s skull, Dromgooe writes: “In
that moment he stares death, actual and bony and hollow-eyed, straight in its
fleshless face, and he feels not fear, but peace and understanding. It is a
peace that is accessed through history” (p. 320). Hamlet Globe To
Globe was published in April, 2017. The copy I read is an uncorrected
proof, so it possible there are slight changes.
Twisted Tales From Shakespeare by
Richard Armour; illustrated by Campbell Grant - This
humorous volume recounts the plots of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including
Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Romeo And Juliet, The Merchant Of Venice and Othello. There is also a brief biography
of William Shakespeare at the beginning. In the chapter on Macbeth, Armour writes: “The witches hear some dear friends
calling, and depart. ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ they comment
philosophically as they leave. This must have been pretty upsetting to any
moralists, semanticists, or baseball umpires who chanced to overhear them” (p.
47). Armour plays with language, which I love, even cleverly using phrases
coined by Shakespeare. For example, in that chapter on Macbeth, he writes, “But the witches, perhaps not liking the way he
refers to their elocution, vanish into thin air, making it slightly thicker”
(p. 49). The term thin air was coined
by Shakespeare in The Tempest. He
also writes: “Anyhow, he is too upset to put the bloody daggers by the guards,
and Lady Macbeth takes over from her lily-livered husband” (p. 52). The term lily-livered was also coined by
Shakespeare, in Macbeth, though it is
actually Macbeth that uses the term to describe a servant. The book also
contains several humorous footnotes, such as this one, regarding the two
murderers in Macbeth: “Later joined
by a third, thought by some scholars to be Macbeth in disguise, but more likely
an apprentice murderer, getting experience” (p. 55). (Though, actually, my copy
contains a typo: “Macbath.”) In the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Armour writes, regarding Lysander: “Then
an idea comes to him. He has an aunt who lives in a town some distance away,
where the marriage laws are more lax than in Athens. The town isn’t named, but
it’s probably somewhere in Nevada” (p. 71). And in the chapter on The Merchant Of Venice, Armour writes: “On
the scroll is written ‘All that glisters is not gold.’ The Prince is chagrined.
All these years he has been saying ‘glistens’” (p. 115). In that same chapter,
he writes, “‘One half of me is yours, the other half yours,’ she tells him
cryptically, hoping he can add” (p. 116). By the way, in the chapter on Romeo And Juliet, Armour uses the Q1
reading, writing “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (p. 95). At
the end, there is a short section on the sonnets, and also a bit poking fun at
those people who think someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the works
attributed to him. Twisted Tales From
Shakespeare was published in 1957.
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