I drove up to UCLA a few nights ago to see the Reprise Theater Company's production of Kiss Me, Kate, which is one of my favorite musicals. As you no doubt know, it’s a backstage retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with songs by Cole Porter. I was humming “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” for a week before I saw the show, and a week later, I’m still humming it. I don’t have permission to print the lyrics here (and I’m not about to commit plagiarism), so I invite you to spend five minutes watching it on YouTube Turn your sound up loud. The song is sung by the two gangsters who … well, if I give you the whole plot, it’ll fill up this blog. They sing it in front of the curtain while the scene is changed behind the curtain. The song is hilarious. The stanzas are puns on the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. “Her clothes you are mussing” is rhymed, for example, with “Much Ado About Nussing.”
Having been a Shakespeare scholar (well, I earned my Ph.D. with a major in English Renaissance literature with an emphasis on the drama—which means Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and that bunch), I really like Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve got a whole long shelf of them on DVD. I suppose, having been a scholar, I’m supposed to approve of the versions that stick to the canonical texts, like the series done by the BBC in the early 1980s and which is available on Netflix. And I guess I’m supposed to disapprove of the versions set in strange places or with modern costumes. I’m not a purist. I like many of the modern adaptations, even the 1998, Oscar-winning movie Shakespeare in Love (more about Romeo and Juliet in a minute) and the BBC’s 2007 Shakespeare Retold, which is versions of four plays so completely rewritten they use almost none of Shakespeare’s verse. But the plots are recognizable. Their Taming of the Shrew starring Shirley Henderson (as a shrewish British politician) and Rufus Sewell (as a cross-dressing, impoverished member of the gentry) is hilarious.
My favorite play of all time is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I first read in high school and first paid attention to (there’s a significant difference there) as a sophomore in college. It’s also one of the first plays I took my son to see. He was five years old, and the play was done outdoors in front of one of the buildings on the campus of Southern Illinois University. I can still remember Puck sitting up in a tree. My favorite version is the 1999 movie set in Italy and starring Kevin Kline (Bottom), Michelle Pfeiffer (Titania), and Stanley Tucci (Puck). But here I have to admit that I’m not fond of every single variant on a Shakespeare play. The 1968 movie directed by Peter Hall (and with a wonderful cast, including Helen Mirren and Judi Dench) is boring. Too canonical. And there’s an operatic version with music by Benjamin Britten. The set looks like a giant green bed. All the action takes place in this “forest.” It’s very strange. The most fantastic production is the 1935 movie by the famous German director Max Reinhardt, who deconstructed and then reconstructed the Hollywood Bowl. This is the version with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. This was when Rooney was 13 years old. Several years before his Andy Hardy movies. His Puck howls but does not tap-dance. This DVD is best with the commentary track turned on.
I also have a some interesting versions of Romeo and Juliet. One is the 1996 movie directed by Baz Luhrman and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes. It’s set in Verona Beach and the Montagues and Capulets are gangsters with guns. A lot of Shakespeare’s text is cut, but there’s enough to make it a good movie. More interesting—notice how often I use this word? It’s because I’m trying to be tactful—is the 1936 movie directed by George Cukor. Now we need to keep in mind that Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. DiCaprio and Danes were five or six years older than the characters they played. In the 1936 movie, Juliet (age 12 or 13) is acted by Norma Shearer, age 34. Romeo is acted by Leslie Howard (whom we all remember as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind), age 43. My favorite is John Barrymore as Mercutio. Barrymore, a wonderful actor, was 54 years old. And he got Mercutio perfectly! Well, his acting style is old fashioned, but he sure read the iambic pentameter right.
And, finally, there’s Hamlet. It’s said to be the best or most famous play in the English language. Me, if we’re talking tragedy, I prefer King Lear and I own the Joseph Papp production starring James Earl Jones. And I recently read Christopher Moore’s novel Fool, in which Lear is a nasty old man and the Fool ends up marrying Cordelia. (There’s a precedent for this: in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the play with a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar. It was popular with Victorian audiences.)
Back to Hamlet. I like Branagh’s 1996 movie, which is Most Compleat and goes on forever. Better, though, is the 2008 RSC production starring David Tennant (best known as Dr. Who) and Patrick Stewart. More fun is the French opera by Ambroise Thomas, written in 1868, at a time when the post-Revolution, post-Napoleon French throne was occupied by Louis-Napoleon, possibly the densest ruler who ever lived. What’s interesting (here I go again) is that the play wasn’t just translated into French. The French people adored Ophelia. Think of Princess Diana—that’s the level of adoration the 19th-century Parisians had for Ophelia, whom they see as a femme fragile who goes mad when her lover rejects her. This was a big motif in French drama. The opera opens with the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude (not seen in Shakespeare’s play). At the end of the second act, Hamlet gets drunk, staggers around on the banquet table, and pours wine over himself. Also not seen in Shakespeare. Ophelia gets her mad scene in Act IV. She strews flowers all over the stage as she sings her big aria. She stabs herself. Repeatedly. She dies. The audience is on its feet, shouting “Brava!” And she gets up and sings some more. Finally, Hamlet survives the duel and is proclaimed king. It’s quite something to watch. So is Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which approaches Shakespeare’s play from the point of view of these two minor characters and reminds me of Waiting for Godot.
It must be obvious by now that I can go on and on about Shakespeare. I could write about the wonderful version of Merchant of Venice that is set in the 1930s, a very dangerous time for Jews. The version of Love’s Labour’s Lost set in the 18th century. But I won’t. “Our revels,” as Shakespeare wrote, “now are ended.” At least for this month.