Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Shakespeare

Sometime back at my blog full of top five lists, I made a list of my five favorites of Shakespeare’s plays.  Shakespeare teacher and Shakespeare Geek played along too, as did BloggingWriter in a comment at my original post.  It was fun to see the lists of people’s favorites.


At the moment, though, I am in the midst of reading and preparing Twelfth Night for class. This is probably my least favorite of Shakespeare’s plays.  I can’t stand Sir Toby and his gang.  It isn’t made any better for me that Malvolio is dispicable, and it’s so hard to sympathize with his shabby treatment at the hands of said sickening gang.  Sigh.  I always dread getting to this play.

There is a lot to discuss, with a lot going on in the text.  But ugh.  I just don’t like the characters.
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Sunday, March 11, 2007

Hamlet

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and it’s been on my mind recently as I prepare for an upcoming lecture on it.

My class this year focuses on the performance aspect of Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve been noticing that I have more versions of Hamlet on DVD than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, and it seems it has been very popular for big-budget films over the past decade or so. I am wondering why that might be so, and will probably ask mys tudents to discuss that in our class together.

On my other blog, I wrote a review not too long ago of the recent Chinese big-budget adaptation of Hamlet, The Banquet. It was a very well-made movie, and has been on my mind often since I watched it toward the end of last year. I loved the scene where the Hamlet character did a prolonged consideration of the importance of masks and making a mask of one’s face. I thought it was an excellent demonstration of the importance of theatricality in the play. It translated very well into this film version.

Some of the other versions of Hamlet that I will be looking at in class include Olivier’s, Hawke’s, and Gibson’s. I think it will be fun to consider these more recent films in light of the “classic” Olivier.

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