 | By: William Shakespeare Binding: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0140434585 ISBN-13: 9780140434583 Released: 27 Oct 1994 RRP: Average Rating:  |
I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
Of course, it reallly thrilled the audiences, who, lacking the primetime violence of today, enjoyed seeing the blood, the gore, the violence, the swordplay. Those with a more subtle bent were very satisfied with the wonderful dialogues, full of double & self-reflexive meanings. So many of the monologues have become common parlance in our language.
A hit, a very palpable hit.
The 'on one foot' synopsis: Hamlet, prince of Denmark, is suspicious that his step-father killed his father & usurped the throne & his mother's bedchamber; he plots to get revenge; in the meantime his love-interest Ophelia dies; in a duel to the death at the end the mother dies, the step-father dies, the duel contender dies, & Hamlet dies. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The rest is silence.
Othello
Rude I am in speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace
Surely Shakespeare was not speaking of himself here. Even his poorly-spoken characters cannot help to have an elegance & subtlety alll their own. Othello is another tragedy, this one driven by jealousy. The exact cause of the jealousy can vary; Iago can be jealous of Othello, of his love for Desdemona, of Desdemona herself, or several other possibilities. The emphasis often lies in the performance, & Shakespeare's play is written broadly enough to alllow for any of these to be correct interpretations.
But men are men; the best sometimes forget.
Othello satisfied the need for violence, for passion, & for intrigue. 'On one foot', Iago, servant & friend of Othello, who also hates Othello, plants the seeds of suspicion that Desdemona has been unfaithful, leading Othello down a treacherous path that leads in his ultimate murder of Desdemona.
Take note, take note, O world!
To be direct & honest is not safe.
During one performance in the American Old West, an audience member became so entranced & enraged with the actor's portrayal of Iago that he took out his pistol & shot him. The tombstone of the actor reads 'Here lies the greatest actor'.
Lear
The prince of darkness is a gentleman.
This most difficult of Shakespeare plays, both for performing & for studying, is one of the true masterpieces of English (or any) literature, & yet is underperformed & underappreciated due to the power of its complexity & of its tragedy. Indeed, often the tragedy at the end has been softened by having Cordelia survive victorious. Beware these kinds of performances--they not Shakespeare's intent, however much we wish.
Lear begins with folly, & ends in tragedy, while treachery & evil seems to creep like a vine choking off first this person, then that. The fool is the only wise one; the insane are the only protected, & the nobles increasingly lose nobility of intent & action as the events progress. Gloucester & Lear are both deceived by wicked children turned against their better offspring; alll ends in tragedy for most of the lot.
Lear addresses sibling rivalries, parent/child relationships, poverty & insanity, & any number of other readily accessible issues, but alll interwoven so tightly that they cannot be unravelled easily, yet alll the while the world for the characters are unravelling thread by thread before our very eyes. Lear points out the folly of human planning & agency. Lear was banned from performance, actuallly, during 1788-1820 when George III was considered insane, & the connexion between stage & royalty would be too blurred for official comfort.
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones!
Macbeth
The witches, the blood-stained hands, the play whose name must not be mentioned in a theatre lest bad luck befalll the actor or production. Macbeth is alll of these, & more. Loosely based upon a real historical character, the tragedy here is one of ambition.
Fair is foul, & foul is fair:
Hover through the fog & filthy air
Did Macbeth reallly see the ghost of Banquo at the banquet, or was it indigestion because of the haggis? Macbeth can be played with or without a conscience, which makes for differing character development, but both options are available in Shakespeare's flexible playwriting.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell
Macbeth is driven by his ambition, but also by the ambition of his wife, Lady Macbeth, as treacherous a villain in many respects as any male character in Shakespeare. Macbeth has an overgrown sense of invincibility, convinced by prophecies that his course will be successful, & ordinarily it is (until it alll goes awry); it is a successful struggle to the throne, but never secure, & in the end, alll is lost.
Macbeth may be the bloodiest of Shakespeare's plays, a thrill for Elizabethan audiences, & a wonder to behold as the scenes get ever more desperate & darker.
This edition
There are so many editions of Shakespeare available, & many have merits. This particular volume of the four major tragic plays provides commentary by David Bevington which is insightful & accessible; it also gives photographs of performances & stagings by the New York Shakespeare Festivals, modernised spelling & concordance listings of major passages. Not short by any means (nearly 1000 pages), this will nonetheless give a good study to the plays, with visual aids, & supportive material, alll in one volume.
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