Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My ranking of every Shakespeare play

nullprogram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 179 posts

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#161

Post by dri_ft »

denton-scratch wrote: post #159
dri_ft wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?

I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did). Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.…

Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.

I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.

>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:

>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:

>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... >Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... >The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#162

Post by jfengel »

hilbert42 wrote: post #132
adamgordonbell wrote: post #54

As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "The very substance of the amb…

"As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…" What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article: "For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays." I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged…

It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text. (The stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. They were added by later editors.)

An egregious example: the big gag in the play-within-a-play of Midsummer is that the "hole" in the wall is between the actor's legs. When they kiss, they're kissing his butt and his crotch. The text is really quite clear about it: "I kiss the wall's hole", "Thy stones with lime and hair".

It's not much to read, but in performance, it's incredibly obvious (and juvenile) humor. (So juvenile that a lot of productions do something else, and the whole scene falls flat.) Reading the footnotes is never going to make it funny to a reader.

The histories and tragedies are much more story-focused, and a lot easier to read. They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation", and you can connect more viscerally to the moment.

Reading a play is an advanced skill, and I really wish English teachers wouldn't treat it as if it were readily accessible to high school students. You do have to start somewhere, but a complete, unedited comedy is starting at the summit of a mountain.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#163

Post by jfengel »

bradleyjg wrote: post #60
ojbyrne wrote: post #3

That was fun to read, even though I would disagree with much of the article. I generally like the comedies least, the OP likes them most, but it's nice to see people talk about Shakespeare in an article linked here. A couple of comments I would make: * "People will think I’m crazy, but yes, I’m placing Henry IV above Henry V." I doubt many people would think you're crazy, the Henry IVs are generally considered better…

He’s just wrong about Titus Andronicus. It’s far and away the worst.

Somehow, Julie Taymor managed to make a masterpiece out of Titus. She embraces the fact that it's a horror story, and treats that horror in a fashion akin to Tarantino: awful and beautiful.

I would have sworn it was impossible, but she did it. And having done it, I don't feel like it ever needs to be done again.

That said, I've seen moderately successful attempts at other horror-inspired approaches: grand guignol, horror fun-house, even "Titus! The Musical".

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#164

Post by JasonFruit »

aetimmes wrote: post #112
JasonFruit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Bernard Shaw, as the kids say, said a lot of things. He probably meant some of them, too.

But what is most important is that he was correct about vanishingly few of them.

Some of his music reviews were pretty good: Arnold Dolmetsch really was a revelation, and surviving recordings suggest that Joseph Joachim playing Bach really was like an attempt to scrape a nutmeg on a boot sole.

But Shaw strikes me a lot like Twitter. He spoke and wrote less because he had something to say than because he wanted people to hear how well he said things, and his reach increased because people enjoyed how well-put his remarks were and how stylishly he put down objections, rather than because of the quality of his opinions.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#165

Post by brewdad »

irrational wrote: post #20

> Like many of you, I had assigned reading for several Shakespeare plays in high school. I loathed these assignments. I wasn’t interested at the time, nor was I mature enough to appreciate the writing. Even revisiting as an adult, the conventional selection — Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, etc. — are not highly ranked on my list. For the next couple of decades I thought that Shakespeare just wasn’t for me. I feel t…

We found a local group that does Shakespeare in the park every summer. When our son was about 12, we took him to a couple shows including A Midsummer Night's Dream which he had acted out in class that year.

Seeing it on stage, with actors who know what they are doing, made Shakespeare "click" for him and really for me too. We've probably seen about 10 different performances by now and all of us actually look forward to the next one.

I highly recommend it for anyone who thinks they don't like Shakespeare but is open-minded enough to give it a shot again.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#166

Post by jovial_cavalier »

ojosilva wrote: post #58
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..." Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen. Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatle…

Well, not really. The written play is the actual Work. Shakespeare put his soul into writing every word in it. They are his instructions, a script for eternity. It's like saying don't ever read the source, just use the app!

No, what you're saying is "why ever run the app? you have the source code right there!"

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#167

Post by Balgair »

Aside: Dear HN reader, if you are somewhat curious about 'getting into' Shakespeare, I thoroughly recommend it.

During the pandemic, I managed to get into him. It took me ~2 years of reading him, getting used to meter, the phrasing, the ideas, the structure. Yes, ~2 years of ~30 minutes/day on weekdays. About 250 hours total, give or take.

Dear Reader, it is totally worth it.

The depths of English that you reach are just amazing. The feelings and thoughts, so well said. The simple and yet universal themes, the characters, the actors that do him such justice and some that do such injustice, the theater of it all. It is a truly enriching experience for your life. It's tough, no doubt, but my oh my, dear Reader, it is worth it.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#168

Post by ghaff »

jfengel wrote: post #11
ojbyrne wrote: post #3

That was fun to read, even though I would disagree with much of the article. I generally like the comedies least, the OP likes them most, but it's nice to see people talk about Shakespeare in an article linked here. A couple of comments I would make: * "People will think I’m crazy, but yes, I’m placing Henry IV above Henry V." I doubt many people would think you're crazy, the Henry IVs are generally considered better…

So much depends on the performance. Some of the comedies make great productions, suitably edited and with the right amount of physical comedy. Right on the page they are nearly all a slog. The tragedies make better reading.

There have been some really good productions of the comedies, e.g. Emma Thompson's Much Ado About Nothing. But often as I have seen some of them over the years, the mistaken identities/gender swapping/etc. all sort of blend together for me past some point. (Case in point, when I looked up my example, I originally typed in As You Like It.) I definitely remember the tragedies as more distinct entities.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#169

Post by as_bntd »

muffinman26 wrote: post #49
as_bntd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the stage is that it is much harder to stay on top of the plot. Especially when you aren't used to the language.

If you have good enough performers, unfamiliarity with the language won't get in the way. It might seem a bold assertion, but there's a reason that classically-trained Shakespearian actors are often cast in sci-fi shows (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as perhaps the most famous examples). They're trained to convey more information through intonation and gesture so that you don't need to know the words they're sayin…

Maybe I just didn't encounter any such performance when I was less... to be perfectly honest, I don't think I've ever seen a Shakespearean stage play I've been able to fully follow, even though my English is OK nowadays.

I've always had to use captions and backtrack/pause.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#170

Post by as_bntd »

tomcam wrote: post #18
as_bntd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laurence Olivier is a great actor. I've enjoyed several of his films, including his Hamlet adaptation (which he also directed). I have yet to watch Richard III though.

I thought he overacted that role. I feel it requires a much lighter touch than most actors give it.

It was my first encounter with Hamlet so I didn't have another frame of reference to judge the performance.

And I had already watched him in other movies such as Rebecca (I didn't like the movie except for the (some of the) end) so maybe I was used to his acting.

Post reply on HN