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I thought I'd note that I just purchased this set from Amazon UK - the listed price (on the item listing page) was 71 GBP (still a pretty decent bargain), but in doing the conversion, Amazon gave the price as 60 GBP (actually 59.98), plus an awe-inspiring 3 GBP for overseas shipping, coming in at an amazing 63 GBP, which converted to $103 - that's about $2.85 per play. I'm SO pleased I rediscovered this thread, and wanted to let everyone know - if it's not an error, this is the bargain of the century (if you order from Amazon UK, check to make sure the same thing is happening with your order)! The multi-box US versions (with their PAL conversions) are over $250 (and that's for only 20 plays), and the complete PAL set is listed on US Amazon from external vendors at the lowest price of $140.

The only one I recall having seen before was Hordern's King Lear; I thought he was a perfect choice for Lear, and loved his performance - from the very first words you could see this was a failing, tired old man rather than a regal monarch, making his decision to divide his kingdom all the more understandable.

I'm very much looking forward to going through this set over the next few months.

I suspect they knocked off the VAT at the time of calculating your total.

And they obviously (if stupidly) applied the postage rate as if you'd ordered a single DVD.

Still, you're clearly not about to complain.

I suspect they knocked off the VAT at the time of calculating your total.

I don't think it was the VAT - there was a separate line for that in the summary, and it showed 0.00 GBP. Titles on Amazon UK, I don't believe, are normally listed with VAT included. I thought it might be the UK equivalent of a gold box or other sale, and the amount charged hadn't caught up with the higher price on the listing page. Or vice-versa.

whipsilk wrote:

I suspect they knocked off the VAT at the time of calculating your total.

Titles on Amazon UK, I don't believe, are normally listed with VAT included.

Actually, they are.

Jack Phillips wrote:

whipsilk wrote:

I suspect they knocked off the VAT at the time of calculating your total.

Titles on Amazon UK, I don't believe, are normally listed with VAT included.

Actually, they are.

Prices in the UK are "always" shown with VAT. Only very occassionally will you see the odd electronic store that shows them without.

whipsilk wrote:

I suspect they knocked off the VAT at the time of calculating your total.

I don't think it was the VAT - there was a separate line for that in the summary, and it showed 0.00 GBP. Titles on Amazon UK, I don't believe, are normally listed with VAT included. I thought it might be the UK equivalent of a gold box or other sale, and the amount charged hadn't caught up with the higher price on the listing page. Or vice-versa.

And Amazon UK do a weird thing now where they no longer make it clear that VAT has been excluded. I think the full price continues to appear on every checkout screen until the final one, at which point the total charge changes without explanation.

The BBC are screening their new version of Richard II tonight, but fans of the 1978 Derek Jacobi version will not be shortchanged either - after the new version it looks as if there will be a one hour programme with Jacobi revisiting the play and his role.

I have watched several of these lately on YouTube. (My University library has them also.) The actors are superb. And that is a great price from Amazon.UK.

I'm still slowly but surely working my way through this enormous box of BBC Shakespeare plays (soon it will be just as if I got one of those new Michael Gove-mandated good GCSEs rather than the one I actually had!), writing the following piece about the Derek Jacobi version of Hamlet during a lunch break at work in a sudden surge of inspiration! I'm transcribing it here - much of it takes the form of Kenneth Branagh-bashing, so feel free to skip down to the last three numbered points for my main views about the Jacobi version of Hamlet:

I'll start with a confession: I've not seen the Olivier version of Hamlet yet (shock, horror!), but the Derek Jacobi-starring version of the play is far better than the Branagh version. Branagh brings a lot of 'energy' to his adaptations, but that often runs counter to or overwhelms the darker tone of the material, something that the Jacobi version seems to better capture. Branagh also problematically plays Hamlet as 'wacky-crazy' more than 'tormented-crazy', as Jacobi does so well (Mel Gibson in his version plays 'Riggs-in-Lethal-Weapon-crazy', which is presumably why he was cast, so as to bring in the action (?!?) audience that might so far have missed out on Shakespeare).

This is similar to what I found with the Henry V adaptation in this set, which was also a revelation for me. I know that the beauty of theatrical production is that there is never any 'correct' way to produce a text, and that the oft stated beauty is theatre is that of a variety of adaptations (although now film too in the sheer number of Hamlet adaptations) that can be compared and contrasted, but I think that if my only exposure to Shakespeare was through the Branagh versions I would never really discover the true power and depth of the play. This might just be my personal take on the play coming to the fore but I had my suspicions confirmed whilst watching the Jacobi version that exactly the wrong way to approach this material is from playing up the significance of the famous quotes, 'theatrical-luvvie' perspective that just ends up skimming the surface of the play's themes (OK, so Jacobi may be a pre-eminent 'luvvie' himself but he is a good enough actor to not let that overwhelm the character he is playing, either here or in Richard II earlier in the series), rather than delving into the darker, tormented version of the character.

This is perhaps being too harsh on Branagh's adaptations but I think this is where his versions of Shakespeare's historical-plays or tragedies fall down (conversely I'm nowhere near as harsh on his adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour's Lost or As You Like It, as his fluffy, frivolous, energetic to the point of mania approach kind of fits better tonally there). He brings a bombastic energy that runs against these very internal pieces - no matter however many battle scenes there are in Henry V or Hamlet acting looney moments there are in the plays, these are not really the main focus of the drama, just the embellishments to the core ideas.

Branagh plays up all that (perhaps understandably in Henry V given that he is labouring in the shadow of the Olivier version which did somewhat turn the play into a patriotic anthem rather than just showing the magisterial/managerial growth of a King) and loses the truly interesting element of the drama in the process. While I'm putting the boot into Branagh this is similar to his adaptation of Frankenstein too, which has mercifully blurred in my memory into an almost context-less montage of characters running, screaming, running and screaming whilst on fire and getting thrown off of high things.

On Branagh's Hamlet adaptation I remember his big pre-intermission speech as Hamlet just before he returns to Denmark for his final confrontation playing surprisingly flatly and in a way that was strangely difficult to understand whilst simultaneously being enormously bombastic and featuring an epic Zack Snyder-in-Watchmen prefiguring huge vista pull back shot showing off the harbour and the huge army there as Branagh stands on a peak like Moses declamatorily ploughing his way through the text of the speech. There is a kind of recitative drone to his speech in this sequence, as if he knows that the audience will be much more interested in the visuals being presented than the dialogue and meaning of Hamlet's words (it is kind of an Atonement-prefiguring moment, or a perfect Manny Faber-esque 'white elephant' artistic moment!). Branagh's voice strangely also does not feel powerful in the scene either, instead trailing off at the end of each line as even he is bored to death whilst saying it!

In comparison Jacobi's same speech is played in front of an almost abstract foggy light blue studio backdrop with some 'harbour' sound effects off screen and occasionally a couple of people dressed as sailors walking past in the background. Jacobi never raises his voice or powerfully emphasises every....single....sentence as Branagh does, and it feels much more of a realistic way of speaking to oneself, with the character fully aware of and understanding the meaning of their words, slowly figuring out what they are going to do. I also like that the scene in the Jacobi version doesn't really play triumphally or belligerently (as in the Branagh), but more as someone returning to meet their fate on their own terms.

(Another point on the 'abstract backdrop' of the harbour in the Jacobi version - the use of it here near to the end of the play also helps to emphasise a neat parallel to Laertes leaving for Paris and departing from Ophelia and her father Polonius early on in the play, which is set in the same abstract location. This is a neat example of the way that, perhaps in a decision taken for purely practical and budgetary reasons, decisions to play apparently unconnected scenes in the same location brings an extra connective resonance to the wider story, as the way that Laertes at the end of the play is driven by the same compulsive, inescapable need to revenge the death of his family could be compared to Hamlet's own situation. Is Laertes more, or less, justified in his vengeance than Hamlet is? And how does the way that King Claudius manipulates Laertes into performing his vengeance on his behalf parallel with the way that he was trying to 'pay off' Hamlet with an assurance of his inheritance being secure after having murdered his father at the beginning of the play?)

Similarly the Branagh film, for all of the 'full text and four hour running time' fame, rushes through the dialogue as if the filmmakers are slightly embarrassed about it (or don't understand it), or with the assured knowledge that the audience doesn't really need to know all of the political shenanigans in order to enjoy getting to the sword fight at the end. The cameo casting of the film also plays into this, as I get the impression that seeing Robin Williams or Gerard Depardieu or Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, Ken Dodd, etc (though the Ken Dodd cameo as Yorick is one of the few truly inspired moments of Branagh's film!) is meant to act as a signifier to the audience that this character is an 'important' one that should be focused on. From a purely personal standpoint the much more leisurely unfolded ghost scene at the beginning of the play in the Jacobi version is far more understandably (and humanly) paced than the almost hysterical one at the beginning of the Branagh film.

Another one: the scene where Polonius asks his servant to go to Paris and spy on Laertes (something which hardens the equivalence between Hamlet and Laertes) plays intriguingly in the Jacobi version focused on Polonius's snooping, whilst in the Richard Briers/Gerard Depardieu scene it plays instead more like a giant joke that the filmmaker's brought Depardieu in for one scene to just say "Aye, my Lord!" a lot!

Anyway, just thinking about the Branagh version so much is annoying me again, so I'll go back to the Jacobi one for a few final points. This is a truly great adaptation of the play for many reasons, but here are the three that stuck out for me on this viewing:

1. Claire Bloom's performance as Queen Gertrude, which beautifully resonates with her other role as the brutally sidelined Katherine of Aragon in the adaptation of Henry VIII that she had played earlier in the BBC series, adding an extra tragic dimension of how a Queen runs the risk of becoming nothing without a King and emphasising that after losing her husband there has to be an extra pragmatic dimension to an "o'erhasty marriage", even one to her husband's murderer, which her son just doesn't understand.

2. The wonderful seeming allusions to Macbeth in this production, especially in the way that King Claudius (fantastically portrayed by Patrick Stewart, always able to keep a benevolent smile even whilst plotting away underneath!) after being told of Polonius's murder in Gertrude's bedroom touches the curtains behind which he had been hiding, gets blood on his hands and then frantically tries to wipe it off!

Just that brief moment spun me off into thinking about the parallels between the two plays, especially the way that they both end with an apocalypse for the ruling class, both in personal terms and on a wider scale as their kingdom is simultaneously invaded.

3. This Jacobi adaptation adds a fascinating element of homosexuality to the play. I'm not really familiar enough with Hamlet to know whether this has always been present or whether it is something just focused on for this particular adaptation but examples of this come through in the historically correct band of players with the women being played by men; an amusing and more abstract mime version of the King and Queen and the King's poisoning being enacted just before the actual play gets performed; and then the play itself.

Then there is the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio which adds a much more tragic dimension to the final scenes in which Horatio, told not to commit suicide by the dying Hamlet, weeps over his corpse. This also adds an interesting dimension to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern characters, as a couple of faux-'old friends' (compared to the 'real' old friend in Horatio) that Claudius brings back into Hamlet's life to keep him busy in England and debauch with him. Not to mention Hamlet's rejections of the poor, innocent Ophelia even after she is almost literally forced into crossing his path a couple of times! Needless to say none of that really turns up in the Branagh or Mel Gibson versions! (If anything they're more focused on playing up the Oedipal dimension of the Hamlet/Gertrude relationship in the mother's bedchamber)

EDIT: Just after posting I looked through the thread again and Sloper has already posted what I was trying to get at above in a much more concise manner!:

Sloper wrote:And the Hamlet with Jacobi is the best filmed Hamlet I've ever seen. In fact, Jacobi's is the only performance I've seen of this role that really 'makes sense' - he seems to mean what he says, rather than just giving an admiring recitation (which I think is essentially what Branagh does).

I like Kozintsev's Russian adaptation of Hamlet (based on Boris Pasternak's translation) even more than I like Jacobi's BBC version. But I agree with everything else you say about Jacobi's excellent version. (The BBC Richard II, also starring Jacobi, is another of my favorites).

Is it necessary or worth it for anyone to restore these and put them out on blu, maybe with full subtitles?

onedimension wrote:Is it necessary or worth it for anyone to restore these and put them out on blu, maybe with full subtitles?

The originals were shot and edited on PAL videotape, and analogue PAL at that, so a Blu-ray would be pointless. I doubt they're going to look much better than they do already, to be honest.

And the DVDs have full subtitles already - rather too full, in fact, as they offer sound-effects transcription as well as the original text. But there's not much of the former to be too distracting.

Although I did just find that during some of the more florid, quickly paced minor speeches in Hamlet that the subtitles occasionally translated only 60-70% of what was being said. I only noticed it happen briefly two or three times during the three and a half hour run time though.

I've been using the subtitles on this set (along with my 'Big Book of Shakespeare Plays'!) to aid with the language, especially in the plays that I'm not quite so familiar with, as I'm better at reading Shakespeare than listening to it, and Hamlet was a surprise as the previous eight to ten plays (in transmission order) have subtitles that very rigorously followed the dialogue as spoken and adapted for the screen.

Hamlet also doesn't start with the William Walton "A Production of the British Broadcasting Corporation" title sequence featured on every play up to this point either, which makes me wonder whether the play just didn't have the title sequence on its first BBC television broadcast (in terms of transmission order there is a big run of plays from late 1979 to March 1980 then Hamlet on its own in May then the next play The Taming of the Shrew in October 1980, suggesting that Hamlet stood apart in the schedule); whether Hamlet, as a more famous play, was encoded for DVD as a standalone release with the Walton titles therefore being removed; or simply whether there were issues with packing such a long play onto one DVD, leading to the loss of the titles and a couple of compressed subtitles as an easy way to save some disc space?

colinr0380 wrote:Hamlet also doesn't start with the William Walton "A Production of the British Broadcasting Corporation" title sequence featured on every play up to this point either, which makes me wonder whether the play just didn't have the title sequence on its first BBC television broadcast (in terms of transmission order there is a big run of plays from late 1979 to March 1980 then Hamlet on its own in May then the next play The Taming of the Shrew in October 1980, suggesting that Hamlet stood apart in the schedule); whether Hamlet, as a more famous play, was encoded for DVD as a standalone release with the Walton titles therefore being removed; or simply whether there were issues with packing such a long play onto one DVD, leading to the loss of the titles and a couple of compressed subtitles as an easy way to save some disc space?

Following on from this, while Hamlet has unique titles, The Taming of the Shrew and Merchant of Venice have moved towards a less bombastic title sequence of titles written on a scroll, so I guess this is something that changed once Jonathan Miller took over the production of the series from Cedric Messina. (We're also back to fully translated subtitles too)

I find The Taming of the Shrew kind of a problematic play. I just find it very irritating with a muddled moral message about the battle of the sexes, and the inciting incident of the father refusing to marry off his youngest daughter until the elder one is married is kind of a Lear-esque stupid paternal decision that could only end in tragedy! (or in this case, farce!)

Though I do like that ironic ending where the 'true love' that the feisty, stallion-breaking relationship of Petruchio and Katherine has been contrasted against throughout backfires against the more insipid lovers! Katherine may have been broken through Petruchio pushing his behaviour to extremes to match her, but there is a sense of mutual respect there. Whereas the 'true loves', won through the usual Shakespearian tactics of class role swapping, hamstringing of suitors and general deception, end up leaving the victors with wives who remain strong willed rather than respectfully compliant. It is a very early Shakespeare play, but even here I wonder whether he was aware of the problems that come up when portraying the path to true love through lots of complications and tangents - the position feels muddled here compared to the precise dissection to come in later plays, but there is the sense that even the 'best' relationships are going to feature arguments and refusals, and true docility isn't really something to praise! (Rather Petruchio and Katherine can go on to become partners in crime, teasing and baiting their in-laws!)

Katherine's only fault was that she did not veil her rantings (something that usually gets played up in these adaptations in order to make her as obnoxious (and deserving of punishment?) as possible in the early sections of the play), and perhaps acted too 'manly'. Yet despite being broken she is given a somewhat happy ending, suggesting that it was all in her best interests. But I cannot help feeling that something of the true Katherine herself got lost along the way in order to make her more societally acceptable to others.

However The Merchant of Venice is growing in my estimations. I think it is perfectly situated in between the light romantic comedies and the really dark and violent tragedies, and a lot of its power comes from the way that it is walking that knife-edge between the heights of romantic love and the horror of gruesome violence. The fripperies, stupid arbitrary 'love tasks' and gender swapping antics that I usually find so irritatingly pointless in other Shakespeare plays such as As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing (and even the supernatural ones such as The Tempest or Midsummer Night's Dream) becomes much more important and even necessary when contrasted against the darker themes of Shylock's single-minded demand for the pound of flesh from his debtor. The moment of Bassanio's choice leading to being united with Portia is the first time I was moved by the power of the love stories in this series of plays, and I think that comes from the mechanics of the 'choose from the three boxes' test being so obvious, letting the audience know beforehand where the correct box is and with the tension coming from whether Bassiano will be pure of heart enough to find it for himself, with his success in the action retrospectively completely validating the father's decision to impose such a silly and arbitrary test and adding to that sense of joy and relief that the 'right' suitor has succeeded in claiming Portia.

In a sense Merchant of Venice is also dealing with the often elided consequences of the actions that occur in the lighter romantic plays. The daughter running off with her lover was also tackled in As You Like It but in a much more frivolous manner (and also deals with the evil Duke getting a forced conversion to the side of good in the final deus ex machina moments of the play!) but here it drives Shylock into madness and a desire for petty revenge. Antonio entering into the deal with Shylock to give Bassiano the means to woo Portia is the series of complicated events that would lead to all sorts of romantic complications for Antonio too in a lighter toned play.

Here Antonio is left helpless in the face of a combination of unfortunate circumstances and an old feud with Shylock still simmering away. Shylock himself is very problematically and anti-Semitically portrayed (although the problem is that the regular utterance of "Jew" as an insult, or statement of fact of otherness is used interchangeably with the notion of the "evil money lender" holding the reins over the lives of others, which perhaps if dealt with purely on a non-racial 'money-lender' level would be an idea that would still hold currency today), but I also see Shylock in the same vein as Tamora and her sons from Titus Andronicus, especially in the scene where Shylock is gloatingly teased by a couple of secondary, up to this point supposedly 'good' and 'noble', characters in the play, which seems to be an incident which hardens his plan of revenge.

However Tamora and her sons are much more understandably motivated in their focused hatred and plans for revenge, while Shylock falls into a more problematic area where, while he gets a couple of speeches despairing at the loss of his daughter to a Christian (and more to the point the fortune that she took with her!) and the need for revenge, he disproportionately tries to revenge himself and pays the price for illegitimately trying to claim more than he was entitled to, not just losing his revenge but then immediately being persecuted by the might of the law into losing his estate and getting forcibly converted, a fate worse than death. (I often wonder exactly why Shylock, or Portia's suitors who choose wrongly and then have to forfeit marriage to anyone as part of their punishment, actually go along with those decisions! But I guess that speaks to older modes of duty? As well as linking the purposeful but eventually wrongheaded suitors together with Shylock's darker, but similarly not thought through, purpose)

There is also that same sense of the law, or fate, being stronger and more powerful (and frighteningly amoral - as long as it is lawfully done then Shylock can rightly claim his pound of flesh that Antonio so carelessly signed over) than individuals whether good or bad. It can dash the plans of characters and punish them severely for their transgressions in a counterblow but it always stands above the plot and the characters, for all of their machinations, need to always bow to that larger order of things at the climax (the best example of this idea is probably Measure for Measure).

I particularly like that this play, while obviously making Shylock the most unsympathetic figure, in some ways is just as harsh about our Christian heroes, all far too quick to mortgage themselves and enter into half thought through contracts, and who never seem to learn to error of their ways (they basically just got very, very lucky in this play!), something which is made very explicit in the scenes with Bassiano having to explain to Portia why he gave away the ring, the symbol of their love, to the clerk of the court who saved Antonio from certain death at the last moment. Antonio himself almost enters into another open-ended deal with Portia in order to vouch for Bassiano, which suggests that, even after everything that has occurred, he hasn't really learnt his lesson of "neither a borrower, nor a lender be"!

But the play beautifully and forcefully moves back into (this time fully earned) light and frivolous mode as Portia and her maid Nerissa reveal that they were the gender swapped clerks of the court who saved Antonio, tested their loves by requesting the rings in payment (and found their loves wanting in their vows, but hey-ho!), and by that admission manage to make everything right with the world again, ready for the blissfully happy ending.

(Something that itself is also beautifully slightly undermined by the final twist of this BBC production back into darker territory by the ambivalent, wordless reaction of Jessica, Shylock's daughter, to being triumphally presented with a document granting her half of Shylock's chattels after his death)

colinr0380 wrote:Following on from this, while Hamlet has unique titles, The Taming of the Shrew and Merchant of Venice have moved towards a less bombastic title sequence of titles written on a scroll, so I guess this is something that changed once Jonathan Miller took over the production of the series from Cedric Messina.

Yes, very much so. Hamlet was the last of the Messina productions, and Miller clearly wanted to stamp his own authority on the series. Although sadly the co-production deal with Time-Life meant that he couldn't be anything like as radical as he wanted to be - he originally approached people like Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman to direct, but both baulked at the requirement that they make broadly conservative productions set in Elizabethan dress.

Although Miller was able to tweak the guidelines slightly over time - Jane Howell's productions in particular (the stylised The Winter's Tale being an excellent example, or the adventure-playground production of the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy) would have been unimaginable in the Messina era - and a few other later productions are often similarly adventurous, albeit never going as far as modern dress or significantly reworking the text. That said, it's a myth that the BBC productions are scrupulously faithful - I think only The Merchant of Venice made no textual changes at all.

The locations are getting much more noticeably and interestingly abstract in these latest plays, especially in comparison to the "on location at Glamis Castle" As You Like It, or other on location pieces of the Messina era.

The Taming of the Shrew has that one 'forum' location that gets used for the entirety of the outdoor scenes, just filled with people, or emptied out to create a different feeling space to use in a different way. And those scenes set in the garden of Portia's palace in The Merchant of Venice feature that excellent piece of green fuzzy cloth to signify a patch of grass which is easy to see during the scene of the musical number before Bassanio makes his choice and especially later when Lorenzo and Jessica fall asleep on it just before the final scene of the play!

If you've just watched Taming of the Shrew (and if you're going through the BBC Shakespeare series in general) you might be interested to watch this appearance by Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett Show from 1981 (here are parts two and three). He's a tremendously entertaining speaker with very clear and lucid ideas, and his intriguing comments on what he feels Taming of the Shrew is actually about go a long way in explaining why his take on it was the first time I think I really enjoyed the play despite its problems.

That is a great interview piece and Miller's reading of Taming of the Shrew is excellent drawing out the ideas of attention (even uncaring, shrieking bullying attention) paid to Katharine meaning that she is loved, and the idea of Puritanism. I also enjoyed the play despite its problems but I do not think that I am far enough along in my appreciation of Taming of the Shrew to yet be able to see past the obvious trappings of a father who doesn't need to confront his part in causing conflict between his daughters and with the collusion of a couple of lechers wanting the pretty but unavailable daughter, handing her over to another man who may love her but forces her to change in quite a blunt and insensitive manner. Katherine may be a raging madwoman at the start of the play but she is the constantly abused one continually forced to change her behaviour by others who never feel the need or reason to have to modulate their own flaws themselves.

That play comes close to the idea of an abuser saying "I beat you because I love you", fully endorsed by society (because two insane, bickering people are obviously a perfect match for each other) and for which the abused party is supposed to learn a sense of gratitude.

I agree with that. In fact I think it would be interesting to see a production that actually presented Katharine's final turnaround as a legitimately sad event, where we've been encouraged to sympathize with her defiance the whole play and the breaking of her spirit at the end of it all is a real tragedy. Surely someone has done this already.

I had gotten the impression from the booklet in the set that the choice of which plays to produce was rather random (with the comment that individual directors got to most choose particular works that caught their fancy at the start of the project), but I am finding that the series is being very well curated in order to create some quite interesting pairings of plays together and throwing up interesting connections.

All's Well That Ends Well feels like a gender-swapped companion piece to The Taming of the Shrew, as a wayward gentleman gets bartered away in an arranged marriage and rails against it, refusing to consummate his marriage. His wife, not taking "No" and running away to a war in a different country for an answer, puts various complicated plots into motion to 'win him doubly', after which he meekly submits in the face of societal pressure.

I have the same problems with this play as I did with The Taming of The Shrew (mostly that I'm sure that these marriages are going to last without the aggressive suitor getting murdered in the middle of the night after the happy ending!) and I'm left to wonder if these plays are meant to be against the unthinking assumptions surrounding arranged marriages, or whether that is just too modern an attitude to be placing on these plays where impudent young men and women don't know their place and dishonour their spouses, parents and wider community and have to forcibly be brought into line.

All's Well That Ends Well also contrasts interestingly with The Merchant of Venice too in the way that our male lead is coaxed into giving away his precious family ring to another woman, which turns him into a social pariah (and assumed murderer!) until his presumed dead wife returns with the ring to set the world to rights.

I also noticed that all of the Jonathan Miller productions so far split their plays in "Part One" and Part Two", while the Cedric Messina plays mostly ploughed through the plays in one piece. When the plays were originally screened on television were they shown in separate parts, such as on separate nights, or was this more of an 'intermission' thing and the play was screened whole?

Kirkinson-
Thanks for the Jonathan Miller interview links. He, of course, reiterates what should be more widely acknowledged, though it seems obvious; which is simply that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, not for the classroom.

The Merchant of Venice discussion's inspired me to watch it. It's never been a favorite as I don't like Portia as written ( seldom as performed) but I'm intrigued about Shylock's portrayal.

The Winter's Tale

This play feels as if it occupies a nice mid-point between Othello and King Lear. Othello in the sense of jealous rage destroying a marriage, although in Winter’s Tale the jealous rage isn’t manipulated by another (as in Othello) but is completely irrational! (The big lesson to be learnt here is not to ask a visitor to stay an extra week because that will cause a violent sexual jealousy in your husband!). King Lear in the sense of a King making crazy decisions and then having to suffer the inevitable consequences of his over hasty assumptions.

I can see why Winter’s Tale might not get staged as much in the sense that the first half is incredibly psychologically brutal, as King Leontes abuses his friend, his closest advisor Camillo (by forcing him to flee when the King requests him to murder the friend, with the advisor then being branded a traitor) and eventually his Queen (putting the abused woman into jail and then through a trial of her fidelity similarly gruelling to Katherine of Aragon’s similar trial in Henry VIII) and his children (driving the young son who looked up to him at the beginning of the play to illness and eventual death from grief, the news of this killing the Queen herself almost simultaneously; taking the baby daughter that the Queen gave birth to in prison, calling her a ‘bastard’ and telling one of his minions to take her to a far off land an abandon her, in a very Hansel and Gretel move!), in such horrifically callous actions that it makes him seem like one of the cruellest tyrants in Shakespeare. And he has quite some competition for that honour! Even the machinations of Iago help to soften Othello somewhat into a tragic character of a weak man manipulated by his advisors – here the King is just a completely deluded bastard! (Which kind of feels truer to life in some senses!)

The apparently idyllic set up of the opening scene only helps to compound the completely unnecessary horror that the King causes and, even more than King Lear (which is a bit more concerned with the themes of filial loyalty and respect for elders), the first section of the play really seems to be focusing on how relentlessly cruel even a King can allowed to be (in scenes such as the ‘yes men’ ministers contrasted with the courageous but blunt ‘speaking truth to power’ midwife), and seems to come to the dark conclusion that he can be as cruel as he wishes, that no questioning of his presumptions can change him from his course, and that only a (self-imposed) irreversible tragedy has the power to drag him back to his senses and make him question his presumptions. But by then it is too late for a number of characters, and a set of events has been set into motion also.

The King’s epiphany that comes after his wife and son’s deaths forms the climax of “Part One” of this BBC production, with the second half set sixteen years later and follows the now grown up banished daughter. Though there is an amusing scene bridging the two parts where the minister charged with taking the baby away has a monologue to it about the perils of abandoning the babe in the wilderness and then ironically immediately gets eaten by a bear (i.e. a man in an amusingly fake bear suit!, trying to literalise Shakespeare’s “Exit, pursued by a bear” stage direction!), while the ship he was on is reported to have been sunk in a Twelfth Night-style storm. This is all deus ex machina stuff to prevent the King from ever getting his daughter back now that he has come to his senses, but it is done in an interesting ‘the Gods are angry’ way (much as the simultaneous deaths of Queen and son had been just before) to meet out a just punishment for the King’s actions and in a strange way to ‘save’ the baby from having to grow up with him!

Deus ex machina is also a good way to describe the events of the rest of the play, but portrayed in a beautiful manner, as the love between the younger generations (Leonte’s banished daughter and the son of Camillo, the fled trusted advisor from the beginning of the play) comes to mend seemingly irreparably severed ties (in the manner that Romeo & Juliet singularly failed to do, but I guess that allowance by Shakespeare makes for the difference between a tragedy and a comedy!) and most audaciously a statue of the wronged Queen Hermione suddenly turns to life as if affirming that Leonte’s follies have been forgiven. I have been harsh on the use of magic for closure in Shakespeare but I think that this might be the ultimate and most perfect expression of that idea (and it raises lots of connotations of Sleeping Beauty for me of a court sleeping following an abuse of power, along with making me think of that recent Nacho Cerda film Genesis in which a sculptor recreates his love, dead in a car crash, from clay and watches it come to life as he turns to clay himself).

It also (rather problematically if taken as realist) suggests that while the position of King is unassailable when doing horrifically brutal and utterly stupid acts, there is the slight (arguably audience mandated in Shakespeare’s times!) consolation that the King can also perform miracles too due perhaps to being more closely connected to the Gods through his lofty position. When a King is sick, the world is sick, when he is cured, anything is possible.

(Although I much prefer the other plausible idea in the play that after the son’s death and Hermione’s collapse at hearing the news that the midwife had hidden Hermionie away to spare her Leonte’s wrath and finally was able to re-present her as the final crowning moment of reconciliation once Leontes had atoned enough for his sins).

This was a wonderful discovery and while the opening half of the play might be meant to be as gruelling as possible, perhaps accounting for its relative obscurity, it is in some ways much more interesting than some of Shakespeare’s more celebrated plays. It also complicates the sharp divisions between romance, tragedy and comedy (apparently it is one of the first two plays to ever use the word “dildo”!) that seems to crop up in discussions of Shakespeare, and perhaps that problem with easy classification is also a reason behind why it does not receive the same amount of attention.

After the slightly more classically presented Merchant of Venice and All’s Well That Ends Well with different scenes taking place in differently dressed locations (Taming of the Shrew was a little more of a hybrid, with a main ‘forum’ location that gets used for the bulk of the action but also a few significant other locations being also being fleshed out), this production of The Winter’s Tale goes back to the slightly more abstract and theatrical approach of a single recognisable (if abstracted) location that gets redressed and reused for every scene, from outdoor garden to courtroom for the trial sequence, to the ‘blasted heath’ on which the baby in the basket gets left, and so on. It works really well in suggesting through implication the beautiful summer garden that the court seems to be ambling through without a care at the beginning of the play being formalised and turned into a confining space before eventually becoming a barren wilderness by the end of the first part of the play, and then returning to beauty again.

I think Timon of Athens has probably had the greatest effect on me of all the Shakespeare plays so far, leaving me in tears at the end, though bitterly ironic tears. It feels like another play that is revisiting key themes from King Lear (a man's hubris leading to his downfall, though the catalyst is money rather than filial loyalty) and Merchant of Venice (whether someone's stupidity in matters of business means that they have to pay an excessive price to atone). It is also another play that suggests to me that Titus Andronicus is one of the key ur-Shakespeare texts - the purest expression of righteous vengeance destroying all which is dealt with in a more dryly intellectual manner in Timon of Athens.

This production of the play also helps to bring out some of the subtexts. For example the opening banquet where Timon excessively dotes on his guests, lavishing them with food and gifts has a great food guzzling sequence of the greedy hangers on gorging themselves while Timon, nervous to be liked, has very little on his plate and fiddles with his napkin nervously.

The extremely long banquet scene (around thirty minutes in the BBC production) that opens the play also contrasts well with the scenes after Timon's bankruptcy when his servants visit those he has treated so well for a loan of money in return. There are three scenes following each of the servants as they are callously rebuffed and each one lasts for only three minutes at the most. It helps to contrast the drawn out luxury followed by the quickness to abandon when Timon is in trouble, and also adds to the sense of events snowballing Timon into destitution ever faster.

The second long banquet in which Timon gathers all those he has previously lavished gifts on together on the pretext of another grand banquet only to serve them water in which he proceeds to wash his hands of them is the scene which especially reminds me of the grand guignol climax of Titus Andronicus. Timon berates rather than mercilessly kills however, and that is probably the reason why the story does not end with the devastating end of the banquet, as it does in Titus Andronicus once everyone meets their end.

Instead Timon faces a worse fate of wandering the wilderness railing against mankind, much in the vein of King Lear. As with Lear he is both a sympathetic character (perhaps more than Lear as Timon's only fault was being too kind, trusting and generous) and one who is in the process of wishing himself into death because his new circumstances have become unbearable to him.

This feels like one of the few pieces of work in any medium to fully grasp the idea that the truly good when abused and taken advantage of can turn to the bitterest hatred of all. Timon is a man who goes from one extreme to the other and cannot live in the middle ground - the area of life where you know that people are just out for themselves and can be cruel but which does not sour you to simple acts of decency, altruism or kindness whenever they occur.

The final long section of the play where Timon is visited in the wilderness by a succession of figures from his past life (For someone attempting to escape from humanity he ironically gets accosted by more people than ever! Especially once the news of his gold discovery gets around) is the most fascinating one as it tackles the idea of what money does to people head on. The hypocrisy of money that allows all behaviours (even living in a cave) to be acceptable when it is funded. War can be a valuable moneymaker whereas individual acts of violence for no purpose have to be severely punished.

Timon himself is not spared from a harsh judgement. His shift from going from one extreme to the other, from utter naive altruism to bitter misanthropy is seen as another form of vanity. The world is terrible because it treats him so badly and no-one else. He is able to rail against all, those who deserve his wrath and those who do not alike, because he doesn't think of anyone, much as he did not listen to counsel during his extravagant period. Timon is such a great character because he has deep flaws that even he doesn't understand, and goes through changes without ever confronting them in himself, whilst the audience is meant to draw the lessons from him.

Timon, for all of his experiences, never grasps a way of making money work for him. Even railing against mankind and his various visitors he can only think to throw the gold at them so they will go away, an action that is the opposite extreme but still reminiscent of his throwing money at his guests to make them stay close during the first banquet. He is treating money like nothing either way, when perhaps a more pragmatic and less extreme approach would serve him better and mean that he did not have to die.

Yet are we really meant to subscribe to the 'middle ground' as entirely the best way to appreciate life? Timon, for all of his faults, explores the extremes of his life to their fullest extent and perhaps could be considered to have lived more than anyone else in the play. The Poet and the Painter and other recipient's of Timon's gifts might survive the play to continue on wheeling and dealing, but I get the sense that they don't appreciate the truly wonderful nuances of life. Their pragmatism sees life as a game and even in his presence they cannot conceive of someone as truly good and giving as Timon was (when he discovers the deus ex machina gold in the wilderness they see this as a kind of proof that he was faking his bankruptcy and had been keeping money hidden away all along, so why not go back and ask for more), and cannot conceive of not taking advantage of that fundamental decency to the fullest possible extent.

They won't weep for Timon (as his servant, and true abandoned friend, Flavius does in the magnificent, wordless sequence of his grieving at the end of the BBC production), and could never understand the callous part they played in his downfall, and would probably see it as entirely Timon's fault.

Which to the play's credit it leaves open. Timon doesn't have to die at any point in the play. But he cannot, does not want to live in a world that is grey, not black and white and so willfully wastes away. He is not blameless, but he is a sympathetic character who did not deserve such torment.

I'm not too sure that I like Antony and Cleopatra that much as a play, though it is fascinating to consider this as the follow on play from Julius Caesar in which the previous events there provide some much needed context (given the way that events are taking place in the wake of it and that it keeps some of the same themes of a bawdier, lower class character in conflict with Caesar, though without the same political manoeuvring aspect of that play), and it is fascinating to consider it in the light of the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor second half of the 1960s Cleopatra (not to mention the Julius Caesar first half!), which covers the same events without the Shakespearian language,

There also feel as if there are parallels with Romeo & Juliet in this couple, though while Romeo & Juliet are much more sinned against than sinning by their wider circumstances, Antony and Cleopatra are much more involved and responsible for their own downfalls. Antony in particular I lost almost all sympathy for after his actions at the beginning of the play of leaving Cleopatra to return to Rome and then casually agreeing to take Caesar's sister Octavia as his wife so as to cement the bond between the two men, with little thought to the havoc that such an action would cause to everyone involved!

While she is only in the play for a very short time, I found Octavia by far the most sympathetic character (she's in a role equivalent to Ophelia in Hamlet), bartered and wedded through a dinner table pact between the two men before she even appears, and who then has a very short scene with Antony in their bedchamber where she weeps over the impossibility of having to choose to side with either her husband (who only has Cleopatra on his obsessed mind) or brother (who bartered her away in the first place) in their conflict and beating herself up on her inadequacy at being unable to 'cement the bond' between them. This is only brutally compounded by the scene in which she approaches her brother and is then berated by him with a "do you know where your husband is right now?" harangue, as if she had been unaware.

Octavia, by performing the classical female role of bartered bond forger between men, also helps to provide some effective contrast with Cleopatra herself, as someone who is actually in a position of power and able to wield it in combination with her femininity in order to control her own life rather than be controlled by others. A power that would be likely be lost if she married and puts its own constraints on relationships. In some ways Cleopatra is part of a run of female characters who have been made cold and callous by their powerful, masculine, position: mid-way on the scale moving towards Lady Macbeth at the far extreme.

Here the play seems to be pointedly contrasting Cleopatra's politicking in the bedroom with the classical masculine domain of forums and battlefields, equating the two. But the relationship with Antony is hitting on a much more emotionally devastating level of obsessive love that even Caesar feeling the familial need to revenge his sister's betrayal does.

This is where I have some problems with the play. I think that the structure is interesting but we have to have many, many scenes showing Cleopatra mooning over Antony and vice versa. The scene in which Cleopatra finds out about Antony's marriage and moves from howling self pity to incandescent rage to "well, who cares anyway?" acceptance, to "But I do!!" recanting and then back and forth a few more times, is very well done to show her pain and uncertainty of what to do. But the problem I have is that throughout the play there is just the rather tiring back and forth between "we're in the greatest love the world has ever known" (a frankly adolescent state, making me think of Romeo & Juliet) pawing of each other, and "oh God, he hates me! Well, I HATE THEM!!!" explosions of Cleopatra's temper.

Interestingly Antony is eventually much more upset and concerned about his fate in reputation and in battle than over Cleopatra (unfortunately he is pretty terrible at war, and eventually even at committing a noble suicide!), and it is her willingness to share in his interests by getting involved in war planning herself (rather than leaving it up to the men) that starts their downfall. Antony, without really thinking about her, proves to be the dominant partner in the relationship as we see Cleopatra always reacting to his presence, or absence, or temper (or marriage! or death!), rather than making any plans of her own without him.

In a fascinating move this only serves to more fully equate the love story with the battles, as the fortunes in war also takes on that back and forth "we're winning, this is the best moment of my life!" / "we're losing, let's all kill ourselves in fits of despair" vacillation between two extremes. I can see the inherent beauty in that structure, but it still feels as if events are not really getting anywhere as we get another scene of over the top joy or wallowing in despair. I suppose though that when you are the ruler of a country or one of its top generals you are allowed the luxury of a thirty minute wailing scene with your attendants following suit in harmony!

(I think however that this might not be so much my issue with the standard Shakespearian tactic of creating drama through vacillating from one extreme to the other than just my personal problem with over done displays of emotion, as I seem to remember wishing that I could just throw the asp at Elizabeth Taylor and get the final emoting over and done with ten minutes earlier in the non-Shakespearian Cleopatra film too!)

The acting is fine (particularly Emrys James as Enobarbus who does a similar escape from serving Antony at the point of no hope being left much as Camillo escaped from a cruel tryrant to his enemy in The Winter's Tale. Only Enobarbus shows the dangers of doing this as he ends up immediately paying for his switching of allegiances, as Antony immediately begins to succeed in battle again!), though I did think Colin Blakely as Antony sometimes put the wrong emphases onto some of his lines. Although that helped to subliminally annoy me with his character even before Octavia appeared on the scene! Jane Lapotoire as Cleopatra was good too, but is hampered by the characterisation which requires her to be kind of adolescently petulant throughout the early sections, giggling with her handmaids and writhing erotically on her bed in a skimpy nightgown (performing quite startling 'humping the air with hands in crotch' movements that belie the disc's 'U' rating!) while chatting with them and her chief eunuch about what Antony might be doing in Rome at that very moment. And then she has to become subdued to the point of being comatose during the final scene following Antony's death, so much so that I think one of the handmaidens actually dies of boredom halfway through the scene!

Sadly it is also one of those plays where the main actors go from SHOUTING EVERYTHING AT THE TOP OF THEIR VOICE to whispering their innermost thoughts (though only Enobarbus gets the honour of having a soliloquy to camera), in order to try and add some manic energy to the proceedings. And there is some pretty over the top drunk acting too!

It also seems a problematic play in the sense that it is one dealing with events a bit too large for comfort. Even the lead into "Part Two" of the play tries to uncharacteristically broaden events out by opening with the Lorenzo Castro painting of the key sea battle of Actium:



over which a quote from Plutarch's Lives about the failure of Antony is overlaid describing the battle and leading into the downward spiral of the film, which is an event that cannot really be reproduced even abstractly on stage (in a way this helps me to better understand and kind of appreciate more the excesses of the Cleopatra films, as the visual or action spectacle can provide its own meaning and driving force to fly over some more expositional patches of a play). So there are quite a few scenes of characters reporting that some key event of the battle has just taken place, which eventually made me feel as if I was watching a play continually talking about another, better one taking place elsewhere! (Or maybe in the locker room just hearing reports of how a game was going from the players as they came in for half-time or hobbled in injured!)

This also pointedly contrasts with the way that, usual for Shakespeare, we see something like the section in which Antony and Caesar bartering Octavia in marriage take place in one long scene and then have another scene where we see the consequences of that play out through Cleopatra learning of the news (which also brings in ideas of how long the news takes to travel and the way that a particular little thought out event has consequences that ripple out beyond its primary ones). Though those dialogue scenes are obviously easier to produce and stage than big sea battles!

Have you seen Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra -- which (in some respects) is a prequel to Shakespeare's play?