I saw Julie Taymor’s film of Titus Andronicus in February and was blown away by the spectacular set design, the costuming, and the acting. I just bought the DVD and was again blown away. I then watched Baz Luhrman’s version of Romeo and Juliet. What a piece of crap! The sad thing is that all the young American actors mumbled the lines and clearly did not understand what they were saying. The meaning of the words was lost in an incoherent shouting. So that led me to my GD question: which nationality performs Shakespeare’s works the best? Does speaking his poetry in Received Pronunciation convey something that our poor, flat Yank accents leave out?
In addition, I’m curious how many SDMBers read Shakespeare or seek out productions of his plays? Do y’all find any relevance in Shakespeare’s works for today’s audiences? Which plays are the best or worst?
I don’t think any nationality performs Shakespeare better—we just SEE the best British productions. I’m sure there are more than enough really bad ones there, too.
My favorite is “Taming of the Shrew,” and I think his comedies have aged better than his dramas. I also think he’s been ruined by being shoved down our throats from childhood as the ONLY good playwright pre-1950 (like D.W. Griffith is thought of as the ONLY good silent film director).
By the time most of us are out of college, we are so goddam sick of Shakespeare and have read and seen so much of him (mostly in bad productions) that we’re off old theater for life.
Give me a good Clyde Fitch melodrama any day!
I have a graduate degree in theatre and performance theory, so Shakespeare was impossible to avoid. By way of credentials, I can say that I have read all 37 plays, and performed professionally in about 10 of them. I also worked as an agent to a professional touring Shakespeare company, so I saw Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors, MacBeth, Taming of the Shrew and the Tempest 65 times each. Frankly, I have just about had it with the reverence the theatre community, academia and the general public have for Shakespeare. He wrote 37 good plays that we know about (some better than others). His works are of historical value, but are not the only worthwhile works to survive Tudor or Stuart theatre. IMHO Marlowe, Kidd, et al are just as worthy of production today as Shakespeare.
As for the question of accents, neither modern British or modern American accents are close to Elizabethan London (scholars estimate that the North Atlantic (Irish-sounding) lilt of Newfoundlanders or south-western Brits most closely approximates what Shakes.'s contemporaries would have spoken. It comes down to the range of notes produced, like music. I am not an expert on lingustics, but I have read that modern Oxford English accent (the accent of ‘properly’ trained London actors) produces 4-5 different notes. Modern American, about 2. By contrast, modern Australian - 7. The Stratford Festival on Ontario (largest Shakes. theatre in the world) trains its actors in a neutral ‘mid-atlantic’ accent that works, if you like that sort of thing.
Everyone knows that Shakespear is best when performed in Klingon. Atlthough I believe that Hindi comes in at a close second.
Shakespeare is the most-produced playwrite in the United States. I think the best productions I’ve seen are British, but IMO it’s a product of the intense seriousness they apply to actor’s training for Shakespeare-in-particular than you usually get in the U.S., rather than any innate difference in culture or accent.
Shakespeare isn’t the only great playwrite of the past, or even his own era, but his eloquence and dramatic instincts are unparalleled. I’ve read two or three of his plays in school because I had to, and all the rest on my own because…well, he’s really good. (Well, to be honest, I haven’t read Pericles or The Two Noble Kinsmen yet.)
The worst is when some director tries to mix brits and yanks, like Branagh did here.
Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, and Robert Sean Leonard?
And Robin Williams and Jack Lemmon in ‘Hamlet’? And don’t get me started on that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fiasco. Christ, some of those actors have trouble with American dialouge.
It’s just sad.
I don’t think it’s linguistic but rather interpretation. The great thing about Shakespeare is that the stories can so easily be moved to a modern background and it still works! Language has little to do with it. If it did, it would obviously be best in the original Danish.
The problem with Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, IMHO was not that the actors were American but that neither Leonardo DiCaprio nor Claire Danes could speak the lines properly. It’s a real pity because visually, the film was very good. IMHO, the best performances were the two British actors, though, even though they were doing and American and a Spanish accent, respectively.
Acting in this country is more stage-based than in the US. Both the cinema and TV industries are smaller; it’s much more difficult to get propelled to stardom at an early stage in one’s career and most actors, even the ones who appear on TV and in films, continue to appear on stage. As in the US, Shakespeare is the most produced playwright, so my guess is that, other things being equal, British actors are more familiar with Shakespeare than their American counterparts.
The bottom line is that being able to speak Shakespeare’s lines in a natural manner without burying the verse is a difficult skill to acquire, and not one that is acquired by appearing in action blockbusters, mindless adolescent comedies or TV soaps, whatever your nationality.
That’s not to say that we don’t have plenty of bad productions of Shakespeare, but we do have the RSC and the National Theatre, both of which turn out consistently excellent productions (The Ian McKellen Richard III was based on the NT production), through which most of our best actors have passed at some time in their careers.
I agree. The RSC now has a policy that one of its theatres will always be staging a production of a play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and I’ve seen about half a dozen of these over the past few years: Tamburlaine the Great and The Silent Woman particularly spring to mind.
[sidetrack]Restoration Comedy is also still tremendously popular on the British stage, and I think it represents an enduring strand in British humour. The Beaux’ Stratagem, Man of Mode and The Country Wife have all been produced in London in the past five years or so.[/sidetrack]
However, I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that Shakespeare’s contemporaries were anywhere near as infulential as he was. I would bet that Hamlet alone has had more impact on the English language than the works of Marlowe and Kidd put together.
The problem is verse-speaking rather than accents. A generation of actors who have worked for the RSC have been trained (by John Barton) to speak the texts of Shakespeare’s plays as verse. There is no reason why Americans could not be trained in the same way. (Incidentally, the idea that there was ever one ‘Shakespearian’ accent is misleading - there was no standard ‘posh’ accent in Elizabethan London and any number of regional accents would have been used.) Shakespeare no doubt had to use some actors whose verse-speaking was just as bad.
The commercial dominance of Shakespeare is easily explained - brand recognition. Most potential theatre/film goers know something about ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ etc. and therefore feel more comfortable about seeing a play/film with a 400-year old script. This is true even for those plays by him which they have never read or seen. Getting the public to attend a play by Marlowe or Webster is as difficult as getting them to attend a new play by an unknown playwright who is still alive. The demographics of cinema audiences compounds the problem for films. Leonardo DiCaprio was not cast as Romeo for his ability to speak the lines.
Some of the best Shakespeare was done by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Closer to the original than Baz Luhrman anyway.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company are still on in the West End of London and seem to have been there for a few years now. They are also doing The Complete Word of God (Abridged) and the Complete History of America (Abridged).
All three productions are absolutely hysterical.
As an American Shakespeare fan, just let me add:
IT’S NOT OUR FAULT!!!.
I’ve seen some decent productions of Shakespeare over here, although nothing that compares to the few British ones I’ve been lucky enough to see (on tape). We appreciate properly done Shakespeare, unfortunately Hollywood is a friggin’ cesspool. Kenneth Branagh produces probably the greatest filmed Hamlet EVER, and a few years later we get Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke setting the damn thing in a laundromat. Good job, Mirimax.
Don’t get me started on Baz(o the Clown) Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. Everything was terrible about that film, most notably the complete waste of Pete Posthelwaite (sp?). I couldn’t finish watching that piece of garbage.
I do have a question. Now taking for granted (still haven’t seen Love’s Labour Lost) that Much Ado About Nothing is Kenneth Branagh’s least good Shakespeare film, can’t it be said that Denzel Washington was at competent in an otherwise failed picture? I know Reeves was his usual vapid self, and that Leonard needed a ton of work, but I always thought that Washington, at least, seemed to have do his lines moderately well.
I have to disagree with criticisms of Bazza’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (as we call him in Australia). In a past life, when I was an English teacher, other teachers who had to teach the play to 15 year olds found it a fantastic resource, and although I don’t think it was the most brilliant movie ever, it helped to put the STORY of R&J back into modern culture. I didn’t have any problems understanding any of the speech, and my buddy who kept taking me out to see it, who had previously hated Shakespeare (for no good reason except disliking books taught at school) didn’t either.
Hopefully having a popular, faithful movie verion of the play will avoid popular misconceptions such as Milhouse on the Simpsons talking about a failed love affair with “We started out like Romeo and Juliet and ended in tragedy”.
HenrySpencer.
Not meaning to be rude, but Millhouse’s line was a joke. It was supposed to be so deliberately ironic and obtuse that it woud draw a chuckle from the viewer. I love that line. Don’t be talkin’ 'bout the line. 
Yikes!!! :eek:
Should I even explain that I knew it was a joke by the writers of the show, but was based on an actualy ignorance among many people about what the play is about? My point was, the irony was intended by the writers, but not by Milhouse (assuming he’s standing in for a certain group of real people, such as school children).
HenrySpencer