This version of Much Ado About Nothing is a reasonably good adaption. It also helps to be aware that the title itself is a pun: “nothing” was slang for female genitalia.
But the best way to gain an appreciation of Shakespeare’s comedies is to find the nearest Shakespeare festival. The actors generally do Shakespeare exclusively, know the material well, and can make it come to life, i.e., put the emphasis on the right words to make the innuendo clear.
ETA: Heck, even Hamlet has dirty jokes. “Do you think I speak of country matters?”
If you’d see Midsummer Night’s Dream performed (well), you’d know it was a comedy.
I think Taming of the Shrew is his funniest, but I don’t know what movie version to recommend. The most famous (Elizabeth Taylor) version is missing a whole lot of the dialogue Shakespeare wrote.
If you didn’t see it performed, it wasn’t worth it. That show is made by Puck, so if you have a good Puck, and decent actors, you have it made, and it will make you laugh like a fool at the antics.
I just saw the 1999 version of it, which was Ok, with lots of pretty girls, and Michelle Pfeiffer smoking up the screen as Titania. Funny, too…not the greatest, but worth a shot. Rupert Everett was Oberon and someone named Stanley Tucci as Puck, who was also very good. Calista Flockhart as Helena did wonderfully, hair all askew, and so cute. I thought Dominic West is far, far cuter than Christian Bale, though.
I just watched the first ten minutes of that film on Youtube (the next part has been taken down due to copyright infringement), and didn’t understand a word of it. It seems horrendously dull, though. All I understood from that clip is “Visitors are coming, and everyone is excited”. But I have no idea where we are, or who any of the characters are.
Perhaps subtitles in modern English would help me!
The dialogue between Emma Thompson and the messenger is pretty amusing if you listen to it. But yeah, you’ve got to watch more than the first 10 minutes to understand the plot.
But if you’re predetermined to hate anything Shakespeare related, there’s not much point, is there?
Good grief! I couldn’t even finish that clip, the way those two were rattling off that gibberish faster and faster made we want to scream! I haven’t got a clue what the audience were laughing and clapping at. The guy’s body was nice to look at, though
Maybe I sound like I’m being willfully obtuse. But I literally don’t understand a single sentence of this stuff.
Of course, Shakespeare himself would swipe from earlier works. There wasn’t a lot of respect for copyright back then, and so when Shakespeare came across a good story from somewhere else he’d merrily steal it.
Many of Shakepeare’s stories are really timeless stories that have been told for centuries and will be told for centuries more, varying here and there, the details changing, but the basic idea remaining the same.
For the comedies, or any funny lines, if you can understand Saturday Night Live now then you would have understood Shakespeare back then. Or even something like the Daily Show - I’ve only seen a few episodes, but so much of it is rooted in specific US current affairs humour that it passes me by.
You have to remember, also, that rhyme was a lot commoner back then. It was basically a very useful way for actors - with so few written scripts between them that none survive - to remember lines as well as sounding cool, and people were still used to hearing people telling stories and reading poems round the fire. I mean, the novel as we know it didn’t even exist back then - it was mostly still stories in verse form. Not everybody was literate, after all, esp. not the poor people. They got their stories aurally.
And the sword-fights and pratfalls (both of which happen in the tragedies and the comedies) would have taken up a lot of stage time. The talking, not so much.
Plus, if you watch a film set in modern times using Elizabethan vernacular, then you lose a lot of the contextual clues. Baz Luhrmann did do this amazingly well with his R&J though, IMO. He made Post-Haste into a delivery company, for example.
For Elizabethan audiences, sending something post-haste would have been like sending something by first class mail. It was just a phrase. In fifty years’ time, ‘first class mail’ will probably give kids a moment’s thought. Actually, it won’t take anywhere near that long.
I want Alan Rickman to play Richard. I even checked IMDB, because that casting is so perfect that it could not have gone by-the-by, but it seems it has. He’d have exactly the right amount of sudden bile, dark humour, resigned cynicism and potential underlying goodness for Richard, and he even looks a bit like the portraits.
AD is very self-knowing and so are a lot of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s not a bad comparison at all.
