Greatest. Shakespeare. Speech. Ever.
Heh. As soon as I saw that post, I said to myself “That’s going to be St. Crispin’s Day”.
And Shakespeare was right, too: To this day, when anyone mentions St. Crispin’s Day, that battle is the first and usually only thing to enter mind.
Gentlemen in England now abed, will think themselves acurs’d and hold there manhood cheap while any speaks that fought with us today upon st crispins day!
It’s right up there. I vote for Mark Anthony’s speech from Julius Ceasar (my heart is in the coffin there with Ceasar, and I must pause while it come back to me…) Brutus had the crowd eating out of his hand up to that point.
For those who don’t know, the young boy seen at the 2:29 mark is Batman (Christian Bale)…
Oh yeah, so it is. Wish I knew anyone who would find that piece of film trivia as fun as I do. I’ll have to store it away until the next time this scene comes up in conversation.
Very brief highjack, but anyone here familiar with Firesign Theater’s “Anythynge You Want To” – originally recorded under the title “Shakespeare’s Lost Comedy?” Some remarkably fun and funny pseudo-Shakespearean guff here, with lots and lots of deliberate anachronisms.
The best scene (IMO) is the throne-room speech where the King is calling his Lords to prepare for battle…and all of the terms are Hollywood movie-terms! “Now, studious Burbank! Come, lofty Mulholland! We shall make such a production…” etc.
I agree with those that have said to go see a play performed.
In the schools I attended Shakespeare was poorly taught. It was made boring, if you can believe it. We never even read the works out loud.
Then I saw a production of Measure for Measure in television. I don’t know why I even bothered to watch, but it was wonderful! I didn’t know you could laugh at Shakespeare. Dirty jokes, illicit sex, cross-dressing, it opened my eyes. I went back to watch other plays, even read them,
Shakespeare had something in common with Cecil B. DeMille, or Stephen Spielberg, he knew the kind of things people would watch. And he said it all so beautifully, for the most part anyway.
Plus, so many themes are still relevant, greed, lust, honor, ambition. When you see continuing wars in the world, go read the Duke of Burgundy’s speech to the kings of England and France, in Henry v. He asks why they can’t make peace, since the land is going to rack and ruin with continuing warfare.
To clarify, he wasn’t just an un-speaking extra in that one scene, he had an actual role in the film (Robin the luggage-boy). People forget both that Bale was a child actor and (I think because) he is actually British. He starred in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.
This program is testimony to the power and relevance of Shakespeare:
“Shakespeare acting program helps veterans deal with emotions”
I’m wondering if, after all this discussion, the OP has an idea why Shakespeare is a Big Deal?
I hope not. All this thread can show the OP is that a lot of other people appreciate Shakespeare, and if that’s what he bases his appreciation of any art on, well, that’s pretty shallow. If he learns to truly appreciate Shakespeare, it’s going to be from watching a good performance.
Yes, but he can still get “an idea” of what it’s about from others’ comments.
Louis L’Amour used that line in one of his westerns, when a character remarked that Shakespeare “… just took a bunch of sayings and strung them all together.” :smack:
I saw a little theatre production of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” that made it more “kid-friendly” by having entre-acts where a second group of actors would come on and burlesque the preceding act in plain simple English with masks and hats to denote different characters.
Heh. That was my feeling when I saw Casablanca for the first time. I knew it wasn’t true, but it still sounded like a bunch of cliches to me :).
Quite so. I’m wondering if the OP now sees why other people think Shakespeare is a Big Deal. That was his question.
I don’t care if he ever develops an appreciation. Anyway, he didn’t ask, “How can I learn to love Shakespeare.”
When I was in high school, there was a re-release of The Godfather. None of my friends or I had ever seen it. When the mob guy comes in and intones, “Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes,” my friend leaned over and said, “I can’t believe they used that cliche!”
Another vote for both the strength of emotion and the complexity of characters (although these are not universal across his plays or all his characters…). Along with the aesthetic appeal of the writing in and of itself, Shakespeare’s language is well-suited to high emotional drama: it’s great for being overwrought in. 
Somewhat off-topic, but in regards to high emotional drama, there’s a Japanese comic-book adaptation of Richard the Third that’s currently coming out in English, Requiem of the Rose King by Aya Kanno, which filters Shakespeare through Japanese girls’ comics to produce something with insane amounts of emotional torque. The visual and narrative esthetics of Japanese girls’ comics means that everyone is beautiful and tormented and crazy and doomed, and then it ladles in gender trauma and family dysfunction and just goes for the throat. Apparently the original Japanese works in excerpts from a venerated translation of the play; unfortunately the English translation doesn’t try to go back and put in the original Shakespearean language, which is kind of a pity… It has some significant differences from the play, but it’s an interesting example of another culture’s take on European literature.
I don’t think that’s quite what Shakespeare had in mind.
I’d really like to hear an entire production in OP. The bits I’ve heard by David and Ben Crystal are just so marvelous to listen to.
Try Kurosawa’s movie Throne of Blood (adaptation of Macbeth), or Ran (adaptation of King Lear).