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Your First Encounter with Shakespeare
I was seventeen when when Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet was released. I was a rural farm boy who knew a little — very little — about Shakespeare, had only read a few lines by him, nor had ever seen a complete play on TV, let alone a live performance.
I was blown away. My crush on Olivia Hussey is just beginning to ebb a bit, 47 years later. It was like an entire new world had been handed whole to me. For a seventeen-year-old, the drama of the last scene was overwhelming. “Come on, Juliet! Wake up, for heck’s sake!”
And the language. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I knew what it meant. Gorgeous and rhythmic. In the scene where Romeo laments being banished from the city, he cries about being “banish-ed” (two syllables, not one). My reaction: “they sure said ‘banished’ different in late medieval Italy than they do here in southern Utah.”
It was only a lot later that I finally realized that the word needed two syllables in order to stay true to the poetic form. With exceptions, virtually all of Shakespeare is in ten-syllable lines (though lower-class characters don’t have to talk in poetic form). But like all great artists, Shakespeare used the form, but wasn’t a slave to it. If a line needed eleven syllables, he’d do it now and then; he’d violate the form if necessary, but the form still mattered.
Examples of the form:
“Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
Or this from the balcony scene:
Romeo: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
. . .
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it.
Cast it off.
It is my lady; O, it is my love!”
. . .
Juliet: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny they father and refuse thy name!”
. . .
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
If that doesn’t get a moonstruck seventeen-year-old going, I don’t know what will.
So, how did you first encounter Shakespeare? Did it go well?
In the years since watching Zefferelli, I’ve seen many of the plays in performance. I’ve read all of them. I get pretty much equal enjoyment out of reading or seeing. Reading allows a more thoughtful understanding of the test; watching makes the text come alive.
All of which raises a second, perhaps unanswerable, question: is it Shakespeare the poet, or Shakespeare the dramatist that you find most appealing? Why? I admit that question — as C. S. Lewis said about grace and works — is like asking which blade of a pair of scissors is most important. But share your thoughts.
In my own mind, the poet wins the race by a nose. I could see myself never seeing another of the plays performed. I can never conceive of not reading the plays.
[I realize I haven’t even mentioned the sonnets, which stand in a category all their own].
Published in Culture, Literature
That does sound funny. :)
About a year ago, I had to buy Brannagh’s Henry V on DVD because it was not among the many films available for digital download. At least it’s available on Blu-Ray now.
What do y’all think of The Hollow Crown series?
I’m pretty sick of Hamlet, regardless of how well the production is put together. It keeps being remade because lead actors love the attention. Is it any coincidence that the majority of Hamlet movies are directed by the lead actor? I think not.
That being said, I actually genuinely enjoyed the Ethan Hawke version. Making Hamlet an insufferable hipster video artist felt like the truest portrayal of that damned mopey prince always talking to himself. However, Hawke clearly stole my idea about using corporate New York City as a setting (though I thought it up as a setting for King Lear ;-).
The David Tennant/Patrick Stewart version is also relatively good, but still doesn’t manage to transcend the insufferable mopeyness of the story:
Curmudgeonly iconoclast that I am, I generally prefer the less outrageously popular plays.
For example, I loved Titus:
I loved Richard III:
I’m looking forward to seeing Cymbeline:
And I still have to see Coriolanus:
I’m curious about Coriolanus as well. And what about The Tempest?
The Anthony Hopkins version of Titus Andronicus was a bit too popsy for me. I’m not sure that story could ever be really enjoyable, though.
What modernizations, if any, are well done? Is it possible to set a Shakespeare play in a more familiar time or place and preserve the drama?
I liked the recent version of “Much Ado About Nothing” from last year or so.
Aaron, check these out.
Methinks my first encounter with the Bard was one rainy night in a dark, mud-soaked alley near Blackfriars when he and his company tramped by. I wasn’t able to see the great poet and playwright very distinctly amidst the throng but I did catch a glimpse of his bobbing, balding pate. Prithee, forgive me for I must be showing my age.
Oh, all right. It was Zefferelli’s Romeo & Juliet and yes I fell in love with Olivia Hussey. Does anyone have her phone number?
Hamlet is in my opinion an overrated play. It’s structure is a mess, going from one incident to another with loose connections. What makes it so popular is this great character at the center and his moral dilemna and the brilliance of the poetry. TS Eliot considered it flawed, and I did too until I recently read it and changed my mind. Still there are greater Shakespeare plays.
I was not aware of it. Looks pretty good. I may have to get it. Richard II is my favorite of the history plays.
I like Hamlet’s messiness. I don’t think it would be nearly as interesting if it were elegant.
That being said, which do you consider greater?
Southern Utah, where we add and subtract syllables at will. Not to mention eliminating the “g” on “ing” words.
You can get them at Audible too. And, yes, they’re very good.
I don’t know how we got this far into this conversation without referencing one of the best Frasier episodes of all time (and a superb example of stunt casting).
Growing up in England, primary school age. Whenever we were sick (pre most immunizations), we were given Lamb’s Shakespeare as our only entertainment. It tided us over from being too sick to do anything but sleep to being too well for Mother to put up with running upstairs to care for us any longer.
Secondary school age, from twelve to eighteen, we studied a Shakespeare play in excruciating detail each year. I saw my first play performed, acted in my first play and helped in the production of many more during my time at college.
Fifth grade. The sixth grade did a full dress performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I mainly remember Bottom prompting his cast mates from the papier-mâché asses’ head, which echoed a bit and added some additional comedy.
The next year, Mrs. O’Donnell was wise enough not to make it an annual event. Instead, after finishing the required material, the top reading group read Hamlet and Twelfth Night and, if I remember correctly, the Scottish Play, aloud (with interruption for discussion of vocabulary, history and interpretation) passing the parts around each time with each student often reading more than one part in each class section. Being stabbed behind the arras was funny rather than dramatic. Sixth grade boys seem to have about the right level of sophistication for some of Shakespeare’s humor.
In eighth grade, a full street clothes production of Romeo and Juliet, the choice of a swishy and (given my term paper subject which he approved without discussion) pretentious gay male teacher who seemed to have a crush on blonde and long-haired Romeo. He in turn used his star status to make progress with the girls, several of whom had crushes on him as well.
A good repertory Lear somewhere in there.
Then at UC Davis, we studied The Tempest, which is to this day my favorite play. That English class was coordinated with the Drama department’s outdoor production of the play. It began around sundown on a warm spring day. Magical.
Are you asking which play I consider Shakespeare’s greatest? I said somewhere earlier King Lear, and Lear is in my opinion the greatest play ever written.
Growing up in Calgary, we had Julius Caesar in Grade 9 (yawn), Romeo and Juliet in Grade 10 (which meant I, too, watched Zefferelli’s wonderful movie version), Macbeth in Grade 11 (which was even better because we watch Polanski’s version, and it had B**BS in it! Woo-hoo! (How that made it past the school board and into our classroom, I’ll never know…)) and then Hamlet in Grade 12.
Macbeth was the one that resonated with me (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it was because of the nakidity or not). Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself” was/is something I could/can relate to more than Hamlet’s vacillations and Hillary Clinton’s very existence proves to us that the character of Lady Macbeth is as relevant today as it was in Shakespeare’s day.
My sister showed Polanski’s Macbeth, and the boys were really excited at the idea of seeing boobs in class. Then they got to that scene and realized that saggy old lady boobs weren’t quite the same.
For me, it was Wayne & Schuster’s Rinse The Blood From My Toga.
How dare you disparage any play that includes that much stabbing!!!