Shakespeare & Film

I am attempting to go read all of shakespeare's plays in chronological order. I am at the beginning of the beginning - Henry VI Pt 1. I think I may have read this in my freshman humanities class - (is this one of the ones with falstaff). When writing films, I have started telling paul that our scripts have too many characters for a low budget film. (I think we had 23 in our last film) This probably betrays my lack of vision, but luckily Paul ignores me and I lack conviction and so we continue to write for too many characters. So does Shakespeare!

Granted it is really not fare to compare plays with films, but in many ways i am not quiet sure why. The most obvious reason is first, in theater there has to be more obvious action to direct the viewer's attention. How do we direct action? Dialogue. Our attention is directed towards the character talking and attends to what that character is doing. Here the playwright holds sway (which is probably the playwright rather than the director is the prestige position in theater.

In film we can manipulate the visual field. We can use a close up or a zoom or a dolly to direct the view towards a particular action - AND we dont have to use dialogue as a signal. We can just use visual cues. So here we have the director as opposed to the writer holding the prestige position, because it is the nuance of the acting and the location of the shots that tell the audience what to pay attention to - dialogue is not less important - but it is not the only tool in the tool chest.

In film we dont need as many characters. Props become characters, environments become characters - I wonder what it would be to film Henry VI pt 1 and turn some characters into 'filmic characters.'

It seems this blog post ended up at a completely different place than I had anticipated when I started, I was going to talk about how shakespeare differentiates his characters with dialogue - but i like this subject matter better.

Shakespeare: a Magical Realist

I just wrapped up my first season of the learned league. I finished 11 in Rundle R. My record was not great, but good enough to move up to Rundle B.

One quiz had the following Shakespeare related question: 'Ghosts appear onstage in four of the major works of William Shakespeare. Name two of the four.' HAMLET, JULIUS CAESAR, MACBETH, RICHARD III

My thought process for this was something like:

Macbeth. There are ghosts in Macbeth, right? Lady Macbeth sleep walks and goes through that whole, out out damn spot speech. Does she see a ghost? Ok well maybe she does not see a ghosts. There are those witches in Macbeth - they are kind of like ghosts....'

Hamlet. Hamlet sees his dead father, right. Is this a ghost or is Hamlet going insane - I don't remember. How about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They die and are ghosts in that Tom Stoppard play.

Then my mind wanders the Tempest, I've never actually read that play, but I've heard enough to write a good High School English paper about it. Isn't Caliban a sorcerer? He is some sort of creepy creature? A ghost? I don't think so, but some sort of hybrid creature. Are there any ghosts in the histories? How can there be, they are historical right? (But they have ghosts on stage.) How about those nymphs in A Midsummers Night Dream, any ghosts?

In lots of Shakespeare plays, there may not be ghosts, but there are other magical elements.
Shakespeare was a magical realist!!!

I was surprised at this (obvious perhaps) revelation. The plays are so engrossing that I was did not register these bizarre magical elements (unlike in contemporary fiction where there is a self-conscious nod-nod wink-wink with respect to magical realism). Witches in Scotland, of course! Ghosts in Denmark, it's not really a ghost, just a hallucination - even if it appears on stage. Contemporary magical realism seems to be an escape from the mechanization and demystification of our world. Science has given us a label for everything, but that label is not enough, it has a one dimensional meaning. So, we reject the science and the label for a more layered/mythological magical realist story.

Shakespeare rides the line between the real world and the magical world or the irrational world and we are never quite sure which world we are in - the magical world seems real, and the real world seem magical.

Seek ye the Gnarl!, in the words of Rudy Rucker.