I recently signed up for a free online course at FutureLearn called "Shakespeare and His World", presented by renowned Shakespearean professor Jonathan Bate, taking a cultural (Elizabethan) theme and examining a particular play that illuminates it. This is not actually the first FutureLearn course I signed up for — I started the "Literature of the English Country House" and "England in the time of King Richard III" but although they were both interesting, I was having trouble finding the time to do even one of them, let alone two nearly simultaneously, and so I regret to say that I haven't yet finished either of them.
But Shakespeare — but Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate! — well! So here are some potted reviews of the productions I'm watching as we discuss them.
After the introductory week, the second week was "Shakespeare and Stratford", with the focus play being, perhaps unsurprisingly "The Merry Wives of Windsor", since despite being nominally set in Windsor, it is very much small-town England of the time. I watched two productions, as it happened, both that the public library had, first a production from 1980 with Gloria Grahame as Mistress Page. It was, I'm afraid, a not especially good production, though that was perhaps more the fault of the sound man and the costume designer and the cameraman than the actors. Despite being touted as being "Staged as seen in the 16th century" Grahame wore a gown in the style of at least a hundred years later, though everyone else was more-or-less 16th century. More irritating was the fact that the actors' mikes picked up every movement of their bodies, so it was a lot like the scenes in "Singin' in the Rain" where Lena's pearls drown out her dialogue. Grahame acquitted herself tolerably well with the Shakespearean prose, though she still carried herself as an indelibly 20th century woman.
I had seen the 1982 BBC production of "Merry Wives" when it was first broadcast, and I'm pretty sure I fell asleep halfway through, but I must say it improved with age. Prunella Scales and Judy Davis play Mistress Page and Mistress Ford respectively — Davis's very modern lipstick was a bit jarring, but Scales could do this kind of role in her sleep. Ben Kingsley was alarmingly manic as Master Ford, but then Ford is supposed to be madly jealous; Richard Griffiths seemed surprisingly bland as Falstaff. (Actually, it was also fun to play spot-the-actor, as there were quite a number of familiar faces, from Nigel Terry to Elizabeth Spriggs and Alan Bennett.) The costumes were excellent, and I admired the set as well, which is supposed to have been based on Hall's Croft.
For "The Birth of Theatre" in the third week, the play was "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and I watched the 1996 Adrian Noble production currently on Netflix. This was kind of weird. I liked the framing of the play as a little boy's dream — he hides under a table during Theseus's and Hippolyta's first scene, and so on — but it doesn't seem to hold up when we are asked to believe that he's still dreaming this when the "translated" Bottom (Desmond Barrit) and Titania (Lindsay Duncan) go at it, and pretty obviously. The fairies were quite Seussian. The slapstick was good — I especially liked the multiple doors when the four young lovers are wandering in the forest — but, hmm, I'm still waiting for a really good filmed version.
This week is "The World at War" and "Henry V". My library has a number of productions, but Kenneth Branagh's was the only one I brought home. A cracking production — first-rate acting, great production values, and a real sense of the both the grit and glory of war.
A Bluestocking Knits 