A Bluestocking Knits

Last week in the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" online course, we discussed "Money and the City", with "The Merchant of Venice" as the focus play.  The public library had three productions on the shelf, so since I have long found this play intriguing, I brought home all of them.  I decided to watch them chronologically, so began with the 1972 BBC Play of the Month production, with Maggie Smith and Frank Finlay.  I like both of these actors, and so it may have been no fault of theirs, but this was a rather dull production.  I kept getting distracted by various things, that Antonio looked laughably like Henry VIII, the absurd pumpkin breeches worn by the younger male leads, which were made out of cloth lattice-work, revealing all — though, to their credit, the gentlemen wore them well — and, really, how unlike a man Maggie Smith looks in drag.

Next I watched again, after many years, the 1980 BBC Shakespeare production with Warren Mitchell and John Franklyn-Robbins — Gemma Jones is Portia.  This held up pretty well.  It's a difficult play, and this cast does it capably.  I just feel that the "quality of mercy" speech shouldn't be a lecture, as so many actresses do it.  It seems to me that, yes, Portia has prepared all of her arguments — she knows that she has the ultimate one, a pound of flesh but no drop of blood — but that Shylock's stubbornness should come as a bit of a shock to her.  How can he really be demanding that a pound of flesh be cut from another man's living body?  "Then must the Jew be merciful," she says, and Shylock replies, "On what compulsion must I? tell me that."  If she looks at him in disbelief, then tries to reason with him — because, because "the quality of mercy is not strain'd" — I think it plays better, plus it would sound less like a set piece that we've all heard a thousand times before.

The third was the 2004 Pacino version, here also with Alan Corduner as Tubal.  The cast is first-rate, and Pacino does a terrific job (I was going to say "for an American", but I don't always get Pacino).  Visually stunning, with wonderful costumes and gorgeous photography, and the only production to actually be filmed in Venice, so there really are palaces and canals — though of course, to be fair, the other two were television studio productions.  I just wish this one hadn't cut so much.

By the time it came for this week's unit on "Witches and Doctors", the only "Macbeth" left on the library shelf was, alas, the 1982 BBC Shakespeare production with Nicol Williamson and Jane Lapotaire, which I didn't like much the first time around either.  He was wooden, and she took up the slack and went in rather the opposite direction.  This is one of my favorite plays, so I was hoping to see the 1972 one with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis again, after many years, or perhaps a new-to-me production — McKellen and Dench, say, or Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood.  Will definitely have to look for those.  (Alan Cumming has done what looks like a stunningly bizarre yet effective one-man version set in a mental hospital — this takes away all of the "reality" of the play, of course, since it's obviously all in his mind, but what a tour-de-force!)

Professor Bate accompanies each unit with a selection of objects from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collection, a contemporary map, a hornbook, a ceremonial pike.  I think the one I found most fascinating was this, which is a glazed money pot used for collecting the pennies from the audience at the theater.  It has no bung like a modern piggy bank, so that the only way to get the takings out is to smash it — obviously intact ones are therefore very rare, which is why he is holding it here so gingerly!  Apparenly it was not unusual for the lesser members of the company, the wardrobe or props for instance, and thus often women, to be the ones to go round with the money pots. It's a very evocative picture.

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.