I’m not sure, at all, what to make of this play.

The movie has spectacle down pat, in scenes and costuming to match the gory spectacle of its events. There are a few scenes thrown in purely for art value: for example when Titus begs the passing Tribunes to be pitiful to his two sons, there’s a two-minute … thing, with some kind of angel(s) blowing trumpets and a son’s face superimposed on a sheep lying on a stone altar, with flame effects as a backdrop. I really don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Sacrifice? Vulnerability? And the introduction is very weird. Young Lucius is playing war with toy soldiers in a modern-looking kitchen, spraying ketchup everywhere for blood. Then there’s an explosion outside the kitchen window, a man (perhaps the Clown) picks him up and carries him downstairs, to … Rome. I guess. The Coliseum. And the soldiers walk like robots, and they’re all encrusted with mud. And some of them are riding motorcycles. I don’t know. It’s all very weird.

Though the movie has very little gore on the horror-movie scale, it ranks with modern plots in random violence, so I can only imagine the reception of its performance in Shakespeare’s day — or is it a modern fallacy to think Shakespeare’s audience was less inured to violence than we are? I’ll check and see if I can find some accounts of the reaction. The SparkNotes summary says the killing and maiming is “the essence of the play. Titus Andronicus is a non-stop potboiler catalog of abominations.” So I’m not far off in thinking that plot is not the play’s selling point.

Anthony Hopkins as Titus is disturbing. I was trying to separate this character from Hannibal Lecter and especially in the last act, that’s almost impossible. I can’t decide if it’s good casting or playing to type, but it definitely draws some comparisons to Silence of the Lambs.

The pacing in this production, however, is dragging. I don’t know if any lines were cut, but I doubt it. I kept thinking it was almost over, only to see I was less than an hour in, then when I checked again, only halfway through. I’m staying up late to get this post done because I could no longer stand the guilt of a long-promised undone task (of which I have more than one), so perhaps I’m watching the time a little closely. But really, at 162 minutes it could stand to be sped up. Young Lucius is just walking, memorably, symbolically, endingly, whatever, for a full three minutes after the last line and before the end credits started.

I’m sure it would all have made better sense if I’d read the play first, but like I said, I had had it and I wanted to get this done and posted, so it was movie first. I’ll still read the play (and look ahead to see what Bloom has to say about it), and as always I’m grateful to have a visual sense of the action, but Titus Andronicus is not quite up there with my favorites.

Shakespeare in Love (1998) is old enough that I won’t belabor the plot. I did enjoy it — apart from the suggestion that Marlowe out-and-out told Shakespeare the plot of Romeo and Juliet; I am, for irrational reasons, not a far of Marlowe’s — but I liked the way it folded in Shakespeare’s (mythical) love life in the playing of Romeo & Juliet, the way Marlowe’s death was folded into the events (and Rupert Everett as Marlowe), and that Viola (who inspires Viola in Twelfth Night) as Thomas Kent was cast as Romeo, not predictably as Juliet. I also liked Judi Dench in general and Ben Affleck as an arrogant “superstar” who is content with the “lower” part of Mercutio because the play is just that powerful. All the players and the audience thought the play was powerful. As I’ve said elsewhere, so do I.

And the costumes — oh, the costumes. All beautiful, all accurate to my limited knowledge. (The Oscar people seemed to think so too.) I mentioned the references to unbraced doublets in Julius Caesar, and thanks to this movie, I know what that looks like. A small thing, but valuable.

I did enjoy the movie, overall. I have historical nitpicks but I don’t have the references to back them up, so I suspended my disbelief on those points for the sake of the rest.

In other news, I am thoroughly procrastinating Titus Andronicus. I can’t decide if I want to read the play first, see Titus first, or do something else entirely for the space of those four hours. I have been choosing the third, but it doesn’t get this play read, watched, or both.

A friend of mine is moving, and I’m helping her go through some things; from her old Shakespeare class notes, I picked up a couple of articles printed from JSTOR’s archive of Shakespeare Quarterly.

One of the articles is Eric Rasmussen’s “Fathers and Sons in Hamlet“. The content is interesting; the length is what caught me off guard. It’s four short paragraphs, two footnotes, less than 350 words. I didn’t know one could publish such short articles. It could have been a blog post!

I could have written such a blog post, was my next thought. Had I Rasmussen’s acuity, anyway, to see “five pairs of murdered fathers and revenger sons” and that Hamlet “achieves a perfect balance: a subplot in which a son revenges his murdered father (Laertes-Polonius) is counterpoised against a subplot in which a son does not (Fortinbras); meanwhile, a classical allusion to revenge (Pyrrhus) is set against a classical allusion to the lack of revenge (Brutus).” (p. 463, SQ, Winter 1984) I registered Polonius’ comment that he “did enact Julius Caesar”, but I didn’t connect it to Brutus. The revenge/lack of revenge subplots flew right by me.

This, also, is why I am not a famous Shakespearean scholar, and Rasmussen is. Notably, he is editing a semicolon-less new Complete Works for the RSC, about which I am very excited, and according to that last PDF link, he is General Textual Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project, which I didn’t know existed but is getting a sidebar link so I can visit often.

The fascinating things one learns by following breadcrumbs!

I’m back to reading Bloom again — this Shakespeare thing is a great break from editing projects and the Wheel of Fortune, Employment version — and I just finished his chapter on Romeo and Juliet. Relevant to Bloom’s title, he states that Romeo, Juliet, the Nurse, and Mercutio are some of Shakespeare’s earliest “exuberantly realized characters”, and goes on in that vein for awhile.

I have recently held that Romeo and Juliet could equally have been a comedy as a tragedy. Until Tybalt’s death, everything in the play is reversible, or attributable only to chance; even with the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, there is still a chance for a happy ending. Bloom agrees with me, to a point:

With just a few alterations, Shakespeare could have transformed Romeo and Juliet into a play as cheerful as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The young lovers, escaped to Mantua or Padua, would not have been victims of Verona, or of bad timing, or of cosmological contraries asserting their sway. Yet this travesty would have been intolerable for us, and for Shakespeare….

It is that very possibility that makes the play so magnetic. It could work out well, but it just doesn’t.

Bloom also quotes Hazlitt, describing Act II, Scene ii (”O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon”), in a sentence that I think describes the larger play as well:

[Shakespeare] has founded the passion of the two lovers not in the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced.

Part of the tragedy is that they’ve only had a taste of the deep love that they could have. They barely know what they’re missing, but the audience knows exactly. Bloom says of a later scene (”Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day”) that “Romeo and Juliet’s aubade is so disturbing precisely because they are not courtly love sophisticates working through a stylized ritual.” Had the play been about such sophisticates, the tragedy would not have cut so deeply, may not have endured as long as it has. Shakespeare has turned the world and the very stars against these young and innocent lovers, while such sophisticates live to woo another day. Romeo and Juliet have been married for mere days, have loved each other once, before they die. It’s absolutely heartrending.

I don’t think Shakespeare started writing the play as a comedy and changed his mind halfway through. I think he meant it as a tragedy the whole time, unless he went back and edited heavily to make those drastic changes and add in all the little unfortunate circumstances and near misses. (Bloom asserts that Shakespeare did so with Hamlet, that the “Ur-Hamlet” was written by Shakespeare himself as an earlier draft of the play we now have as Hamlet.) But I do think that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet hinges on the possibility of a happy ending, and the fact that such an ending is denied.

Writing about Shakespeare usually requires quoting Shakespeare. There’s the time-honored way of doing it, citing which edition one is using (my preferred version is the Norton Shakespeare) in a footnote or a reference list or a works-cited section. But this is the 21st century and I’m running a Shakespeare blog, so I like to be able to link readers to the text and make the context visible with a mouse click. It’s no replacement for owning a physical book, but it works for the medium.

According to a recent Google blog post, Google’s Book Search now has the Complete Works online and searchable. Here’s the front page and here’s a sample page from Macbeth showing the “Tomorrow” speech.

I’m still not sure how I feel about Google Book Search as a whole. For the Shakespeare project, they seem to be using old (read: public domain) editions — this is the Clarendon Press edition of Macbeth, published in 1878. It has endnotes and few textual glosses, and I know there’s more recent scholarship about the play. Less modern spellings are sometimes retained: searching the play for the word “tomorrow” yielded no results, but I got them when I searched “to-morrow”. Parts of pages have been cut off in the scanning process, too, and not every page is readable.

MIT’s Complete Works is a better resource, at least for my purposes. It too uses public-domain editions, but the text is HTML and therefore always readable. Readers also have the option of viewing the play scene by scene or the entire play on one page. There isn’t a search feature, but I work around that by viewing the entire play and using my browser’s Find function (Ctrl+F in Firefox). The problem of spelling remains, and there are absolutely zero notes or glosses, but the ability to link to a scene rather than a page is indispensable — especially since many Shakespeare scholars cite act, scene, and line rather than page number. The Google Books version doesn’t have that refinement.

I’m not sure why Google Books bothered, actually. Their version is kind of a pain. If you absolutely need notes and can’t get your hands on a physical version of the play, give it a whirl — but Folger editions (with notes on facing pages) are $5 paperbacks at your local Barnes & Noble, and that version is a good hundred years newer.