Missy - Hamlet ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 It’s been a minute since I watched the Gibson Hamlet. When I first saw this movie, in a theater, the year was 1990 and I was in my youth (high school). I LOVED it. It was the first Shakespeare that made me laugh and made me mad and it had a great sword fight. 

After I’d seen it I thought of myself as a Shakespeare fan. I’d seen Shakespeare plays before, and because of my King James Bible-centric education, and church going, I didn’t have nearly the barrier to entry that I find most people struggle with. 

I’ve seen it a few times but not again since my kids were born. That’s 16 plus years absence and a world of experience. 

I’m happy to report that I’m still into this movie. I don’t love it the way I did but I enjoyed it and am happy to have revisited it. I have rated it 4 stars. 

I’d forgotten just how much the Zeffirelli leaned into the Freudian interpretation of the play. I don’t find myself as compelled by that reading but I certainly see where it comes from.

The newest thing for me had to do with Gertrude. In the final everybody-dies-part of the play I teared up a little at the farewell between mother and son. 

I haven’t thought much about Shakespearean mothers before. His plays tend to be very father-daughter. He himself being father to daughters levins these relationships I imagine, but me, I’m a mom.

I’m going to score the Shakespearean moms in this blog. So I’ll start with Gertrude. I find Gertrude to be a very meh mom. She clearly cares tremendously for her son but can’t seem to keep her head straight enough to be helpful to him or even reasonable. I feel like if your husband, the king, dies unexpectedly the next move is to get your fully adult offspring onto the throne. Her move was to get into a new relationship and pawn off responsibility. Then not let her son leave to deal with his obvious angst, which he was trying to do. Self centered and/or dumb Gertrude gets a C+. When it was obvious, she tried to do the right thing, but she sure wasn’t looking for the right thing to do.

Anyway…

While watching bits of Hamlet this week, in fits and starts, (life/kids/work/etc)  I also read the Bill Bryson Shakespeare book. A Fantastic book! I’m such a fan of Bryson.

And I’ve started listening to a Great Courses Lecture that I’ve enjoyed in the past. It is  called  William Shakespeare: Comedies,Histories, and Tragedies, I assume named after the First Folio. 

I’m a massive fan of the Great Courses and this one has some nice reflections broken down play by play that are going to be helpful, I hope, in organizing my thoughts. 

Here are my thoughts therefore. 

Discussing the characters and their motivations with Mariam I am stuck by the contemporary desire to pathologize. I find remarkable also how great Shakespeare was at comic relief. 

Comic relief was a new or at least relatively new literary technique in the theater and he was just so good at it. Hamlets asides and 4th wall breaking, snide jibes, and backtalk land with fantastic punch to my modern ear. 

I enjoy the dark medieval feel of the Zeffirelli setting and almost entirely agree with his editing. I like the casting, particularly the Close as ditzy blonde Gertrude and the action hero that was Gibson of that era.  I found the performances rewarding and human. 

I think there isn’t much to be done with Ophelia. She either works as mad or as pre mad but I’ve not seen a convincing version of her as both. I think Bonnam Carter playing her off as fragile and innocent is as good a choice as can be made but she really shines as a mad giver of Rue. 

A special shout out here to Nathaniel Parker as Laertes. I remember being impressed by him each time I’ve seen this Hamlet and was again this time. It’s a tricky part to play (which one isn’t with Hamlet?!) but he made someone who could have been mere plot device or incomprehensible waffler into an appealing and sympathetic figure. 

I’m running through Shakespeare as pure audience for this project and had a solid enjoyable audience experience with this one. 

Hamlet - 4 star for enjoyability and setting

Mom score - Gertrude C+ mom for truly loving her son but also for being deleteriously oblivious. 

 

Onward to Lear. 

Dread

Missy - Heck yeah Shakespeare or All the Worlds a Stage

 Despite Mariam’s generous description I am entirely an enthusiast and not a scholar. Case in point, our first selection provides ample evidence of the exceptions to my generalizations, that Elizabethan plays are light and fluffy. 

The list that we are following starts with Hamlet. Hamlet is anything but light and fluffy and it is Elizabethan. 

This monster of a play (clocking in at over 4 hours its Shakespeare's longest) is the uber Burbage, carpet chewing, philosophically drenched, power house that survived, and world toured, and kept on giving, up to this very day. 

Everyone gets a chance to see Hamlet if they are at all Shakespeare inclined and even, frequently, if they aren’t. It’s one of the plays you are likely to be assigned if you take a theater class in high school or college, it’s right up there with Much Ado. Its also a school and community theater staple. I've seen some very good and some really should have skipped it versions.

I love Hamlet and our guide must too as it’s first on his list. 

However, he has selected the Branagh Hamlet and that opulent spectacle really is  the FULL 4 hour chonky boi. 

Here is the Branagh trailer.

I think it’s too much for a diving off point, though I have recommended to Mariam that if she likes the Zeffirelli/ Gibson version (my recommended starter Hamlet) she should go back and watch the Branagh. 

The Hamlet Wikipedia article puts our fist selection in some context: “ In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as "sensual rather than cerebral",^[256] cast Mel Gibson—then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies—in the title role of his 1990 version; Glenn Close—then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction—played Gertrude, and Paul Scofield played Hamlet's father.^[257] “

I like this version, and I think it will give us an introduction to the plays as blockbusters rather than an intellectual exercises  

We are going to be audiences and not analyzers here. I think that people tend to forget or maybe gloss

over the fact that Shakespeare is fun, that his work has lasted not merely for his stunning command of 

the language but because his characters speak to us. 

Here is the Zeffirelli trailer (you will see quite a difference in mood).

I’m super excited about this project. I’ve roped some of my family into watching with me and I can’t wait to get into that headspace of Shakespearean language and wit. 

Onward to Denmark.