Missy - Supplemental Music

William Shakespeare1564 - 1616

Full Fathom Five (1623)

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange:

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Ding-dong!

Hark! now I hear them,

Ding-dong, bell!

But then

Song Full Fathom Five, Ben Whishaw
Artist Elliot Goldenthal
Album The Tempest (Music from the Motion Picture)

Come unto these yellow sands And then take hands Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd The wild waves whist Foot it featly here and thereAnd, sweet sprites, the burthen bearHark, hark! The watch-dogs bark

Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange, rich and strange Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell Hark, now I hear them... 

All of which is to say there is a lot of variety with Shakespearean music, even for the music for which we have good records. 

I went to a concert yesterday. It was a lovely concert and free.

There is a church in Frederick (Calvaryu United Methodist) that holds free concerts for the public.

A friend told me they were doing lute music and I was excited and blocked in my calendar with great anticipation. 

Not exceptionally surprisingly there was some Shakespearean music performed. 

They did The Willow Song from Othello and Full Fathom Five (the song at the top here) from The Tempest.  

They talked about how they were using the Robert Johnson music because he was a Shakespeare contemporary so they knew what the songs sounded like for lute. 

I had no idea this was the case. I thought all Shakespeare music was speculative. 

Robert Johnson was a court composer in the court of James I and later of his son Charles I. 

He worked with the Kings Men (The name of Shakespeares company at that time) and is closely associated with Shakespeare. He set songs from The Tempest and Cymbeline and The Winters Tale to music. 

It is not recorded that his music was  played during the plays, to his tunes and accompaniment, but there is a fair shot. 

It’s not actually recorded what any of the music in the plays sounded like and lots of people have tried lots of things to make feasible examples. Lots more people have just taken the lyrics and themes and treated Shakespeare as a librettists of sorts. 

I only recorded small snippets of the concert to keep in fair use but here is what I heard. 

Full Fathom Five

The Willow Song

Here is a very pretty and complete version of that song. 

The Willow song is a little different in history because it’s not really a Shakespeare song, in that he didn’t write it. It was a well known sad song about a man who was betrayed by his love and then lost all appetite for life. It’s reworked beautifully by Shakespeare in Othello where both Desdémona and Emilia sing it before their deaths. 

Shakespeare swaps the He in the song for a She and uses only the first few verses. 

For me, this moment in the play always makes me tear up. A good soundtrack will do that. 

The audience would have gotten it instantly. 

I’m so happy to have gotten to hear live music and especially this type of live music. 

I quite liked Ayreheart and bring your attention to this piece with a different lead singer. 

Beyond that, it’s clear that Shakespeare had music in his bones. 

According to google Shakespeare included approximately 100 vocal songs in his work and made over 400 references to music or things musical. 

I will leave you here with a few of my favorite Shakespeare music tunes but bear in mind they may or may not be Shakespeare. Like most else with the Bard it’s all speculation. So here are some songs I like that are Shakespeare adjacent. 

And this one because I sang it most recently. 

Hopefully someday I will have permission to post our version. 

Missy - Supplemental - Mushrooms

I quite like cooking. I also am into history and experimental archeology and historical reenactment. I therefore have a few historically themed cookbooks. 

Apropos of this project is my Dining With William Shakespeare by Madge Lorain. 

This is a cookbook featuring a number of feast menus containing dishes recipes and ingredients mentioned or eaten in the works of Shakespeare. 

It grew out of a theatrical dinner party and turned into a very nicely researched historical cookbook anthology. 

I am vegetarian and that makes a great deal of the book merely academically interesting BUT not all of it. 

Last week I made pickled mushrooms. These were used as pickles are now-a-days, and also as a salad during the winter when fresh vegetables were tricky. 

For the menu I referenced they were in the first appetizer spot. 

It wanted fresh mushroom picked under a certain moon phase, and I very much doubt theses were that, but I did find them easily and felt safe eating them.  

They get cut up and boiled in salty water then quickly rinsed.

I’m very happy to get to use my long pepper here. 

Normally when I make pickled anything I start with a premade pickling spice mix, but this time I had a very specific and historical mix to create. 

It was mostly made up of pumpkin pie spices like nutmeg and mace and cloves. 

It also called for black pepper corns. 

I however have long pepper. 

Long pepper was the pepper of Europe from the time of Rome on down. 

It’s a little hotter and a lot more flavorful. It reminds me of nutmeg(ish) so imagine black pepper and allspice had a baby that leaned spicy. It’s great!

By the 1600s this was considered an old fashioned and out of favor staple, having been replaced by modern black pepper. 

I far prefer the flavor of long pepper however so in it went. 

This part of the process filled me with hope and optimism. This spice mix smelled so good. It’s the best smelling pickling spice I have ever encountered. 

The next part was weird for me. 

These are pickled in white wine. I normally pickle in vinegar and don’t drink alcohol so I didn’t even have any white wine. 

Happily my mom had some so I used hers and then let the whole concoction sit in the basement near the washing machine for a week. 

Then I opened them up and took a piece for me and a piece for my husband and gave it a go. 

Hmmmm

Very wine-y and almost squeaky. 

Lots of spice but mostly sour wine-y spices. 

Meh

They are edible and might even appeal to someone who likes pickles and mushrooms and wine. If you are that person let me know. I’d like a 3rd opinion here. 

I will be trying that spice mix next time I pickle red onions but definitely I will go back to vinegar. 

I’m going keep trying some of the Shakespeare recipes here for supplemental entries. 

UPDATE 

Important updates from the field: my friend Matt (who likes pickles/mushrooms/wine) tried them and said they were good. 

Woo!

Keep an eye out for those fairies y’all.

 

"You demi-puppets that by moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,

Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms."

The Tempest

Missy -Julius Caesar ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

So our list claimed that this 1953 version of Julius Caesar was the definitive version and the only one to watch hands down. 

I’ll give you a little taste here. 

Julius Caesar is the story of the assassination of Caesar by his fellow republicans. It’s about their motivations and the reactions of his world thereafter. 

I hadn’t seen any version of this play before, though I had read it. The positives were that those throw away lines, referring to the biggest storm ever, or the crowd becoming a mob, got the royal MGM treatment on the screen. There is a giant cast and the special effects are big and booming and immersive. This really makes a huge difference for me as the audience.

Brando as Marc Anthony

and Mason as Brutus are great!

But I felt the hamminess of a big Ben-Hur tinged Hollywood in most of the other performances. Particularly, I felt it with Caesar (Louis Calhern) and Cassius (John Gielgud). I felt the Captain Kirk pauses and grandiose poses, keenly. 

Some of this is just temporal dissonance, I’m used to and prefer, in a likely juvenile way, one kind of movie and this is another. BUT mostly it’s because I vastly prefer a natural sounding delivery, like anything by Branagh, to the sort of scenery chewing shout-fests the 50’s were keen on.

Here the famous Marc Anthony Speach in two styles so you can hear what I mean.

I love this one.

Here is the 1953. I like this one and think Brando is great here.

A lot of the shouting is due to the crowd and distance, completely appropriate to the scene, but not all of it. Older movies (mostly for technical reasons) were shouty. 

I find shouty less compelling.

If you want a real taste of what I don’t like go look up the Charlton Heston version (shudder).

Enough complaining about old Hollywood. 

The play is also not my favorite. It is short and still manages to pack in a bushel of spechifying. 

I’m much more a fan of Greece than Rome when it comes to the two giants of ancient western civilizations. So the attack and defense of the Roman ideals is never going to be much for me. In Shakespeares day everyone literate was brought up on Rome and things Roman and this series of plays makes great sense for them.

There are great ideas here and noble dissertations. To me though it’s not compelling in and of itself.

This play brought more quotable quotes than you could imagine for such a small one.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves,”


“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.”

“Et tu, Brutè?”

“Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.”

It goes on and on. You know lines from this play if you are old enough to read this blog. It has in it some masterful writing.

It’s beautifully written and interesting but it has yet to grab me. This is probably also because I dislike Caesar and most of the conspirators and most of the crowd characters.

The most interesting things for me here all point to Marc Anthony and Octavius in their future. Probably because my foot in the door for Rome comes from I Claudius . I love I Claudius!

It did tickle my history fancy though.

Here for your viewing pleasure some fun Julius Caesar images. 

Brando smoking on set. 

Julius Caesar 

Marc Anthony 

Brutus

Now for something completely different. I've been waiting to do this play, with great anticipation, to put this video, that my daughter showed me last year, up. Its fantastic. Warning it is gory.

I hope someone, in future, does a version of Julius Caesar that I like more. I’m not writing it off by any means but this version wasn’t entirely for me. 

Julius Caesar - 3.5 stars for not grabbing me. 

Mom score - no real moms but I want to give 4 stars to Calpurnia for having to go through the barren woman shaming from Caesar in act one. 

Missy - Othello ⭐️⭐️⭐️

 I am giving the Fishburne a very unfair 3 stars because I could barely get through it. 

Othello is one of the 4 great tragedies and, as the Teaching Company professor rightly pointed out, it is the only domestic tragedy. 

It was well done, well cast, beautifully shot and costumed and so painful I had to watch it in small chunks while doing something with my hands.

Ugh

Iago is easy for me and I know he’s very not easy for lots of people. He is a cruel manipulative man who ruins the happiness of others. I like the theory of him as a holdover from an older medieval morality play type.

Branagh is great here.  He is creepy and sociopathic and believable.

Desdémona is easy for me. She is a good and honest person who believes that everyone else must also be good and honest.

Othello is easy for me because he gets so in his own head that rational decision making is beyond him. I enjoyed seeing pre Matrix, young sexy Fishburne with interesting tattoos.

Rodrigo and Cassio are uninterested 2D stock parts. Ditto the Bianca subplot  

Emelia is for me the most approachable and reliable character here. Shout out Anna Patrick. She sounded modern in both delivery and perspective.

My problem is not with the movie.

My problem is with the play. I will have this problem when we get to Titus as well.

I don’t want to watch people suffer like this. 

The Nation State plays, Lear or Richard III, feel removed enough from me. Romeo and Juliet feels like a fairy tale to me. Othello feels like a claustrophobic, slow crushing under a heavy wheel. It feels like drowning.

I deeply value the Greek ideal of plays as cathartic. No part of me needs to express or experience domestic violence. It hurts me to be in that headspace.

I am so glad we are done with this one.

Othello - 3 stars for production and discomfort 

Mom score 0 stars - no moms except in Othello memory of his dead mother as related to his handkerchief and Desdemonas mom also dead.

Missy - Romeo and Juliet ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I loved this one. 

I remember it very fondly. 

A cherished memory from when I saw it in the theater in the 90s with my best friend Kathryn, was hearing a girl in the front yelling “Nooo!” during the end scene when Romeo drank the poison. 

We were shocked, and unkindly giggly, that she’d had no idea what happened in the play. Which is to say that Romeo and Juliet is so known, so over saturated , that it’s easy to dismiss as cliche. But the early masterworks really are masterful .

We loved it, my best friend and I, we got the soundtrack and listened to it over and over. The movie hit all the right notes for us at the time. It was relatable because we were the same ages as the cast and we liked Shakespeare and MTV, and it was fun. 

I was worried therefore that this viewing would suffer from that rose tinted glasses failure of nostalgia. 

I loved the Whedon Much Ado around the same time and it lost so much on rewatching.

The Teaching Company lecture lauded the Baz Luhrmann editorial style of quick cuts and music video feel, as supremely appropriate to the fast pace and violence of the play. 

I quite agree and, in fact, thought that the editing and music would be my favorite parts of this viewing. 

I was wrong. I loved those things it’s true, but I loved best the casting and the acting. 

Some examples here. 

The Montagues. 

The Capulets. 

"O, speak again, bright angel! For thou art / As glorious to this night, being o'er my head, / As is a winged messenger of heaven"

Clare Danes was innocent and sweet but not cloying or stupid. Her love and her helplessness felt real and heartbreaking. 

DiCaprio is floaty and daydreaming here, he is moody and romantic and rash in all the right ways. He’s probably the least interesting member of the cast for me but he is solid. I remember watching What’s Eating Gilbert Grape not long before this and liking him a lot already when I first went to the movie. 

Benvolio "I do but keep the peace: put up thy sword, Or manage it to part these men with me,". Dash Mihok was my crush of this film when I was a baby Missy. His quiet nature and only-reasonable-person-in-the-room vibe appealed greatly to my sense of hope. Plus of course, like everyone in this movie he was good looking.

 

John Leguizamo as Tybalt kills me. His “Peace, I hate the word” and his desperate trapped machismo during the duel scene are truth and beauty and all the great things that acting can be. 

Prince of cats indeed. 

Harold Perrinau’s Mercutio the, if not actively crushing then at the bare minimum, camp consort of Romeo is a joy to behold. 

His loyalty and devil may care delivery bring a life to this stodgy character that I have never seen matched in any version of this play. 

I mean look at him!

Special shout out to the loving but flighty Nurse Miriam Margolyes and the meddlesome Priest of Pete Postlethwaite I found them both sterling. 

The movie was popular but not well received in its release and I think the Vulture review gets it right when it claims that critics didn’t know what to do with a frenetic slightly psychedelic Shakespeare but that young audiences got it instantly. 

I’m so happy to have been in that time and to have gotten it in that way. 

I had a lot of sitting around time at work yesterday and finished the movie up while sitting in the lab. 

I did not imagine finding myself brought to tears, in a labcoat, by a 30 year old movie that I had seen multiple times before, but there I was. 

Romeo and Juliet: 5 stars

Mom score: 1 star for Lady Capulet and 4 stars for Lady Montague. 

I hate that the good mom had to die of grief off stage to get this rating. 

Sheesh. 

On to Othello!

Missy - Much Ado or A complicated number of stars

 

Our guide selected this one and I agreed right up until I saw it again and decided that I wanted to watch the Branagh even more. So I’m going to do a double review here. 

They are both fun and we have landed into the light fluffy Elizabethan plays with a light and fluffy plop. 

The Whedon is famous for being filmed in 12 days as a sort of offshoot project after one of his Avengers films was wrapped. It was shot at his house with his friends and he and his family did the soundtrack.

I used to be a massive fan of Whedon. I’m the right age for OG Buffy (even the movie before the show) and the right type of consumer for Firefly and the Avengers, I even loved Dollhouse.

I remember being thrilled when this one came out because Whedon plus Shakespeare!

But then…

Per Wikipedia: In July 2020, Justice League actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of showing "gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable" behavior toward the cast and crew of the film,[221] going so far as to invite Whedon to sue him for slander if he believed the allegations were untrue.[222]

And then: Jose Molina, a writer on Firefly, also spoke out against Whedon's behavior saying that "casually cruel" was a "perfect" description and that "He thought being mean was funny. Making female writers cry during a notes session was especially hysterical. He actually liked to boast about the time he made one writer cry twice in one meeting

And then the entire Charisma Carpenter thing.

It got to be too much. I couldn’t watch his stuff and not think about all of that. This is the first time I’ve watched this Much Ado since then and it’s downgraded the whole thing to 3.5 stars.

This isn’t entirely fair, nothing in the movie has changed.

I love the black and white, I love his character consolidation choices, I love the Beatrice and like the Benedict. I think the mafia spin is fun and love the small feel.

Special shout out to Fran Kranz’s Claudio who seemed just young enough and just dumb enough to remain likable despite his many dick moves.

I wish Whedon was a better person so that I could love his stuff wholeheartedly as I once did.

On to the Branagh.

Let me say here that I love Keanu Reeves. I love him and I feel like he was acting in an entirely different movie from the whole rest of the cast here.

QQ

BUT beyond that weirdness, this is a wonderful version. There is so much life and energy and lightness in this film that I can, easily, have it on as soothing cheering background for my life.

Emma Thompson is radiant as Beatrice and Branagh the perfect witty ass that Benedict needs.

Makes me want to watch Dead Again.

I think nearly every performance is perfect. This is how light fluffy Elizabethan should be.

A special aside for the Keaton/Fillion Dogberry parts. The clown-show that the constable storyline requires is so far outside of the mood of the rest of the play that it could feel like a failing or at least a pitfall. I’ve never seen it played as anything other than slapstick. I don’t think it could work any other way.

Keaton can be so super schtick and Fillion so thick that they just breeze through it. In both movies I have my favorites for every part, but not for Dogberry. They are both just great!

Much Ado About Nothing - 4.5 stars

Mom score - 0 no moms

 

Missy - King Lear ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

I think I’m glad we did Lear so early. There are a few plays that hurt my feelings enough that I don’t watch them, and this is one. 

King Lear is a morality play done by a nihilist. No one (Edgar notwithstanding) is lovable. Cordelia is right and Kent is loyal but the ugly humanity and worser natures on display in this story make it hard to swallow. 

That being said: this is the best Lear I’ve ever seen and I’m giving it 5 stars. 

I’m more than mildly surprised by that score but as a production it’s just about perfect. 

The casting, settings, sound design and cinematography are outstanding. 

Every delivery is believable, comprehensible, and sincere.

I was talking to my daughter about why I don’t like watching Lear and found myself describing him as both a diva and a little bitch. She remarked that I’d just sworn more than she had ever heard at one time. That is not quite, but nearly, true.

The truth is of course that the bleakness and cruelty in Lear makes me uncomfortable and I prefer to be comfortable in my leisure time.

The Hopkins decision, or possibly director Richard Eyre’s decision, to put Lear measurably into dementia or with one foot solidly in the land of senility, makes me much more comfortable.

All the other King Lear’s (plays and stories) told during Shakespeare’s  time have happy endings. I certainly sympathize with the impulse. Lear’s last line about looking at Cordelia’s lips, as if she might still be breathing, allows for that hard to smother hope. It’s not a happy play though, and it’s easier to imagine that he is still out of his mind than that she somehow survived her own assassination. 

Special shout out here to Edmund (John MacMillan) for making a potentially cartoon villain completely buyable. I love how much is shortcutted here by portraying the bastard son as nonwhite. The culturally saturated offhand dismissal of a bastard son in Shakespeares time and the casual racism of our own having a powerful overlap.

He is pissed off and vengeful for a lifetime of abuse and disregard as his subtext works exactly. 

Plus I’m not familiar with Macmillan’s work but anyone who can hold their own with Hopkins and Thompson in the room is top notch. That dude has chops!

I’m going to try to watch some of his stuff.

I am also going to watch RAN (the Kurosawa Lear adaptation) and maybe do a supplemental blog post here.

King Lear - 5 stars for production and decision making

Mom score - 0 for no moms at all

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