The undiscover’d country

I just remembered that I hadn’t posted today, so here I am. (Not that it really would have been that great a loss if I’d waited till tomorrow — it’s not like forgetting to brush one’s teeth or to shower — but it’s nice to have a daily record of sorts.)

So, last night I attended a performance of Twelfth Night here on campus. I’d never seen or read it before, I must admit, but once again Shakespeare won me over. I keep forgetting how brilliant, funny, and modern he is. The performance itself was well-done and I felt I got my money’s worth. (Well, truth be told, I got the tickets for free. But even if I would have paid, I would have felt that it was money well-spent.) I love the theatre! The Foreigner opens this coming week. Mmm. :)

For my Middle English class I had to memorize 20 lines of “The Prioress’s Tale” (from the Canterbury Tales), and today I passed them off to my professor. While pacing the room trying to commit the lines to memory the other day, I realized that I really like memorizing stuff. And so I printed out Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and have begun making the words my own. It’s great. (And yes, I memorize them with a British accent. ~blush~)

To sleep: perchance to dream…

I heard that the Twelfth Night they did on campus was a miserably mutilated abridged version. I purposely didn’t go see it for that reason. :D You need to see the real thing. There’s at least one decent movie version.

And memorizing stuff is really fun. I’ve got the first two parts of “Lady of Shalott” down now. :D

Miserably mutilated? Well, since I haven’t seen the full version I can’t quite compare the two, but I didn’t notice anything particularly awry with this version, short though it was. Abridgements don’t always have to be bad, you know. (I do prefer unabridged, of course.) I was entertained, and it was still Shakespeare, and besides, the tickets were free. :)

Ah, “The Lady of Shalott.” That’s one I’ve been meaning to memorize for a while (and those of you who’ve been reading this blog for more than a month or two will probably know why ;)). Maybe I’ll go do that instead of finishing my paper… :P

I wouldn’t have called it miserable or mutilated in the least. What it was, was all the hysterically funny and *delightful* moments of the play condensed into one hour. The performers and the performance did not intend it to be anything more or less than that. Take it at face value– it was incredibly entertaining.

I guess I’m just a Shakespeare purist. If you can’t do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all. :D Of course, the exception is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged.

But how do we define “right”? :P

I see two slightly conflicting viewpoints here. In the first, you go to see a play to be entertained (and by “entertained” we’ll also include being taught, inspired, moved to action, etc.). In the second, you go to see an artifact, not unlike going to a museum.

I don’t think that there’s anything wrong about the second — and from a historical point of view, it’s certainly fascinating to get it as original as possible — but for me, when I go to a play I almost always have the first perspective. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar, and while I do appreciate antiquity and original sources and all of that, I want to be moved by the play, the way the original audience was moved.

With that in mind, abridging the play doesn’t really damage the experience. In fact, even if the abridgment drastically changes the original, there’s still something to be got out of it. There will be many Shakespeare performances over the course of my life, and I don’t mind in the least if they’re all a little bit different from each other (or a lot!).

This seems to be almost the same argument as the book-into-movie thing. When I go to see a movie made from a book, I try to see it as its own thing, not really as being all that connected to the book. And that way I’m rarely disappointed in a movie’s failure to stick with the book; I may be disappointed in the lack of artistry, or the bad acting, or the weak cinematography, but as far as I’m concerned the book and the movie are two entirely separate universes.

I can see your perspective, and I must admit that I do enjoy some “derived from Shakespeare” works. For instance, the roommates and I watched She’s the Man this weekend, and it was by all accounts hillarious, and not too poorly done. It’s fine if you want to use the Shakespeare storyline: they weren’t originally his anyway, and there’s something inherently moving about them.

And I guess moving the setting is alright, though I pretty much detest it. When I was in England, we saw the Royal Shakespeare company do Hamlet. Same lines, superb acting, but the costumes were modern business attire and the play was set in a huge company instead of a kingdom. It just wasn’t as good. No matter how much I tried to just focus on the words and enjoy the performance, I couldn’t help feeling let down. And when I saw Much Ado about Nothing by the BYU experimental theater company this summer, the American place names they inserted really jarred with the rest of the script.

But if you’re going to do Shakespeare as a play, there’s no way to do it except using the original words. There are some things that just can’t possibly be as good abridged. Shortening a Shakespeare play to one hour is, to me, like reading that cartoon/picture book version of the Book of Mormon. Sure, same storyline, same ideas, but not worthy of being called the same thing. And I understand the need for each: the picture book is a children’s version, a tool to introduce us to the real deal. Which is how I viewed this version of Twelfth Night: a children’s version. Fine if you need an introduction to the real thing, but those who have already tasted meat won’t be sated by the milk.

I guess my overall statement would be that I’m okay with “derived from” works–ones that don’t purport to be the same experience. But it irritates me when an abriged version purports to be the real thing. It annoyed me to no end when I found out that this was an abriged version because nowhere on the advertisements was the fact mentioned, except obscurely as a “children’s theater series.” The least they could do is make it clear what they are doing so that us Shakespeare snobs can make an informed decision. :P

I don’t mean that modernizing Shakespeare is always going to be a good thing. It can be a brilliant success or a wretched failure, depending on the artistry of those involved. What I do mean is that the technique of adaptation (whether that’s abridgement, modernizing, retelling, or whatever) is not inherently flawed, that it isn’t always bad.

Second point: we ought to take the adapted version as itself, not as the original. I think it’d be pretty clear in almost every case whether or not a play/book/show/whatever is an adaptation, even if you didn’t know in advance. West Side Story is clearly not Romeo & Juliet, for example. More locally, a year or two ago I saw a Shakespeare production here on campus — I can’t remember which — where all the actors were dressed in modern garb. As soon as the lights came on I could tell it wasn’t going for the authentic Globe Theatre atmosphere, and that was fine. Of course we can keep comparing the adaptation to the original, but that seems to be a pathway to despair. If we take the adaptation to be itself and nothing else, then it will stand or fall on its own artistic merits, independent of the shadow of its progenitor. And that’s the way it should be, I think.

And yes, I agree that they did a poor job of advertising Twelfth Night’s abridged status. Oh well. But they did announce it at the beginning of the show, giving you the option to re-orient your perspective, seeing it not as a poor Shakespeare ripoff but as its own thing. Sure, it’s not going to be as rich as Shakespeare’s original — it’s milk, not meat, since it’s clearly meant for children — but that’s okay.