fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-04-09 11:43 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-04-09 11:43 pm
(no subject)
I have been working working working on this big research project for my Renaissance drama class, and everything I read makes me want to stop working and go read all the Renaissance drama, ever. Which I cannot do right now, so somehow this desire got transmuted into wanting to watch Shakespeare in Love again, for the first time since I think 2001? It is both more and less charming than I remember. Mostly I find myself skipping through the romance stuff and marveling at how thoroughly they managed to de-queer a story with that much crossdressing, but everything involving the theater/actors/business of playing and the actual craft of writing (as opposed to the ~art~) is even more wonderful than I remember. Of course, it helps that I get a lot more of the jokes now. (The references, I mean, like tiny John Webster feeding live mice to a cat and fanboying Titus Andronicus. Not the things like "it's like trying to pick a lock with a wet herring," which I have to admit is still a favorite.)
I do wish it was about Marlowe, though. That performance was so much more interesting than the "thoughtless overexcited manchild" version of Shakespeare--I mean, he certainly has his charms, and I get what they were going for, and he is very early days. But I find it more annoying than charming(although it is, some of the time, reluctantly charming). Especially since the movie actually causes me to think, as I watch his growing-up arc, god, Shakespeare, you should have died instead of Marlowe, you total dick. Which I don't actually think, in the real world! Finding a mention, yesterday, of a story someone wrote about the Elizabethan theater scene if Shakespeare never lived actually sent a wave of physical anxiety through me! But watching the movie Shakespeare, I can't actually connect him with Twelfth Night or Macbeth or The Tempest, so that feeling does not arrive.
Plus he totally got Marlowe killed. Such a dick.
oh goddammit, I started THINKING about it, and I went and looked at the first nine plays in this Shakespeare chronology (obviously it is necessarily approximate), and compared them to the first and only seven Marlowe plays, and...there's only one play of nine that I would feel more than moderately sad if it vanished from the world. It's only with the tenth(ish) that everything suddenly turned into genius forever. I mean, I would honestly rather read Dido than 1 Henry VI. If Marlowe had gotten another twenty years, a chance to suddenly turn into genius and make Faustus and Edward II look like stumbling early attempts...it is seriously breaking my brain. To say nothing of how they would have played off each other.
So now I'm going to spend all night getting increasingly upset and anxious over all the Marlowe plays that never got a chance to be as good as--and so different from--Shakespeare. Genuinely, intensely upset and anxious, because my mental illness is as pathetic as the rest of me. I might have to take a pill.
I do wish it was about Marlowe, though. That performance was so much more interesting than the "thoughtless overexcited manchild" version of Shakespeare--I mean, he certainly has his charms, and I get what they were going for, and he is very early days. But I find it more annoying than charming(although it is, some of the time, reluctantly charming). Especially since the movie actually causes me to think, as I watch his growing-up arc, god, Shakespeare, you should have died instead of Marlowe, you total dick. Which I don't actually think, in the real world! Finding a mention, yesterday, of a story someone wrote about the Elizabethan theater scene if Shakespeare never lived actually sent a wave of physical anxiety through me! But watching the movie Shakespeare, I can't actually connect him with Twelfth Night or Macbeth or The Tempest, so that feeling does not arrive.
Plus he totally got Marlowe killed. Such a dick.
oh goddammit, I started THINKING about it, and I went and looked at the first nine plays in this Shakespeare chronology (obviously it is necessarily approximate), and compared them to the first and only seven Marlowe plays, and...there's only one play of nine that I would feel more than moderately sad if it vanished from the world. It's only with the tenth(ish) that everything suddenly turned into genius forever. I mean, I would honestly rather read Dido than 1 Henry VI. If Marlowe had gotten another twenty years, a chance to suddenly turn into genius and make Faustus and Edward II look like stumbling early attempts...it is seriously breaking my brain. To say nothing of how they would have played off each other.
So now I'm going to spend all night getting increasingly upset and anxious over all the Marlowe plays that never got a chance to be as good as--and so different from--Shakespeare. Genuinely, intensely upset and anxious, because my mental illness is as pathetic as the rest of me. I might have to take a pill.
cannot... restrain... Ren drama... nerdery
and I pretend that someone else wrote Act 5! JOAN OF ARC, how is that not awesome? (Again, except for Act 5.)It is one of the GREAT TRAGEDIES of literature, though, that Marlowe died so young. Seriously, if I had a time machine and the opportunity, I would totally try to stop his getting stabbed in the eye.
Which plays have you read? Because oh, I want to recommend more to you!
Re: cannot... restrain... Ren drama... nerdery
I've read...several plays, I have plans to read a LOT more this summer, when the horrorshow of the next five weeks is over. All the Marlowe I haven't read, first, and then dipping through my Norton anthology for other guys--another Jonson(we read Volpone), The Revenger's Tragedy since I've seen the movie, anything else with a good title pretty much.