Happy Birthday, Mr Swan of Avon: An Unnecessary and Rambling Defence of William Shakespeare

It was going on four years ago that, casting about for a name for the blog I had decided to start so that I might make the option of engaging with my Doctor Who rants voluntary rather than inescapable, I settled on Jane Shakespeare.  ‘Shakespeare’ is, natch, my favourite writer, which seemed appropriate for a blog that was sure to be devoted to vital and pressing literary journalism and not at all discussions of which fictional characters I’d most like to bang, and ‘Jane’ had a pleasantly anonymous feel to it, making it suitable for my sophisticated and mysterious alter ego.

I shall allow you a moment to finish mirthfully wiping your eyes.

‘Jane’ is also, of course, a reference to my favourite novelist and, as such, she has already been made the subject of a celebratory post.  Shakespeare, though, not so much. There were my reviews of The Hollow Crown, which remains to this day my post with the highest hit count, teaching me the valuable lesson that if you want traffic to your blog, include pictures of Tom Hiddleston in a sauna (I’d love it if there was just an insatiable hunger for over-enthusiastic dissection of televised Shakespeare but I am, occasionally, a realist).  I’ve started Shakespeare-centric posts a couple of times – my top ten characters, the five greatest performances I’ve seen, and so on and so forth.  Shakespeare has featured in several other posts.  But for one reason or another, having his own has never quite happened.  Until now. The man turns 450 this year and by god, I’m going to acknowledge it.

Let’s be clear: much of the 450 celebrations are tourism.  Shakespeare  the ‘national poet’ is an export, a cartoon guy in a ruff with a bald head and maybe he’s like holding a skull or something because that’s from one of the plays right? No snobbery or denigration is intended here (well, not much) because Stratford as a town basically runs off of Shakespeare tourism, despite the irony that he spent much of his life trying to objectively not be in Stratford.  Shakespeare also gets caught up in nationalism debates a lot – when Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (essentially a treatise on the whole notion of Englishness) was in the theatres, one of the most frequent name-drops in reviews was Shakespeare, with the play being received as a kind of mixture of Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (like, so many feelings about that but the margin being too narrow for my purposes etc etc). Keats has a right old fanboy squee about the “Chief Poet!” and his work: “The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (but I can’t stay mad at Keats for long, bless him).  It’s natural, in a way – there is no more famous writer in the English language, no other playwright who has their own company, their own theatre, their own place on every syllabus at every age. Shakespeare is inextricably part of the make-up, the DNA of Britain – if you don’t believe me, then Hugh Grant says it in Love Actually too (but frankly I’m quite offended that you believe Hugh Grant over me, especially in Love Actually).

But. But. But. That is not a good enough reason to make such a song and dance about it.  Of course it isn’t. Tradition on its own never is. And tradition is not why every single person ever should be acquainted with Shakespeare in some way.  Because I do believe that, I really do.  The first thing to say here is that I’m not saying it should be compulsory in schools (although I think it already is). Schools, for the most part, make kids hate Shakespeare. And no wonder. I get bored reading it sometimes and he is my very favourite playwright ever. But it should be seen and it should be heard and it should be spoken and it should be talked about.  That’s what he wrote it for – entertainment.  To make people laugh and cry and throw up in their mouths a little bit (Titus Andronicus). It’s silly enough to make stupid jokes and high school comedy adaptations of (not an insult, 10 Things I Hate About You was perhaps the peak of artistic endeavour in the early 2000s), and it’s serious enough to bring hope and solace to those in need (personal experience applies but also the Robben Island Bible and so many, many other instances).  I like arguing, and most Shakespeare plays could be argued about forever.  It’s a natural partnership, you might say.

But one of the most common complaints I hear about Shakespeare is that he’s irrelevant.  Who cares what a Dead White Guy has to say about stuff four hundred odd years ago?  And yes, it bothers me sometimes that as both a feminist and a literary person, my favourite writers are pretty much all of the Dead White Male persuasion (notable exceptions included).  I couldn’t say why but early on in my education, Shakespeare, Keats and Austen formed a triumvirate that retains its empire over my heart to this day.  One thing they have in common is that they’re all writers who are passionately misunderstood by their most passionate fans.* Allow me to put on my hipster glasses for a moment.  Keats is thrillingly romantic but he’s first and foremost Romantic, in a small, angry, dying man kind of way.  Austen gives her characters happy endings but I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to her at a dinner party (actually I totes would, if only because I’d feel more out of the line of fire there than opposite her, and we could bitch behind our fans). Shakespeare...yeah. I say Shakespeare is misunderstood by his fans, because I think to some extent he’s misunderstood by everybody.  Misunderstood isn’t even the right word really – ungraspable would be a better adjective, or unknowable, or subversive. Contemporary accounts of the man himself are rare, and those that exist aren’t always reliable, but they all seem to say the same thing: a quiet man, an observer. From his will, we know he wasn’t especially generous – not so much the second best bed furore, but the fact that his bequeathments to the Stratford poor are negligible compared to what other writers of similar financial status left behind. Then there’s also the fact that, as mentioned, he skipped town to London pretty quickly after his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway (although again, debate continues over how loving or unloving this marriage was).

From very little evidence and completely unscientific instinct, the picture painted seems to me more writer than man, someone not entirely engaged in the business of living his own life and much more concerned with recording others. But he was a man, and that – I think – is where we go so wrong.  Milton, as a young poet, wrote a sonnet about reading Shakespeare and being helplessly paralysed in the wake of it – what would be the point of writing, when you knew you would never be as good? And that was from the guy who wrote Paradise Lost. But Shakespeare was just a man, and he was a lucky one – he lived at a time when theatre was the dominant form of entertainment, and a form of entertainment that was about hearing, about language, which he was, y’know, pretty good at. The vocabulary of English as a whole was rapidly expanding, he lived through the turn of a century and a crisis of succession, not to mention the aftermath of a hundred or so years of religious wrangling, and the end of a dynasty. It’s all so much more complicated than I can ever fully explain, but something shifted during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he was the right man in the right place at the right time.  Jonson famously wrote that he was “not of an age but for all time” – true, but it’s the first bit that we tend to forget about. He was completely of his age, and it was the age that he happened to belong to that allowed him to be ‘of all time’.

All this means – confusingly, as someone who obviously loves Shakespeare a lot – that I think we could stand to knock him off the pedestal a little.  Sometimes as a director I get asked why I keep doing Shakespeare plays (of the eleven full length plays I have directed, seven are Shakespeare plays, and that’s not counting workshops) and the answer is always the same: within the Complete Works is every story I could ever want to tell. I believe that it is directors, rather than writers, who are the descendants of storytellers, travelling bards – we don’t make up our own stories, but we take ones that already exist and embellish, alter, bring elements in and out of focus.  Basically, if a play has too many stage directions, I go “nope” and get out the Complete Works again because those plays are robust. They withstand a lot of loving dicking about. Age shall not wither them etc. They don’t endure because Shakespeare is some mysterious dude up on a monument, but because they’re low down and dirty plays, quick and living and breathing and painful. Bad Shakespeare happens when people approach with too much reverence – of course, it also happens when people approach without actually having a single clue about the play they’re doing, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. But at least those disasters tend to be fascinating car crashes that you can’t look away from – the greatest sin, born of too much veneration, is to make it boring.  You can do kind of anything with these plays.  I’m not saying every idea is gold but theoretically, you can.

And to purists who insist that Shakespeare should be performed in tights and ruffs, or have all male casts because ‘original practice’ (yet curiously displaying a casual disregard for ‘original practice’ in, oh, every other area of the production, Propellor, I mean you and your huge amount of Arts Council funding**), to you I say this: he’s been dead for four hundred years. He doesn’t care.  In fact, what with the way Renaissance playwrights rewrote each others’ work to keep it up to date, he’d probably just shrug and be all, “Whatevs, forsooth” if you told him you were relocating A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a secondary school and replacing the fairy music with Miley Cyrus.*** And while ‘original practice’ is actually very interesting and can provide hugely valuable insights into the way the plays work (for example, knowing that The Winter’s Tale was written for the Blackfriars indoor theatre tells you a lot about why the pacing of it is so much statelier and more intimate than, say, Henry V which is a Globe play and involves lots of rushing about to cover all the entrances and exits), that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly reproduce those practices for an audience that has changed a lot in the four intervening centuries.  The fact is, these plays can and do adapt beautifully because they are about people, and people do not change all that much, whether they are in medieval Verona or 1920s Berlin or present day Afghanistan (also Will was not exactly historically accurate himself, cf chiming clocks in Ancient Rome). Furthermore, it is people who are going to see your play, and you have a duty to share your story with them because selfish theatre that doesn’t care about its audience is just no good to anyone, and I could be doing stuff with your funding.

The exception to all of this is that I am an absolute devotee to understanding iambic pentameter and verse – but Picasso did not jump straight in with the eyes on the sides of heads, he learnt how to draw from life first.  It astonishes me the number of Shakespeare productions I see where the director has jumped straight to the concept and ignored the fundamentals of actually speaking the goddamn script – and that, really, is what makes a great production.  One of the best I’ve seen was Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It at the Globe.  I don’t even like As You Like It (ha).  Plus, it was in period dress.  But every single moment was clear and golden and the play just swept you along and Rosalind was a sexy butch lesbian type and Orlando looked like a goddamn rock star and Celia and Oliver**** were real, proper characters, and gah, my heart.  Verse is also something that I hear a lot of uncertainty about.  I won’t lie, it takes some getting used to, and there are rules to it that take some time to learn – but once you do, it unlocks a whole new, extraordinary level of meaning and, from a dramatic point of view, basically tells you how to do the play. Another young director once said to me that she would find Shakespeare too difficult to direct because it was this unbreachable, alien fortress of a thing– I wanted to shout, “No! I’m a fraud! It’s so easy! It’s the easiest thing in the world! The director of every Shakespeare play is Shakespeare! You just have to learn how to listen!” But I did not. But I wish I had. Because you should know that understanding it has absolutely nothing to do with schooling and everything to do with listening and instinct. Anyway.

In the end, the point I wish to make is this.  To end where I began, the episode of Doctor Who that has Shakespeare in it describes him as “the most human human”.  I can’t really get much closer than that.  He is the least Dead, White or Male of any of the DWMs I know and love – his perspective, that quiet, observer’s perspective, is always that of the outsider.  His plays are full of people trying to get in, always excluded from something, no matter what their social status.  His characters are creatures of want, of desire, and their happiness is predicated on getting that thing – I’m not sure Hamlet is a tragedy, and I’m not sure All’s Well That Ends Well is a comedy (ok, well, it’s definitely not a comedy, but I’m not going to get into why ‘problem play’ is too easy a cop-out now).  He takes the part of the dispossessed, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – there is compassion and sorrow running through and through the veins of Shakespeare, not least in the plays that take place in crappy universes where everything is terrible always (King Lear, Troilus and Cressida). That’s why he’s relevant, that’s why he goes on.  Not always, of course, there are areas that are hugely problematic – Coriolanus’ whole “give political power to the poor? That is ridiculous” stance, the minefield that is the gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew*****, the casual racism of The Merchant of Venice’s deceptively awesome heroine Portia, and so on and so forth forever. But that’s part of the deal. That’s the package of being human, and no production will ever make a definitive discovery on any of this.

I want to direct Shakespeare because, as I said, travelling storyteller. There is not just one Hamlet to tell, there are as many Hamlets as there are actors. I have at least three different ways of doing King Lear, and everything I’ve already directed only makes me want to do it again. It will never stop being new to me, which is exciting and beneficently humbling. With other writers I may direct one of their plays and feel it has been exorcised from me – with Shakespeare it’s just a Zen matter of waiting for the wheel to come full circle, and feeling out when the time is right for a particular story in a particular way.  I am sceptical of the books and talks and teachers who say, “The thing you need to know about Richard III is...” because if you are a sufficiently good storyteller, I believe that in the end the only manual you need is the text itself. By being you, an individual reading it at your place in your time, it becomes a new play again – perhaps this is true of any good writer, but it is Shakespeare, who finds time for every walk of life and every strain of feeling, who lends himself to it most.

And just to prove that I learn from past experience:

You’re welcome.

*Also in this category: Byron.  I’m told that Byron conventions are full of men who think they are Byron, and women who want to go back in time and sleep with Byron, to which I say, ladies, please. Think of the syphilis. Yes, he was a rake and a cad and a brooding, wandering, tortured soul but he was also an absolutely on the ball, incisive and keenly-minded genius and his greatest work is basically a sex tour of Europe, in rhyme.

**I do know Propeller are not in any way purists, and I really enjoy their productions but also I cannot really get on board with the idea of a company being funded to take jobs away from women, especially when there are so few in the first place.

***Not actually being facetious, I would probably enjoy this production a lot.

****Massively helped by Oliver being played by Jamie Parker, who can get it. More Jamie Parker doing Shakespeare, for it is what the people want.

*****I will never stop saying this: it is not a sparky tale of two social misfits playing a sexy sex game, it is a tale of a woman being systematically abused until she gives up her desire to speak her own thoughts, at which point she is rewarded with the opportunity to speak her husband’s thoughts. However, 10 Things I Hate About You will never not be excellent, so maybe let’s all just watch that instead.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 1: Thor: The Dark World

Blimey, it's been a while, eh?  Not to worry, adulthood hasn't got me yet.  If you're wondering why I've decided to title this three-part blog post* with a variant on 2013's strangest yet most persistent meme, it's because these three works of media degraded my ability to think in full sentences to about that level.  Really.

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Thor: The Dark World: Review: Basically I'm Reviewing Loki: Just Loki: Where Do I Stop Putting Colons

Ok. So. I'm going to preface this review by saying that when I saw the film, I was suffering under the combination of having just said farewell to a supremely lovely cast of actors on an excellent production I'd been working on for a few months, and that farewell came in the form of excessive drinking and very little sleep, so my emotions were already dancing a merry dance all over my nervous system. The result of this was that when the film finished, my immediate instinct was to go and light up a cigarette that can only be described as post-coital. I collapsed, limbs splayed in my cinema seat, hyperventilating with the sheer force of ALL MY FUCKING FEELINGS.

And then I snapped out of it and remembered the first half of the film. Because the first half of the film is, frankly, dull as fuck. It starts ok (gratuitous crotch shot of Loki) and then just kind of stops (very little Loki until halfway through and then it's All Loki All The Time).  And for once in my life, I'm not just being a fangirl (I said not just being a fangirl). Basically, there's not enough Loki to make this film deliver on its promises. It was marketed as 'Thor must ask Loki for help, angst ensues' and that's just not really what it is. Tom Hiddleston has been walking the earth like the Wandering Jew with cheekbones, to promote a film that he's barely in.

To be honest with you, I don't even remember that much of the first half (something about Christopher Eccleston's career not quite panning how he expected) and awkward segues into comic interludes, mostly courtesy of Kat Dennings as Darcy, though even her infallible ability to be deadpan and awesome seems strained in the odd, tired energy of the events. There's also a cameo appearance from Chris O'Dowd, going on a date with Natalie Portman and let's all back the fuck up and read that again because CHRIS O'DOWD WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON A DATE WITH NATALIE PORTMAN GET BACK TO THE BASEMENT. So there are more jokes than the first film but none of the effortless delight of, say, Thor walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse. In fact, there are actually too many jokes to sit comfortably with the amped-up grit factor and the tone lurches drunkenly all over the place from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again via a rainbow bridge**.

Part of this is the criminally under explored villain, when the film can actually decide who the main antagonist is - Malekith or Loki.  If the rumours are true that a bunch of Malekith's stuff was bumped from the film to make way for Loki, then it raises the horrifying possibility that Tom Hiddleston's original role in the film was confined to maybe just one eyebrow raise and that is a world that I want no part in.  I am disappointed in the disservice done to both Chris Ecclestone and his character, not least because when they announced him I spent two days in a sort of glee-coma unable to say anything except repeat, "Malekith the Accursed.  Dark elf.  Christopher Ecclestone." But things were always going to be difficult post-Avengers. The first Thor had the advantage of being largely encapsulated in its own universe, the action confined to the remote realms of Asgard and New Mexico. Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe's internal public is aware of superheroes, the threat level has to be very finely judged for solo outings because otherwise just, like, call the other Avengers, y'know? And frankly, all the known universes collapsing in Greenwich kind of seems like at least an equivalent level of threat to a leather clad sociopath letting aliens on flying bikes into New York. But whatever, maybe Bruce Banner was on holiday. 

And I suppose things were also always going to be difficult in terms of how to write Loki. After going gloriously and hammily full villain in The Avengers, giving him any kind of arc must necessitate a little backtracking - bringing him home is a start (and let's not forget the moment in The Avengers when Thor tells him he can stop and come home and goddamit it, you can see in his eyes that that would actually maybe be really nice were it not for the whole attempted genocide and mass murder blips) but in The Dark World, it's just done in far too broad brush strokes. This is where the lack of Loki becomes problematic. There's not enough time to make this film what it deserves to be, which is Thor-and-Loki-go-to-family-counselling. I'm not quite sure that the MCU appreciates what it has in Hemsworth and Hiddleston, which is a few dozen gallons of heartbreak and an effortless chemistry. This film feels like it was written for lesser actors, ironed out into Hero and Villain, and yet the Brodinsons of Sassgard*** run away with every scene they're given (in Loki's case, cackling). Hiddleston's least subtle character elicits, weirdly, his most subtle performance,**** doing more acting with his eyes in one scene than there is in the rest of the film combined, and Hemsworth leads the film with lovely sincerity, retaining the streak of self-effacing humour brought out in The Avengers (I mean, thank all the Nordic gods, because the lack thereof in the first film was what sent me running into Loki's mad arms in the first place).

The fact is, the greatest superpower any of these films possess is humanity - that's what gives us the hook to keep us coming back, and is also why Superman movies are doomed to fail in comparison.  Tony Stark has his inner demons, Bruce Banner has his rage issues, Steve Rogers is a good man in a bewilderingly and increasingly complicated world, and Thor has a dysfunctional family. It's even ironic, maybe, that the most ridiculous Avenger (space-god-thing-with-science-magic) has the most affecting and, dare I say it, relatable backstory. Not so much with the frost giants, obviously, but the fuck-up sibling and the inability to ever really give up on family when they're threatening to take over the world that your signifiant other lives on, well, we've all been there.

Or maybe at this point Hiddleston's popularity with the fan base is just becoming a hindrance to writing a well balanced story.  I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to love Loki. The right way is to appreciate him for the magnificent bastard he is, in which case you probably like Avengers Loki best, slasher smile, death metal hair, eye-ripping and everything. And there's the wrong way, which is to watch him whilst silently keening "MY BABY YOU JUST NEED A HUG", in which case you probably like him best in the first film, all wobbly bottom lip and palpable and justified sense of betrayal. (I'm somewhere in between the two, since you ask, feeling somewhat relieved at the last second reveal of him finally sitting on the throne of Asgard, with a moment of "oh thank god, that's my clever little psychopath", but far far too many moments of "JUST LET YOUR RIPPLING BLOND BROTHER SAVE YOU WITH HIS LOVE" for me to be entirely comfortable with myself. It is not, after all, a million miles away from "he just gets tense when he's trying to usurp a throne, he loves me really!")

This film was stuck between the two, flirting with both sides enough to be really really frustrating but not nearly enough to be satisfying. What we want, I suspect, is for Loki to be - like any good trickster figure - consistently and ambiguously using his emotions for his own gain. Like Sherlock. Or Artemis Fowl. Or - Loki's classical ancestor - Edmund in King Lear. We want a conman who is always ultimately up to something but in the moments when he displays vulnerability, left wondering whether it was all an act or possibly, maybe just a little bit sincere. We were almost there with this film. His 'death' is a particularly egregious example - the redemption, the regret, it should have been a Type 2 Loki fan's wet dream (and also how I was predicting they would write him out of the franchise). But there just wasn't time to process it. The quick cut to the gags about Chris O'Dowd and Thor hanging his hammer on the coat rack undermined it so quickly that there was no way he was really dead. Similarly, perhaps showing Loki's lonely displays of grief over Frigga's death (Frigga, my thoughts in brief: wow someone had some awesome in their coffee this morning, oh wait look she's dead in order to further the character development of the male protagonists, colour me shocked) would have made the later bluff too obvious, but it was obvious anyway because this film took a fond farewell of subtlety in the opening credits, so lingering just a little bit longer on him blowing stuff up with his mind would have been an infinitely more satisfying exploration of character.  That, in the end, was the core disappointment - everything was undercut so swiftly that you hardly knew how to feel about any of it (ambiguity is great, confusion is not). We're invested in these characters now, and not for the big explosions. Iron Man 3 was a darkly sincere look at the individual, not the costume. The Thor story should be an obvious contender for this type of treatment and yet became something so much less than the sum of its parts.

Look, it's not all bad. It was worth the ticket price for Hemsworth and Hiddleston alone, frankly. From the moment they Reservoir Dogs their way down the halls of Asgard, through the chase on the spaceship ("Well don't hit it, just press it gently." "I AM PRESSING IT GENTLY.") to Loki's deadpan "Ta-da" upon emerging into Vanaheim, the central section of the film is a pure joy. And, crucially, it's set us up for a Thor 3 in which the action is Thor-Loki centric, and me being the eternal optimist that I am, I'm going to hope for all the bickering, sparring, betrayal, game playing, double bluffs and tentative reconciliations we were promised this time. And after all, Loki essentially won this one. I can't really hate that. So until then I'm going to wait for the DVD and play a specific twenty minutes of it nonstop until my laptop breaks (cf also: War Horse) or Gotterdamerung occurs.  Whichever happens first.


*THREE PARTS.  Seriously though.
**A mysterious repaired rainbow bridge - how? It was a massive deal that Thor couldn't go and see Natalie Portman at the end of the first film and there was a shoehorned-in mumble about dark energy in The Avengers and now it sort of turns out that, basically, Asgard engineers totally could have done it, no problem, but the thing is, like, union stuff, and also they'll need to get some parts in.
***Kudos for this outstanding piece of wordplay goes to my colleague, Kate. Good writers imitate, great writers steal etc etc.
****No seriously.  Go and watch his other stuff and tell me he doesn't bring unnecessary melodrama to more conventionally written roles.  Then watch Thor again and tell me why and how he's finding deft emotional complexity in Giggling Space Despot.

The BBC Gives Me a Present: 'The Hollow Crown' Review

A/N: Each mini review was written after the film in question was aired so this is really a record of my week-by-week responses rather than a response to the whole.  Consequently it's quite long, even for this blog.  Epic blogging for an epic series.  That's what it is.

...

The degree of excitement with which I greeted the BBC's announcement that they would be televising the Henriad, aka Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, aka some of my favourite plays of all time ever, directed by Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock aka some my favourite theatre directors of all time ever, with a cast that would not only include Jeremy Irons, Ben Whishaw and Simon Russell Beale but would also feature Tom Hiddleston aka my favourite actor of all time ever (I might have mentioned him here a few times) as Prince Hal, aka one of my favourite parts in Shakespeare of all time ever, could, in nuclear terms, have levelled a small conurbation. The BBC, it seemed, was like a drunken uncle in a generous mood who knows that your parents have been arguing: "Would you like a present?  There you go.  No wait, you've been such a good girl, have another.  No, that's not nearly enough.  Here, take my kidney."  Or similar.

I was very excited.  Like, Avengers-level of excitement.  And I'm not ashamed of being so plebbishly thrilled.  History plays were the Dallas and Dynasty of Shakespeare's day: sexy, glamorous men and women shagging and trying to kill each other, all for the benefit of grubby little groundlings like me watching with one hand in a bucket of popcorn (or holding an orange stuck with cloves for the historical pedants amongst you), gaping maw slackened with delight and reverence.  They're meant to be enjoyed, is what I'm trying to say.

Having said that, I didn't want to just come here and flail.  I purposefully have refrained from posting reaction posts or excessive abuse of the caps lock key.  These are my favourite plays, and I want to respond to them like the adult with an English degree that I am.

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED.

The BBC doesn't want me to respond like a mature, intellectual adult.  The BBC wants me to just offer my ovaries up on a plate and say, "I'm so sorry I ever tried to have coherent thoughts about your Shakespeare plays, I'm probably just over stretching my woman-brain."  The patriarchy has a new weapon, and its name is TOM HIDDLESTON IN A FUCKING SAUNA.

Pictured: patriarchy.

I am really quite annoyed.

Despite this obvious attempt by the forces of retrogressiveness to prevent me from giving a considered analysis of The Hollow Crown, I have overcome all obstacles and done so.  I have also rewatched the sauna scene several times in order to prove that its bewitching enchantments have no hold over me, thou foul televisual wizards at the BBC.  So let that be a lesson to you.  Anyway, on with the show.

...

Richard II is a funny old play.  It's full of pomp and circumstance (phrase copyright Shakespeare, cf Othello), and a huge percentage of it is spoken in rhyming couplets which are not the easiest things to make sound spontaneous.  It was slightly to my surprise then that Goold's Richard II was - Act 1 to Act 5 - completely stunning.  I'd like to go into more detail than I can, mainly because I watched it three weeks ago now, but also because there's not much else to say.  The way it was translated into film was gorgeous: long, locked-off shots holding the court inside them like a series of picture-frames, the couplets delivered carefully but fiercely.  The great risk of any production of this play is that it will stale quickly, everyone caught inside the huge, slow-moving machine of the court and its rituals; Goold avoided this beautifully and the whole thing flowed like gossamer.

Whishaw is perfect casting for Richard - a man who is a bad king yet good at being king.  He was perfectly juxtaposed with Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke, an actor who will never set the world on fire for me but was well cast here.  Whishaw is elegant and neurotic where Kinnear is heavy and direct, Richard's growing astonishment that he could ever be deposed beautifully paralleled with Bolingbroke's astonishment that he must be the one to depose him.  Also Whishaw is beautiful and Kinnear looks like a turnip but I'm sure that's beside the point.  The deposition scene in particular was magic; Richard's unwillingness to physically let go of the crown devolves into a grown man having a temper tantrum - but what a temper tantrum it is.  Goold and Whishaw understand what Richard understands - to be a king requires an essential theatricality, one that Bolingbroke does not have (but his son totally will).  It's not often you can watch an adult man lying on the floor kicking and screaming because someone is taking his toy (really, Richard's whole objection to Bolingbroke taking over as king amounts to "BUT HE DOESN'T LOOK AS GOOD AS MEEEE.  LOOK AT MY BONE STRUCTURE, THERE'S NO WAY HE CAN PULL OFF THIS CROWN.  I WANT A BIGGER LOLLY") and your overwhelming reaction is to hug them.

The cast as a whole is an embarrassment of riches - Patrick Stewart turns up to deliver the 'sceptered isle' speech ("Oh," says everyone with polite surprise, "so that's where that comes from") and then dies.  David Suchet turns up as York, which was actually less surprising than Lindsay Duncan turning up for all of two scenes as his wife and, apparently, mother to the guy with slamming cheekbones from the first series of Silk.  James Purefoy and David Morrissey are also just about discernible under a layer of grime and beards as Mowbray and Northumberland respectively, and Clemence Poesy does a very good job of swanning about being French and beautiful as Queen Isabella.

Speaking of queens, I was both amused and skeptical about the heavy Saint Sebastian imagery: as a play, Richard II owes a large debt to Marlowe's Edward II, which features a similarly idle king insensitive to his kingdom's needs who is then deposed and murdered, this time by his wife (another Isabella, conveniently) and her lover.  Marlowe, let's be frank, makes quite clear the reasons for Edward's wife's displeasure in the form a strapping young lad called Gaveston who Edward seems much more interested in spending time with.  I've always unconsciously assumed similar things about Richard and, it seems, so has Goold, except without the unconscious bit.  Richard lingers around nubile young models being painted as Saint Sebastian - adopted as a gay icon, as I found out when I proudly brought home a postcard of a very lovingly rendered Caravaggio-esque version of the pierced saint from the National Gallery and got some very questioning looks from my family - before dying in a similar fashion, shot full of crossbow bolts.  It's sort of reassuring that someone else had the same thoughts but also I'm still mentally thirteen and all the Saint Sebastian stuff was so heavy handed that it did make me giggle uncontrollably.  Not enough to put me off the production as a whole though: a gorgeous, gorgeous rendering of a difficult play.

...

On first watch, Henry IV Part 1 was a much more mixed bag.  I must confess, the Henry IVs have a special place in my heart, much of which is owed to the wonderful productions at the Globe in 2010, much of which is owed to Roger Allam's Falstaff and a slightly smaller amount of which is owed to Jamie Parker's Hal, who between them stole my affections much more successfully than Falstaff manages the robbery at Gadshill.  That was a joke to show you I've read Shakespeare.  It was a production that could only have worked at the Globe: rowdy, slightly pedestrian in interpretation and thoroughly reliant on a few charismatic lead performances, but ultimately big-hearted and sort of magical.

Eyre's Henry IV was, on a personal level, less successful.  It is a rather chilly, loveless interpretation of a hugely generous play that demands imagination from its dramatists.  The Henry IVs present life in all its little permutations, in all its unimportant nuances.  Perhaps the reminisces of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in Part 2 don't affect the movement of history but I dare you to listen to an actor - any actor - deliver Falstaff's line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight" and not feel like it's important to life.  This, perhaps, is what Eyre misses.  A history play is usually the story of a king; it is no accident that the Henry IVs, that seem so preoccupied with lowlives and rebels and general scum, tell the story of a prince.  The simple genius of these plays is that Hal isn't king yet: he's still a man (well, boy) and he responds to things like a man.  Henry V is a political play about war, no two ways about it, but so long as Hal is around, his drama is that of a man, encompassing life at its grandest and its most trivial and Shakespeare makes every moment of it important.

Eyre's production was a disappointment only in this respect: I simply didn't laugh enough.  I'm not being a pleb demanding more rotten fruit being thrown, it's intrinsic to the way the play works.  There is no other Shakespeare play that draws you so thoroughly into the protagonist's journey - we, with Hal, are seduced by Falstaff (though, thank heaven, not literally) and we, with Hal, are shocked when the cracks start to creep into the relationship even though we, with Hal, have always known that the party has to end sometime because when you are the crown prince the ending is kind of a foregone conclusion.  With Simon Russell Beale's dour, downbeat Falstaff, there was none of this seduction.  I was unsurprised by Falstaff's callous disregard for human life towards his pathetic band of soldiers -"food for power" he mutters as he marches - which is usually the point at we which we (and Hal) start to suspect it's not all Elizabethan Santa Claus and cups of sack.

Eyre's approach to the language was brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. On the one hand, it was treated like actual, living, breathing language that people uttered carelessly while they were riding or fighting or drinking or reigning, which was wonderful.  No-one proclaimed or declaimed or recited; Hal's eulogy for Hotspur after he kills him (roughly translated into modern English as "I'm really sorry I had to kill you so my dad would love me") was all the more affecting because Hiddleston - covered in blood and dirt and sweat - could barely get the words out for shortness of breath and pain from his wounds.  On the other hand, some of Shakespeare's most glorious and inventive language was simply glossed over, lines that held so much potential just thrown away.  In the 2010 production, something was made out of every single line, which may not be the way that people speak but it's a pure delight to watch.  Here, Beale's introspective, insecure Falstaff practically mumbles the man's most audacious and brilliant lie - that he knew all along it was Hal under the buckram cloak robbing him of his own ill-gotten gains.

This is not to say that Beale was a bad Falstaff - no-one was bad.  Jeremy Irons nailed it as Henry IV - though I can only assume that they decided to recast and not have Rory Kinnear reprising the role because there is no way Kinnear's children would be that good looking.  (Wow, he's really taking a pounding here.  Sorry, Rory.)  Joe Armstrong was a strong Hotspur with an enjoyably broad accent, managing to make a lot of out of part that can be fairly thankless and tiresome (but then again, Hotspur is Hal's foil and Hal is great so yeah, suck it Hotspur).  I also very much enjoyed the casting gag of having his real-life dad Alun Armstrong play Hotspur's dad Northumberland (also supposed to be an older version of David Morrissey from Richard II, again I will assume that having an attractive son came into this decision).  There was also a nice little moment for the unfortunates amongst us who happened to become somewhat attached to the BBCs execrable Robin Hood series that ran a few years ago (call it morbid curiosity that kept me watching), reuniting Joe Armstrong as Hotspur/Alan-a-Dale with Harry Lloyd's Mortimer/Will Scarlett.  They even had a little bromance moment.  For a moment, I was seventeen again.  Then when I had finished blacking out from the horror and taken a shower, I carried on watching.

Hiddleston's Hal gave me a multitude of FEELINGS (yes, it has to be in capital letters), most of them signals from my brain to my ovaries telling them to shut the hell up.*  He excels at characters that are hard to read and this ambiguity works perfectly with Hal, a character that writes the book on playing his cards close to the chest.  He tells us in the first scene that he's going to ditch his friends to make himself look better and then does so in a needlessly brutal way, and at the same time he's disaffected, displaced and unhappy, and suffers from a major case of Daddy-doesn't-love-me...itis (this is becoming another Hiddleston trademark, and regular readers will know that you will hear no complaints from me on this front).  Hiddleston is marvellously subtle and compelling and was a canny casting choice in so far as he knows how to use the camera - to the point where this almost overshadows the rest of his performance.  Maybe he's been away from the stage too long, maybe he's not picked up some Shakespeare for a while but there were a few moments of disconnect from the words; the beauty of the performance lay in his reactions, his expressions.  I'm not complaining because it contributed to the great strength of this production: Eyre's translation of Shakespeare from stage to screen.  Shakespeare's characters lie.  They lie all the time - to each others and to themselves and Hiddleston conveys this wonderfully.  Falstaff asks him if he's afraid of Hotspur.  Hal replies, "Not a whit, in faith."  Bollocks.  Hal's clearly shit-scared - and Eyre lets you know that with close-ups that focus on details too small to be read from the auditorium, twitches and half-smiles and grimaces that reveal a whole different narrative underneath the text.  Eyre's other trick of cutting away during monologues, often to the next room, is more frustrating.  It's sort of like someone changing the channel in the middle of your programme.  Hey.  Richard.  I was watching that.  I was also disappointed that Hal and Falstaff's great soliloquies about (respectively) image management and honour were done in voiceover - it's a good trick for the camera but goddammit, I'm an audience member.  Talk to me.  Share with me.  It's what Shakespearean characters do.

...

Watching Henry IV Part 2 made a lot of things a lot clearer.  My general concept of these two plays is as a great duet: major key and minor key, fast and slow, young and old etc etc.  Eyre takes this idea and shoves it out the window, giving us a slow, bitter breakdown of relationships between Hal and Falstaff, Hal and Henry, Hal and himself, Falstaff and the world - everyone and everyone, really.  Unwilling as I am to part with my view of these plays as simultaneously rambunctious, savage, warm, carnivalesque, etc, Eyre's conceit of them is compelling.  It is very much a cold, empty universe that Hal inherits as he steps up to become king; Part 2 is often observed to have a twilight feel to it - by which I mean everyone is tired and conscious of their own mortality, not stalking teenagers and walking around sparkling.

For me, the most electrifying of Eyre's directorial decisions comes in the scene where Hal, believing his father to have died, picks up the crown and puts it on.  Henry promptly wakes up and berates his son for being so eager to see him kick the bucket; it's a great scene anyway but Eyre directs it with incredible nuance, working through its arc beautifully.  Those close-ups I was talking about work overtime to give you Hiddleston wandering from his dead father's bed to the empty throne room, sitting and crowning himself before starting to cry.  By relocating the moment to the throne (in the play, Hal performs his self-coronation by the bedside) Hal becomes isolated and, most importantly, frightened.  It gives the moment a significance I never would have considered: for all his tactics, Hal is deeply insecure of himself.  I have always taken it as read that Hal has an intrinsic self-knowledge that enables him to pull off his prodigal son trick: he can defeat Hotspur in battle and he will be a good king.  Hiddleston's poker-faced prince is revealed to have no such certainty but, just when he should be assuming the mantle of authority, he collapses into grief like the young man that he is.  It's a brilliant counterpoint to Beale's Falstaff, who was immediately more satisfying in the melancholy rural world of Part 2, also playing his own great insecurity: that he is too old.

I am surprised that Part 2 should be more successful than Part 1 - it's a much less substantive play - but perhaps it allows the strengths of the actors to shine through more.  Hiddleston is a cerebral actor and doesn't entirely convince in Hal's carousing scenes, but in Part 2's long, introspective speeches and moments of self-realisation, he shines.  The famous dismissal of Falstaff loses some of its shock factor only because Eyre builds up to it so organically: when it comes, we wonder how Falstaff can have had any other notion of how this story would end.  No-one is suggested to be at fault - there is no calculating, opportunist Hal or sly, opportunist Falstaff - but it is merely the price of kingship.

I would suggest watching both parts of Henry IV together.  It's a long viewing experience, but you need the second part to make sense of the first.  Eyre connects the two stories in a way I never thought possible, not presenting you with a replaying of the same arcs in major and minor key, but the full and dazzling story of a young man's ascent.  Hal's coronation is the dynastic high point of The Henriad, yet it is packed full of attendant sorrows.  This seems to be the best way of describing Eyre's films: the ascent is grim and full of obstacles, but the triumph is earned.

...

It's hard to be really surprised by Henry V anymore.  It's amongst the most adapted Shakespeare plays, with Branagh's and Olivier's being the obvious contenders and massive box office smashes in their day.  All that potential for blockbuster action sequences, all those rousing speeches etc etc, it's Hollywood's wet dream.  I've always found its popularity strange, though, seeing as it essentially starts with a Chorus apologising for CGI not having been invented yet.  The entire play is an exhortation of the imagination, a plea that the audience go along with it - because if they don't, all that patriotic guff about England's favourite warrior-king sounds terribly hollow.  Thea Sharrock's Henry V is, to my very great surprise, my hands-down favourite of the Hollow Crown films.  Why? Because she locates the heart of the play in this: the audience's understanding of Henry as a man.  She refuses to make the play either pro-war (as Olivier does) or a commentary on the horrors of war (as Branagh does).  She simply tells you the story of Henry.  And I was surprised again and again and again.

It is entirely valid to argue that the visual spectacle is what lets this film down: indeed, there is a little of the usual television-epic-army-of-twenty syndrome in the battle scenes and the courts are neither spectacular nor imposing.  I understand that some might be disappointed in this film precisely because it isn't Branagh's huge, roaring blockbuster.  But as I said that's not the story being told.  There's a huge preponderance of close-ups - not just of Harry but everyone, from the high-ups to the low-lives.  Sharrock tells the story of a series of individuals in war.  Of the four plays, it is the most successful in using film to convey the interiority of its players.  Heavily cut down to just over two hours, the paring back of the story to its essentials (the Scroop/Gray treason subplot is cut) allows us to focus on the lives at stake.  For god's sake, I cried over the Duke of York's death (an excellent Patterson Joseph).  I couldn't have told you for certain that there even was a York in Henry V previously but now I don't think I'll ever forget.  Sharrock also navigates the issue of the Chorus being a fundamentally theatrical device fantastically - Olivier and Branagh both took a meta approach, with the film starting on the stage of the Globe, and the Chorus walking through a film set respectively - by having Falstaff's page (usually martyred in the slaughter of the baggage train, an episode which was cut) morph into John Hurt's Chorus, present only in voiceover until that moment, still holding his bloodstained St George armband.  It's incredibly poignant, not because of the George's cross, but because we understand that we've simply been hearing the story of a man told by another man who was there.  Henry V is a mythologised king; Sharrock un-mythologises him brilliantly.

A large part of this is due to Hiddleston's performance, carrying on from the Henry IVs.  I freely admit that I was wrong in my predictions that Hiddleston would make a better Hal than Henry - while he was good in the previous instalments, he's extraordinary here.  Sharrock and Hiddleston explode all my lazy prejudices about Henry being an unsatisfying cipher of a hero; this is a young king learning on the job and all too frequently making mistakes.  "Once more unto the breach" is delivered to a small group of soldiers, each one addressed individually by a king who is clearly bricking it himself.  The threats to rape the women and murder the children of Harfleur are delivered with a desperation and tension that suggests Henry is shocking himself as he speaks.  It stands in beautiful contrast to his later order that all the French prisoners be killed, coming in a fit of rage after York's death and the apparent refusal of the French to surrender.  "I was never angry since I came to France/ Until this moment" he says, and boy do we believe him.  The Agincourt speech is not - as it usually is - a rousing call to the whole army but a quiet and simple exhortation to his nearest and dearest to simply be brave.  It brings out something dazzling in the speech - that Henry never actually says they're going to win.  All he asks is that they do their best.  It is perhaps the most affecting interpretation of it that I've heard.

This is the thread that Sharrock finds in a play usually cast as being pro- or anti- war or patriotism: the idea of courage.  It is never suggested that the English victory is due to Henry - heavy emphasis is placed on his prayers that God be on his side.  Rather than confront the validity of the war, this Henry resorts to something unquestioningly admirable: bravery.  Yet even then, bravery is not presented as morally superior; Paul Ritter's bitter, raging Pistol suffers a form of PTSD - faced with the battlefield, this "swaggerer" from Eastcheap simply breaks down.  Williams, the soldier that questions Harry in disguise, is likewise not condemned for his view that the king has blood on his hands - rather, you get the sense that Henry agrees.  York asks to lead the vanguard and dies - yet he dies at the hands of a rogue Frenchman (damn those rogue Frenchmen) and we never question his sincerity or wisdom.  It is a fantastically nuanced portrait of individual responses to war, from command to foot soldiers.

I'd also like to mention Tom Brooke's Corporal Nim, who was something of a revelation.  I've honestly never thought that hard about Nim before - another Eastcheap tavern sweller who goes off to war because there's sod-all else to do in Medieval England - but Brooke's unhappy, melancholic performance imbued the part with a huge amount of pathos and yet again reminded us not of the 'cost of war' or anything so sweeping, but simply of the single human lives that interweave throughout the story.  Similarly Melanie Thierry's Katherine - usually such a thankless task with the awkward lurching from war drama to rom-com - was brilliantly rendered.  The scene where she starts to learn English was imbued with a tension I'd always suspected was lurking there: she knows that her future is going to involve England in some way, and there's a war going on - something, anything to distract.  It's both pragmatic and strangely affecting.  The wooing scene is less successful but I'm going to blame Shakespeare here - it always seems oddly bathetic after the charge and energy of the battle scenes. Nevertheless, it is charmingly and (remarkably) convincingly done: the pledge of two young pragmatists who understand that their futures are linked and start to see that they could, despite everything, love each other some day.

Ultimately, Sharrock does things I never thought to see in a Henry V. Rather than cutting the play's problematic epilogue, in which we are reminded that Henry died not long after his conquest of France and left his infant son in the hands of the nobles who would begin the Wars of the Roses, Sharrock allows Shakespeare his final note of tragedy.  Opening and closing on Henry's funeral, we are left with a heavy mix of pride and grief: never for a moment is Hiddleston's distinctly flawed and human king anything less than the text's "star of England" - but stars fade, and history marches on.

...

Overall, The Hollow Crown has been stunning television.  It has not only lived up to my expectations, it has surprised me over and over again with its deft, intelligent, even revelatory interpretations from directors and actors.  Is it perfect? No.  Do the four films hang together? Not really.  Could it have afforded a bigger budget?  Almost definitely.  But it has, I think, changed the way we think of Shakespeare on film.  All four are defiantly cinematic envisionings of a series of plays that demand much of their dramatists.  Richard II is slow and gorgeous; Henry IV 1 and 2 is an uncompromising look at plays that usually go affectionately unchallenged; Henry V is a brilliant answer to a play that the nation seems simultaneously obsessed with and troubled by.  I really couldn't have asked for more than this: a series that presents some of my favourite plays beautifully, intelligently and viscerally, yet reminds me that no matter how many times I think I've got the measure of them, the Henriad still has more treasures to give.  Standing ovations all round.

...

*It sounded something like this: "oh huh wonder why they cut that line look they gave that bit to Doll oh that's interesting HIS SHIRT IS OPEN ooh I like that interpretation interesting I never thought of it like that OH MY GOD HIS HAIR IS WET AND ALSO HIS SHIRT jeremy irons is great oh look its will and alan from robin hood man that show was bad oh yeah shakespeare FUCK DID YOU SEE THE LIGHTING ON HIS COLLARBONE JUST THEN I wish these soliloquies weren't in voiceover HE JUST LOOKED INTO THE CAMERA oh no why did you cut that speech down HOLY FUCK LOOK AT HIS HANDS SO I GUESS I HAVE A HAND THING NOW OR SOMETHING IS THAT NORMAL LOOK HOW BLUE HIS EYES ARE CONCENTRATE ON THE SHAKESPEARE YOU HAVE A DEGREE OH FUCK HE WINKED AND NOW I'M DEAD".  But also he looked like this:

Oh hello.

And also all the promo shots for Henry V looked like this:

STOP LOOKING INTO MY SOUL.

THAT IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE WAY FOR A KING TO SIT.

So on balance I think I did quite well.