Read the article Simon Schama's Shakespeare, BBC Two
Do you share the critic's views? Why/ why not?
Render one of the articles in your blog as Rendering 5.
Bruce Norris: 'I think we are doomed’
or any other theatre feature from
If you have posted Rendering 5, use The Telegraph features as Rendering 6!!!
With every new series, there are a lot of comments on that Simon Schama’s archly mannered drawl becomes more and more pronounced his camp asides more central to his on screen persona. The article takes a critical view that he is getting awful grand. And he now apparently “owns” our greatest dramaturge, the way to go.
ReplyDeleteAnalyzing the situation in the first of this two part series it is necessary to note that Schama engaged with that well trodden theory, of Shakespeare as the very definition of Englishness, of our language, our history and of our way of looking at ourselves.
Speaking of the report it is interesting to point out that Schama’s point is that before Shakespeare came to “belong to all time”, he was very much “of his time”. By the way the cue mash-up imagery across the centuries: a roast hog rotating upon a spit; random youngsters quaffing pints of lager in heritage London pubs; a lot of slo-mo shots of commuters scurrying across bridges over the Thames; medieval country churches as cycled to by John Major's imagined spinsters.
Likewise, you just knew that when he began to describe the Peasant’s revolt leader Jack Cade, from Henry VI, that we were going to see a skinhead in a hoodie with attitude and an East London accent tramping through a trashed up office before cracking open a can of Tennent’s. From his point of view Shakespeare didn’t just talk about kings and queens, we learned, but the common people as well (cue shots of 1970s sink estates).
Fortunately, giving appraisal of the situation, Schama’s historical analysis was a lot more sturdy than the imagery; the protean forces unleashed by the Reformation, from the emergence of the Virgin Queen to replace the Virgin Mary, and the Protestant reliance on “the Word” and “the Meaning” as opposed to “the Spectacle” and the “Mystery” of the previous Catholic settlement were a very good time for an ambitious young playwright to be working in.
There is every likelihood that especially as the essentially Catholic drama of the itinerant medieval Morality Plays – played by amateurs from the Guilds - were in the process of being replaced by the largely amoral, bawdy proto-capitalism of the first theatres for whom Shakespeare lost no time in catering for.
It is an open secret that the language, the cultural context and the Cultural Revolution that Shakespeare appears to surf so effortlessly, and there was a fair amount of gratuitous gesticulation. The article concludes by saying that in next week’s episode, Schama looks at Kingship. Hopefully, it is very likely that his thoughts will be accompanied by some less hackneyed visual tropes that, unlike the Bard’s plays, do not stand the test of time.
It is hard to predict the course of the events in future and the reporter also gives no details to his personal opinion but as for me, I also have several ideas about this question. But they don’t matter for literature. I am the man who doesn’t admire by the authors, but I admire their works.