I was thinking about the question that our professor posed to us last class. What do you think the purest form of Shakespeare is/was? After thinking about it for awhile I realized that at this point in time I don't think that it is really possible to get a "pure" form of anything Shakespeare. I feel that the only time in which Shakespeare could have been pure and acted out in the way that he wanted it would be the first time the plays were every acted out with Shakespeare as the director. Only then would he be able to make sure that each actor was in his place and each line was said the way that he wanted.
After thinking about this I thought of my favorite recreation of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCapprio, I felt, shed a humorous light on the play. It infused the language of Shakespeare with an odd assortment of present day artillery and dress. It also is most likely the farthest in Shakespeare's mind of what he wanted his play to become.
I feel that Shakespeare's intentions aren't as clear cut in moves such as Romeo + Juliet and O because the directors get so caught up in trying to make the movie and the plot more modern that they may confuse what Shakespeare was trying to say or twisting it in ways that, although it makes it less confusing for the audience, does not show the underlying stories of Shakespeare's plays.
2 comments:
Another great, great movie (R&J). I wonder, though, if whether the fact that it may have been "the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind" matters? In some ways, the books of his plays ten years after they were performed may have been far from his mind as he was writing...what do you think?
I think that the only true way to know what Shakespeare would have wanted to have acted and performed would be to watch a play directed by Shakespeare and maybe even to be a little extreme acted by Shakespeare. No one can do something exactly the way that he would have wanted they can only attempt. I feel that the older the plays get and the more "modern" the attempts get at making the play causes the ideas that Shakespeare had to get muddled and diluted and therefore hard to depict or interpret.
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