What's Your Favorite Shakespeare Play?

This week Shakespeare Uncovered started on PBS (thanks to Robyn for the heads up), and it was AWESOME. If you have any interest at all in Shakespeare, I highly recommend this series. There are four episodes left and David Tenant hosts the one about Hamlet! (Fun fact: did you know Shakespeare named his son Hamlet?) I'm excited.


Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent. 1889. Tate Britain.

The first episode was about Macbeth, which incidentally is my favorite Shakespeare play of all time. I know you're probably thinking I'd prefer one of his comedies, such as As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing, and I do enjoy those--but Macbeth totally fascinates me. For one thing, it has witches and magic and destiny, which are three of my absolute favorite things to see in a story. For another thing, it's really about the relationship between Macbeth and his wife, and their marriage is actually kind of sweet. They're a team! At least until Macbeth starts killing people.

I was blown away by Macbeth when I first read it in high school, and since I've learned more about the history of play, I've come to appreciate it even more. Macbeth is a work of art that bites back; it doesn't stay safely on the page or in the theater. That's why actors are superstitious about calling it "the Scottish play;" one doesn't want to invite it into one's home. It's close enough to actual history and human nature to be completely plausible.*

What I love about Shakespeare's tragedies so much is that you spend the entire play going, "Ooh, if they just hadn't done that, everything would have turned out okay." There's something comforting about looking at a series of mistakes that happen to other people in the hopes you might avoid the same. A great example of this is Romeo and Juliet, which could arguably be retitled A Series Of Dumb Decisions. But with Macbeth, you sympathize with him so much and feel his downfall is so unavoidable, you can't help but finish the play with the sense that it's more of a cautionary tale about ambition and moral weakness than a tragedy per se.

Anyway, that's just a few of the reasons why Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare play. What's yours?



*Incidentally, if you're interested in Shakespeare, I can't recommend Jennifer Lee Carrell's Interred with Their Bones and Haunt Me Still enough.



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Collision

As if I wasn't paranoid enough about getting into a car accident, Collision did a good job of convincing me that every single person on the road except for me is FREAKING INSANE and not to be trusted.

Collision, which aired on Masterpiece Contemporary the last two weeks, takes us into the fascinating world of... a traffic accident. Yeah, I didn't exactly find the premise gripping, either. But Ruth from Booktalk & More assured me that it was really good (check out her review), so I decided to give it a run on the ol' DVR. And, as usual, she was right!

Okay, so here's the run-down: a bunch of cars are in this huge pile up on the A-something-or-other, which I'm guessing is like the British version of an interstate. And every single person in this crash has something suspicious going on in their lives, and half of the people are murdered! It might even be a higher percentage than that. And yummy yummy Douglas Henshall (oh, Cutter, I missed you so {{{hugs}}}) has to sort through all this crap to find out what caused the accident, and meanwhile his ex-luvah is in charge, and his boss keeps going, "Why haven't you solved this thing yet??? You only have one more day!"

Usually the multiple-storylines-thing annoys me, but somehow Collision managed to completely suck me into all the characters' lives. I think the pacing of the revelations about their lives had a lot to do with it--the idea that all of these people have progressively bigger secrets is patently ridiculous, but I loved learning about them, and was completely willing to suspend any disbelief.

I'm not going to go through all the characters' storylines, but I do want to recount my favorite, which involved a young woman named Jane Tarrant. Jane works at the gas station, but longs for bigger and better things. Yet how can she break out of her rut? After the crash, a rich old guy (well, older) comes into the gas stop and starts crushing on Jane. Then he asks her out for a drink, and btw he's married, and oh haha Jane's actually engaged to some bloke who wants to get married in a pub (uhg). But why don't you go to this art exhibition with me, baby? Wellll, let's just say, he's rich and he loves art. *fans self* Of course, it's Kandinsky, but hey, I can put up with that. And so, apparently, can Jane, who agrees to go to Paris with him, breaks up with her fiance, and quits her job. But will Richy Richard leave his wife for a gas station employee? Oh please oh please say yes, because that would be totally cool.

Um, anyway. Aside from that guy, the other men in this show are NOT SMOOTH. Henshall trying to get back together with his ex-luvahrrrr was totally awkward. Despite that, though, I highly recommend this show. And I believe you can still watch it online at PBS.com.

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And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love's Philosophy

I like mystery books, but I LOVE mystery shows; and last week's And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea, the first episode in the second season of Inspector Lewis on Mystery! (or Masterpiece Mystery or whatever the hell they're calling it now) was a great piece of television:  entertaining, intense, mysterious, and fascinating.



If you don't keep up with Mystery, here's a quick run-down:  Inspector Lewis started off as the Detective Sergeant on a previous series, Inspector Morse (which I've never watched).  Then Morse died, and now Lewis is the inspector in his own series, aided by the "dishy" Det. Sgt. James Hathaway. 

Lewis and Hathaway are part of Thames Valley Police, whose environs include Oxford University.  The central mystery of And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea revolves around one of the university's most famous students, Percy Shelley.  It all starts when several volumes of rare 19th-century literature is discovered in the flat of a murder victim and janitor at the Bodleian Library, arguably one of the most famous libraries in the world.  After getting a peek at the inner workings of the Bodleian, Lewis and Hathaway are led, strangely, into the world of gambling and fine art.  This isn't exactly a whodunnit story (it's obvious fairly early on who the baddies are), but the mystery lies in raveling why the murderers killed their victims.

First of all, let me just say that Hathaway is my favorite part of this series.  He is super-smart, quiet, funny ("Do I get to play at being a policeman, then?" Philip, suspect number one, asks at some point in the show.  "Why not?" Hathaway mutters in response.  "We do it all day."), and very intuitive.  Not to mention dishy!  And did I mention he plays music?  It's, like, Ren Fair jazz or something, but still.  He's totally swoon-worthy.  Thus I was the complete opposite of bothered by the fact that he recited Shelley's "Love's Philosophy" so many times during the course of this episode I now have it memorized.  He can recite poetry as much as he wants as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, back to the point (assuming I have one), what I really found fascinating about this episode was, of course, the way it treated art and artists.  One of the murder victims is an art student who does conceptual pieces like videos of paint drying.  Philip, her friend and the initial suspect, is a painter with a photographic visual memory.  Lewis and Hathaway, of course, being no-nonsense policemen and blah blah blah, are completely perplexed by Nell's contemporary art pieces--works like video of paint drying and trying to bomb a building.  However, the show itself didn't treat Nell's work dismissively--on the contrary, she's called original, imaginative, and creative several times in the course of the episode.

Not so with Philip, a painter and fan of JMW Turner and John Constable, the gods of English landscape painting.  The university gallery manager calls him, "Just an eye," and Philip himself says he doesn't have ideas.  Because he paints what he sees, he's portrayed as a mere copyist--literally.  Not only that, but he's sexually and emotionally emasculated.  At the same time, however, his "copyist" powers of observation give him an almost Sherlock Holmes-esque ability to help solve the case.  Apparently, mimetic art is good for deductive reasoning and recording, but does not qualify as creative or original.  One wonders where that puts photography, then.

I also love how academics are portrayed in this series (hint:  it's not flattering).  They're snobby, completely out of touch with reality, and either abuse their specialities for personal gain or hate them--or both.  Academidiots are such easy targets.

Overall, I thought this was a great episode, but I was a bit bothered by how art was portrayed in it.  The "good" pieces were incomprehensible--which fits way too much into this myth that there is any such thing as originality, let alone that that contemporary art is the sole possessor of it.  Talk about academidiots--that's total bull crap.  But then I'm a 19th Century person, so obviously I would favor Turner over watching paint dry.

If you want to read more about And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea, check out Ruth's excellent review of it at Booktalk & More!

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Wallander

I really love mysteries.  And according to Alan Cummings, Kurt Wallander is the most popular fictional detective evah... or something like that.  I wasn't really paying that close attention.  What I do know is, Kurt Wallander is a Swedish detective trying to solve a series of grisly murders involving beheading and scalping in the new Mystery! series on PBS.

I know what you're thinking right now.  You're thinking, "But Tasha, I thought Swedes were the most non-threatening people in Europe."  No, you're getting them confused with the Swiss.  However, I do have to agree there seems to be a rather high level of crime going on in the Rembrandt-esque landscape that makes up Wallander's district (fyi:  Rembrandt was not Swedish).

Here are some other things I learned about Sweden on this show, aside from the fact that they like to murder each other:

• Swedish people talk with British accents.
• Have you ever wondered if Swedish homes all look like the inside of an IKEA store?  Well, apparently they do.
• Does anyone else find the scarcity of trees to wood used in houses ratio alarming?  And did anyone else start humming Norwegian Wood at some point?  No?  Well, okay then.  I didn't, either, I was just wondering, of course....
  
• Lawn ornamants should never consist of florescent tube lighting.  Really, what was that guy thinking?
• While in the US, a psychological profile of "white male, appears to be normal" is usually considered helpful, in Sweden it only causes confusion.
  

In all seriousness, though, despite the fact that I obviously know very little about Sweden, I really loved the first episode in this series and highly recommend it.  Kenneth Branagh is absolutely great as the depressed and occassionally inarticulate detective who obviously feels very deeply, but has difficultly expressing his emotions.  For example, here's what he sounds like in a phone conversation with his daughter:

Daughter:  Maybe we can go to see grandpa later?
Wallander: *long stretch of silence* Erm--
Daughter: Okay, then.  Well, WHATEVER, Dad! *hangs up*
Wallander:  Gr--I--mmmm--wha--GAAARGH!

That sounds like a conversation with my dad, except I don't hang up on him.  I actually found the relationship between Wallander and his daughter to be rather odd; it didn't feel like a father/daughter relationship at all.  He also has the most annoying ringtone in the history of the world. 

Really the best thing about the series so far is Branagh.  The shots were occasionally overdramatic, as was the score (which was sort of hit-and-miss with me--sometimes brilliant, sometimes completely distracting), and I guessed who the murderer was right away; but overall, it was a great, enjoyable episode, and I look forward to seeing next week's installment!

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