![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2011 07:14 am1. Antony and Cleopatra
I never think I'll like this play but it always wins me over. Which is a strange thing to have happen again and again, so I suspect it must instead be that the play gets better as it goes, or maybe relies on accumulation for some of its effects. It's kind of ending even before it begins, and the end of the end is, what, the whole last two acts? It's drawn out to a degree comparable only to the ends of Ghost and A League of Their Own, which are both intolerable to me (and to all males? or all humans?). But A&C earn it because it really is all about back story, a back story that draws in a lot of history, geography, prior Shakespeare. Maybe this is another of his experiments: the two don't show their best sides early on, and you're soon pretty much on Enobarbus', who's shown getting very sick of them. It's not like their annoying sides disappear later, either, it's just the other ones show up. What happens with Eno works as a kind of sacrifice of those parts of the audience mind that want A&C to die for their obnoxious sins against plot. They're worse than procrastinators, who are absolutely intolerable in narrative (a challenge Shakespeare took up a few plays earlier), because they are perpetually distracted - they simply don't notice the obvious. The most difficult thing pulled off may be that they don't come across as idiots. They're drunk on who they are together, and we eventually come around to finding that valid - maybe by becoming drunk on their rhetoric. Marvell's "Coy Mistress" poem is practically an epitome of this play, even down to the different speeds of the two halves. The most used word in the play may be "world." The world is their ball. They make Augustus run.
What are my favorites? I love Julius and Romeo, but I'm not sure to what extent that's just because I feel I understand them. Midsummer probably likewise. Love's Labor's Lost I need to read again; it was my favorite of his comedies once. Winter's Tale is fascinating.
I'll reread it shortly to check, but ever since I first experienced it I've felt Othello is even better than Hamlet. It must be the best play in the world. Despite what those others and Peer Gynt and Prometheus Unbound mean to me.
I'm also going to reread Troilus, Comedy of Errors, Richard II and Cymbeline, all of which I remember liking.
Bloom ranks the plays something like this: Lear, Hamlet, Henry IV (both together), Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night. Then Othello, Midsummer, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice and maybe Tempest in the runner-up group.
I'm fond of all those, possibly excepting Merchant.
I never think I'll like this play but it always wins me over. Which is a strange thing to have happen again and again, so I suspect it must instead be that the play gets better as it goes, or maybe relies on accumulation for some of its effects. It's kind of ending even before it begins, and the end of the end is, what, the whole last two acts? It's drawn out to a degree comparable only to the ends of Ghost and A League of Their Own, which are both intolerable to me (and to all males? or all humans?). But A&C earn it because it really is all about back story, a back story that draws in a lot of history, geography, prior Shakespeare. Maybe this is another of his experiments: the two don't show their best sides early on, and you're soon pretty much on Enobarbus', who's shown getting very sick of them. It's not like their annoying sides disappear later, either, it's just the other ones show up. What happens with Eno works as a kind of sacrifice of those parts of the audience mind that want A&C to die for their obnoxious sins against plot. They're worse than procrastinators, who are absolutely intolerable in narrative (a challenge Shakespeare took up a few plays earlier), because they are perpetually distracted - they simply don't notice the obvious. The most difficult thing pulled off may be that they don't come across as idiots. They're drunk on who they are together, and we eventually come around to finding that valid - maybe by becoming drunk on their rhetoric. Marvell's "Coy Mistress" poem is practically an epitome of this play, even down to the different speeds of the two halves. The most used word in the play may be "world." The world is their ball. They make Augustus run.
What are my favorites? I love Julius and Romeo, but I'm not sure to what extent that's just because I feel I understand them. Midsummer probably likewise. Love's Labor's Lost I need to read again; it was my favorite of his comedies once. Winter's Tale is fascinating.
I'll reread it shortly to check, but ever since I first experienced it I've felt Othello is even better than Hamlet. It must be the best play in the world. Despite what those others and Peer Gynt and Prometheus Unbound mean to me.
I'm also going to reread Troilus, Comedy of Errors, Richard II and Cymbeline, all of which I remember liking.
Bloom ranks the plays something like this: Lear, Hamlet, Henry IV (both together), Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night. Then Othello, Midsummer, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice and maybe Tempest in the runner-up group.
I'm fond of all those, possibly excepting Merchant.
