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>"The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess." A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate.

>"The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess." A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate. I'm genuinely curious.

jfengel 6y ago
Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the plot just goes completely elsewhere for 17 years, followed by a completely unmotivated and really bizarre quickie "redemption". In each case you leave the theater having no idea how to feel about anything. They weren't funny, but neither have they resolved dramatically. They just kinda stop. That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie. The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp. But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often. So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.
- bogomipz 6y ago
  Thanks for your perspective and the wonderfully detailed response. That's quite interesting about Julie Taymor. I wish I would have been able to see that and now I'm curious to read a review. Do you have some online Shakespeare resources that you cold recommend for reading more about these types of elements discussions of Shakespeares works and career arc?

>"The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess." A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate. I'm genuinely curious.

jfengel 6y ago

Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the plot just goes completely elsewhere for 17 years, followed by a completely unmotivated and really bizarre quickie "redemption". In each case you leave the theater having no idea how to feel about anything. They weren't funny, but neither have they resolved dramatically. They just kinda stop. That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie. The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp. But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often. So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.

bogomipz 6y ago
Thanks for your perspective and the wonderfully detailed response. That's quite interesting about Julie Taymor. I wish I would have been able to see that and now I'm curious to read a review. Do you have some online Shakespeare resources that you cold recommend for reading more about these types of elements discussions of Shakespeares works and career arc?