Tuesday, December 03, 2013

6 Facts About Cymbeline That Will Keep You Up At Night

This week we got our first look at the trailer for the upcoming Cymbeline movie, starring Ethan Hawke.  If you haven't yet taken a look, here's your chance:




While the most hardcore of Shakespeare geeks debates the merits of another Ethan Hawke version of Shakespeare (and whether the flame throwers were a good idea), I thought it might be a good opportunity to play catch up with the rest of the world who are scratching their heads and asking, "Cymbeline? Wotzat?" Well, brace yourself. This is not your Mama's Shakespeare. (Your mother was a high school English teacher, right?)

1) Unless you study these things, you've almost certainly never heard of Cymbeline. IMDB shows only 5 filmed productions dating back all the way to 1913 (and counting this yet to be released one). In comparison, I stopped counting Hamlet productions at 30+, and that wasn't even counting all the variations (Hamlet 2, Zombie Hamlet, and so on). Romeo and Juliet has even more. Many Shakespeare plays have become ingrained in our cultural subconscious to the point where we all recognize various Shakespeare references before we ever sit down to watch the show. You've almost certainly seen a balcony scene reference, or Hamlet talking to his skull, or Macbeth's witches around their cauldron. You've almost certainly never seen any Cymbeline.

2) The only quote you're likely to recognize will also probably make you cry. There's no "To be or not to be" here, no light through yonder window breaking, no witches chanting around a bubbling cauldron. If you recognize anything that comes out of this play, chances are it is this funeral dirge:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust. 
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust. 
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownéd be thy grave!
3) It's not a tragedy, or a comedy, or a history. It's true that Shakespeare plays had a certain formula you could rely on. Comedies end with a wedding (or, well, the promise of one), and the joke is that tragedies always end with everybody dead. Ok, fine it's more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Cymbeline breaks all the rules. It's listed in the First Folio as a tragedy, but hardly anybody dies, and rumor has it that the editors of the Folio may have never actually seen a performance of this one. There's not really a single central "tragic hero" like you might expect to find. It has a happy ending, but everybody was already married. It's arguably something of a history, because Cymbeline was a real king who ruled at the same time as another of Shakespeare's favorites, Julius Caesar. And, like watching a production of Julius Caesar, you're likely to come away from Cymbeline wondering, "Ok, now, wait, how much of that was actual history and how much did Shakespeare just make up?" In short it's a little bit of everything, which leads us to ...

4) Lazy sitcoms did not invent the "clip show" or "greatest hits," lazy Elizabethan playwrights did. (Credit to Shakespeare geeks MagpieAndWhale and TheRoaringGirl for those expressions.) Shakespeare had his favorite characters and plot devices, and threw them all into the stew for this one. To borrow from theroaringgirl's useful summary, "It has star-crossed lovers, missing princes, a manipulative wife, an aging king, a trusty servant, a villainous liar (whose name literally means “little Iago”), a “breeches part,” an idealized pastoral setting, war with Rome, getting lost in wales, a visit from the Gods, a soothsayer, songs, mistaken identity, a death-like sleep, and the most convoluted 5th act reveal ever written." Orson Welles is credited with the quote, "Now we sit through Shakespeare to recognize the quotations." If point #2 told us that there's not going to be many quotations to recognize, the good news is that there's probably going to be a whole lot of plot you'll recognize from other plays.

5) Most critics over the centuries have hated it. Samuel Johnson did not want to "waste criticism" on its "unresisting imbecility". George Bernard shaw called it "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order." Henry James offers, "The thing is a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all.I bet Ethan Hawke and friends can't wait for the latest crop of reviews to come out! (Credit to blog Ten Pages or More for these and more similar quotes.) None of this stops them from calling it "Shakespeare's undiscovered masterpiece" in the trailer however.

6) It's a pastoral comedy with a happy ending, done in the style of a flamethrower-wielding motorcycle gang. You did watch the trailer, right? I'm not making that up. As someone else noted, it's like doing Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It with a motorcycle gang. And flamethrowers.


There's your lesson in Cymbeline for the day. So - if you weren't already planning to go see it (because hey, Shakespeare movie!), did I convince you?

P.S. - What do you think of the new font?  Too big?  I'm trying it out.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the large font.

--Average Mom

JM said...

Well, Duane, I'm not in first grade.
Does that say anything about how much I like the new font? :)

Duane Morin said...

.....no. :)

Does that mean "my eyes aren't what they used to be, so I like the bigger font" or "It makes the site look like a first grader wrote it"?

Anne said...

Wow. At least now I know SOMEthing about Cymbeline. :) Thanks for another fun post.

Oh, and new font is fine.

JM said...

Duane, It was not a comment on the content or how it appears at all. It has no bearing on how it's perceived--at least I don't think so. But the size! Sure does take up a lot o' bandwidth.

See Spot. See Spot run. See Jane. :)

Am I dating myself with the example? :(
Keep it if *you* like it. I'll still read what you write.

JM said...

Okay...maaaybe an eensy weensy spider bit smaller...:)

JM said...

Saw a production of Cymbeline a few years ago. The director chose to unwisely intersperse modern pop songs, (no doubt "inspired to genius" by the loose ridiculousness of the play). Needless to say, it didn't work.

But if one Shakespeare play was made for the the overindulgent proclivities of Hollywood, this one is it. Pile it on. The more the merrier! Ironically, and I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, the gross liberties the studio treatments always take with Shakespeare could even serve to connect and smooth out the loosely hanging pieces that make up this conglomeration.

But they seem to take it way too seriously, if the trailer is any indication. Well, what can one expect--Ethan Hawke must be surrounded by a venue that suits his constant brooding.

I'd love to see it interpreted as a complete farce. Maybe Mel Brooks could give it the best interpretation of anyone.
I laughed myself through the production I mentioned-- unfortunately, in all the wrong places.

Anonymous said...

Hate to keep belaboring something as insignificant as the size of print, but this near sited average mom still liked the large font!!! Seriously, I know nothing about Cymbeline, but if I were going to see the film, I would want to read the play first. To me, in any of the Shakespeare plays I have read, and it hasn't been that many, I like to linger over the words, how they are strung together, and then reread. I know the plays are meant to be seen, but for me, contemplating on the words spoken through reading them are the treasure I find in Shakespeare.

--Average Mom

JM said...

Average Mom,

Yes, initially the plays were meant to be *heard*, not read. Elizabethans went to *hear* a play.

But in our modern experience, it's only through reading them that we can truly understand what is there *to be* heard. (If that makes any sense?) The combination of both will take us to a complete understanding of what is actually there on the page.

Investigation should always begin on the page and make many trips back to the page, in my opinion. There's too much there to not do so.

Simon Harding said...

A 2016 factoid: The Royal Shakespeare Compamny in Stratford-Upon-Avon are doing Cymbeline, this year, with many of the male roles (including Cymbeline him... er herself!) played by women! - http://www.theatrebreaks.com/shows-stratford-upon-avon/cymbeline