The Hollow Crown

I finished this excellent film series tonight and really liked it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a PBS film series of the four plays in the second tetrology. I found the movies really entertaining, which, let’s face it, can be a problem with Shakespeare sometimes (at least for me). These films are all Hollywood and are geared towards the “Average Joe” seeking a “Shakespeare Experience.” They succeed I think, providing a view into Shakespeare that is all cinematic glitz and glamour.

In fact, this idea of giving Shakespeare “back to the people” appears to have been a major objective of these movies (interviews in the bonus material on the DVD confirm this). In this vast and varied space that is “Shakespeare,” I have come across this notion many times before, the notion that Shakespeare has been hijacked by academia and thus diminished and devoiced, robbed of life by narcissistic, cloistered scholars in sealed-up universities.

Okay, a little too much there, but in all honesty, I feel like they may have a point. One of the actors in the DVD interview put it perfectly in saying (I’m paraphrasing) that Shakespeare would have been “horrified” to know that his plays were being experienced in a classroom. They are plays after all, meant for stages (or movie sets I guess). They are not books (remember, Shakespeare did not publish a single one of his plays during his lifetime). These are things of the theater, plain and simple, and are in their natural state only when acted out in front of people.

However, on the other side of the argument, there is something weird that I can’t quite put my finger on whenever I see these plays made into big Hollywood-type things. In watching such movies, it seems at times just so far from what Shakespeare actually intended or could ever have envisioned and as such I sometimes find a little nagging voice inside my head saying “it’s not supposed to be this way” during a particularly tricked-out fight scene or something. It’s kind of like this: if I were to go back in time and show anything from The Hollow Crown to Shakespeare, would he also be horrified (probably more like completely mystified…and I would probably be burned at the stake as a witch…but that’s another matter entirely)? The form would just be too far out for the guy to accept. Or would it?