newcritics

Not what you might think. For the first anniversary of newcritics (yeah, newcritics!), founder Tom Watson has asked for a few posts about “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” Perhaps not as confounding as “To be or not to be…” in Hamlet, the text which has recently enthralled me, but still, daunting.

After reading Claudia Roth-Pierpont’s arresting Shakespeare article in The New Yorker (the November 19, 2007 issue, now available online only in synopsis), I decided to read Hamlet first, since I had not yet read or seen the play.

I swore, too, to revisit Henry IV, parts one and two, Henry V, and possibly Richard III. Although I now intend to avail myself of that qualifier “possibly,” regarding Richard III, because Henry IV alone has bullocked me.

In truth, Roth Pierpont’s article mentioned Hamlet in passing. Her thought-provoking piece concentrated on Shakespeare’s historical plays and Laurence Olivier’s and Orson Welles’ simultaneous efforts to make movies of them. She chronicled Olivier’s and Welles’ shared rivalry and grudging regard toward each other. The knighted Olivier and struggling Welles directed and acted in Shakespearean movies that in her estimation enriched and newly enlivened Henry IV and Henry V, among Shakespeare’s other plays. Both men’s films brought Shakespeare out of academia to earn acclaim among the masses. As the USA and England fought Nazi Germany, Shakespeare’s monarchs’ rallying cry to war and triumph spoke to the crowds. Olivier achieved box office success.

Alas, the films, while renowned through the 1940s and -50s aren’t readily available now. But Shakespeare’s plays, luckily, are.

I chose Hamlet first, not only because my teachers failed to assign it and I had so far failed to read it on my own, but possibly, too, because of a vague awareness that plots about warring for land and lordship rarely interest me.

Hamlet, however, not only kept me reading and rereading night and day, the text prodded me to find the movie on Netflix, starring Olivier as a somewhat old Hamlet, although naturally the actor manages to convey a young person’s deep bewilderment and fury upon discovering betrayal. The resplendent Jean Simmons plays Ophelia with a virginal quality that’s almost inconceivable among modern actresses.

Reading the play without the benefit of others’ criticism, no foreknowledge of “the Freudian Hamlet,” the cowardly Hamlet or calculating Hamlet, I regarded him as a high-minded, mad-eloquent existentialist. Further, Hamlet impressed me as great enough to claim a worthy scholar, actor, or director’s entire career.

As for Henry IV as Prince Hal as good-time Harry? Whereas Hamlet kept me up all night reading, Henry IV has not. In the introduction to Henry IV, Harold Bloom lauds Falstaff as rich in wit and wonderment. So far, I’ve missed that. Not finished—even though I allow no novels or short stories to divert me—I find Falstaff and his roguish wit largely a case of allowing Hal and his friends to call him names and indulge in bad-boy pranks. I’ve grown tired of the play, despite its brilliant text. Enough with jack and sack and fat guts already. Without Harold Bloom’s introduction professing such devotion to Falstaff, I’m not sure I’d plow on through. But of course I would—and will—out of stubbornness.

Happy Anniversary newcritics, and many more.