Showing posts for Shakespeare
-
Macbeth (1623, 2025)
Better than I remember. I read Hamlet and Macbeth at around the same time, a long time ago, and I remember disliking Macbeth. Thinking that it was a bit dark and messy.
Still definitely dark. But much tighter than I remember. There's very little fat on the story — it's all propulsive and action-driven. There's not a ton of soliloquising or emotional gymnastics. No scenes where people go off and just mull around. I dig it.
Just after reading it we went to see the film of the production with David Tennant from back in February 2025. It was good but some of the casting choices were weird. David Tennant was actually remarkably not good. Banquo was terrific, and Macduff got better and better as the play went on. The person who played Malcolm gave off the impression that they hadn't rehearsed at all, and in fact that there was a person with cue cards standing just offscreen. Rigid, table-read-type stuff. The visual language was very cool, but maybe not particularly original.
Play, by William Shakespeare |
Show, with David Tennant | -
Shakespeare on Genius.com
I'm of the firm belief that if you're going to read Shakespeare, you should read with annotations. Shakespeare interjects too much context, and indeed sometimes writes things in such a roundabout way, that the text alone winds up only revealing part of the picture. Or at least it does for me.
But annotated Shakespeare tends to be the domain of books that you have to go out and rent from the library, if the library has them at all—and there's no way of determining whether the annotated edition you're getting is any good.
Genius.com, however—yeah, the rap lyrics website—hosts a bunch of Shakespeare plays, and the more popular ones even have pretty good, comprehensive annotations! Problem solved. Here's Hamlet.