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Jan. 22nd, 2008 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe post I meant to make this morning, or yesterday, or whichever: part two!
When I saw we had The Revenger's Tragedy (by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur, depending on who you ask) assigned for class, all I knew about it was the rendition that's described in Tam Lin. Since then, I've read the play, reread the Tam Lin performance, and seen the film, so I've got three versions jangling about in my head, and it's very odd.
First, the play itself: it's both pretty deliberately modeled after Hamlet (Vindice carrying around and babbling to the skull, the "grave" jokes, the poisons, the incest, the scene in which the vengeful sons shout at their mother for her bad behavior) and kind of an anti-Hamlet, in that while Hamlet is all about Hamlet's interiority and restoring proper order, The Revenger's Tragedy has no interiority whatsoever and deals with tearing authority down. All the characters basically stand in for the attributes they represent - i.e. Vindice (Vengeance), Lussorioso (Lustful) and, my personal favorite, Supervacuo - and the 'good' guys exist to tear down the 'bad' guys in various horrible fashions, often along with a lot of really nasty humor. I give you a (paraphrased) example from the scene in which Vindice has just poisoned the evil Duke by tricking him into kissing the poison-coated skull of his dead girlfriend (revenge tragedies are apparently like this a lot.)
Duke: Oh my god, the poison is dissolving my tongue!
Vindice: *with extreme glee* That's what you get for French kissing!
Duke: *would probably be telling Vindice that he was a giant freak, if his tongue wasn't busy dissolving*
That being said, while it is a very cold and fairly heartless play in that way, the part I found most interesting is the bit where Vindice is hired by the Duke's son to kill himself - or rather, the disguised character he was playing before. Vindice thinks it's hilarious, but there's something to be said there about what revenge does to a person - and that probably has some interesting things to say about what Thomas is trying to do with the play in Tam Lin, too.
Meanwhile, the movie version is . . . . fascinating and insane. It's not like any other filmed version of a historical play I've seen before; the screenwriters basically take the plot, remove chunks, throw in new scenes in Jacobean speech and mix it in with some random lines in modern speech as well, usually full of curse words or people demanding to know if other people are Cockneys. Christopher Eccleston stars as Vindice and starts off the movie in style by exiting a Death Bus, striding around in a long black coat, and beating up a gang of randomly angry Liverpudlians; as might be expected, this was calculated to win my interest. He spends the rest of the movie being crazy and tormented and performing wacky crazy ventriloquist acts with the skull of his dead girlfriend, and also beating more people up, and also pretending to be BFF with Eddie Izzard (as the evil Duke's son Lussorioso) while secretly plotting the downfall of his entire family (including Derek Jacobi as the aforementioned evil Duke.) Sadly, the combination of Eddie Izzard and Christopher Eccleston made me wish Vindice would swear off the whole revenge business and just team up with Eddie Izzard instead, but that is my fault and not the film's.
Interesting points of diversion from the play: first of all, Castiza, Vindice's sister, who in the play gets two scenes to be Pure and Chaste and that's it, becomes a major player in the film. She's part of a knife-throwing act (awesome) who recognizes Vindice almost right away after threatening him with her giant knife (double awesome) and then gets to join in the revengination and laugh crazily along with Christopher Eccleston and the other brother when everyone dies (triple awesome, but also REALLY CREEPY.) Meanwhile, their mother is I think a blind crack addict? The blind part definitely, at least. To compensate for how awesome Castiza is, though, the filmmakers ramp up the incest storyline - in the play, the Duchess is sleeping with her husband's illegitimate son, while in the film she's sleeping with her own son. They also make Lussorioso even more evil and cut out all the wacky Jacobean disguise hijinks.
There are also some really crazy metaphors that I'm not sure I understand entirely, but would probably comprehend more if I was British. For a start, I am completely bemused by the hordes of angry Cockney-hating (but Eccleston-fearing!) Liverpudlians. There is also a fairly blatant Princess Diana analogy when a prominent character's wife dies, although that's also mixed in with (I think?) some JFK conspiracy theory action. And at the end after everyone dies there's a Big Dramatic Zoom on a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. And probably more things that I didn't even notice. And there's a Monty Python reference at one point. And apparently the whole thing is set in postapocalyptic England after some catastrophe destroyed the whole southern half, but I did not get that either until I read up on the movie afterwards. In sum: INSANITY. And completely creepy, although also often hilarious. But worth watching for Eccleston and Izzard, and for the awesomeness that is Castiza.
So after reading Revenger's Tragedy, I followed that up with the reading for my other class, Matthew Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk. After murder and rape and incest, I got . . . more murder and rape and incest! The Monk was famous in its day for being terribly horrific and licentious; it was written in 1794 by a very bored 19-year-old boy in ten weeks who'd been reading a lot of Gothic novels and thought he'd try his hand at his own.
Things I learned from reading The Monk:
1. If you go into a monastery, you will become cowardly, vain, and weak-willed, and may eventually be seduced by a demoness.
2. However, if you go into a convent, you will become pregnant and get locked in a dungeon with your dead baby by the evil nuns to Think About What You've Done, so the monks are probably better off.
3. If a girl stalks you into a monastery, sends you pictures of herself as the Madonna, and threatens suicide if you send her away again, she is BAD NEWS and you should not sleep with her.
4. Conversely, if you follow a guy into a monastery, save his life, express your intention to die for him, and then put out a whole lot, he'll never love you as much as if you played hard-to-getand were secretly his sister the whole time.
5. If your plan to rescue your true love involves her disguising herself as the castle ghost to follow the route the ghost usually takes, and you then find someone who looks exactly like the castle ghost following the route said ghost usually takes, check and make sure it is not the castle ghost before you grab her and pledge her your life in very bad poetry.
6. The Bible is lewd, licentious, and inappropriate for gently-reared young females.
(6.a. But if you say this in your Gothic novel, the famous poet Coleridge will get very pissed with you and start a literary review bitchfight.)
In other words, as might be expected, the book was mostly entertainingly melodramatic, UBER-SKETCHY in parts (like, say, those dealing with incestuous rape), really anti-Catholic but surprisingly liberal in the concept that getting pregnant out of wedlock is not all that bad, considering, and had a cameo from the Wandering Jew. Homeward Bounders readers, you will know why that entertains me so.
At this point, I was really feeling the need to read something that did not end with half the cast dying tragically. Fortunately, anticipating this, I had packed light and fluffy: Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax.
Okay. I'm going to admit right now, I am a fan of girly romantic comedy novels, and I am discovering myself really fond of Heyer. The Unknown Ajax was absolutely adorable - and only half a romance, really; the other half the plot had smugglers! The story focuses on a poor-but-landed-and-titled family that has to call the long-lost lower-class grandson (the second son married "a weaver") home to inherit after the oldest son dies in an accident. There's an unmarried other daughter who is tall and spirited, and that part of the plot is, of course, utterly predictable. But the hero spent most of his time talking in broad Yorkshire and making utterly deadpan jokes, and the romance is not at all angsty but believably friendly and affectionate, and there were hugs! In fact, most of the romantic scenes went like this:
Hero: [Something deadpan tragic about his poor lower-class status/secret engagement to an illiterate blonde/cowardice in battle/etc.]
Heroine: You lie a whole lot, you know.
Hero: Happen I do. Hugs?
Heroine: . . . okay.
There's plenty of comedy, including a classic screwball scene at the end. And did I mention the smugglers? Overall, it made me giggle, and it made me happy, and did not at all make me think, which after Middlemarch and the revengers and evil monks was exactly what I wanted.
And if you read through all that babble and still have the patience to comment on something, you should get a prize.
When I saw we had The Revenger's Tragedy (by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur, depending on who you ask) assigned for class, all I knew about it was the rendition that's described in Tam Lin. Since then, I've read the play, reread the Tam Lin performance, and seen the film, so I've got three versions jangling about in my head, and it's very odd.
First, the play itself: it's both pretty deliberately modeled after Hamlet (Vindice carrying around and babbling to the skull, the "grave" jokes, the poisons, the incest, the scene in which the vengeful sons shout at their mother for her bad behavior) and kind of an anti-Hamlet, in that while Hamlet is all about Hamlet's interiority and restoring proper order, The Revenger's Tragedy has no interiority whatsoever and deals with tearing authority down. All the characters basically stand in for the attributes they represent - i.e. Vindice (Vengeance), Lussorioso (Lustful) and, my personal favorite, Supervacuo - and the 'good' guys exist to tear down the 'bad' guys in various horrible fashions, often along with a lot of really nasty humor. I give you a (paraphrased) example from the scene in which Vindice has just poisoned the evil Duke by tricking him into kissing the poison-coated skull of his dead girlfriend (revenge tragedies are apparently like this a lot.)
Duke: Oh my god, the poison is dissolving my tongue!
Vindice: *with extreme glee* That's what you get for French kissing!
Duke: *would probably be telling Vindice that he was a giant freak, if his tongue wasn't busy dissolving*
That being said, while it is a very cold and fairly heartless play in that way, the part I found most interesting is the bit where Vindice is hired by the Duke's son to kill himself - or rather, the disguised character he was playing before. Vindice thinks it's hilarious, but there's something to be said there about what revenge does to a person - and that probably has some interesting things to say about what Thomas is trying to do with the play in Tam Lin, too.
Meanwhile, the movie version is . . . . fascinating and insane. It's not like any other filmed version of a historical play I've seen before; the screenwriters basically take the plot, remove chunks, throw in new scenes in Jacobean speech and mix it in with some random lines in modern speech as well, usually full of curse words or people demanding to know if other people are Cockneys. Christopher Eccleston stars as Vindice and starts off the movie in style by exiting a Death Bus, striding around in a long black coat, and beating up a gang of randomly angry Liverpudlians; as might be expected, this was calculated to win my interest. He spends the rest of the movie being crazy and tormented and performing wacky crazy ventriloquist acts with the skull of his dead girlfriend, and also beating more people up, and also pretending to be BFF with Eddie Izzard (as the evil Duke's son Lussorioso) while secretly plotting the downfall of his entire family (including Derek Jacobi as the aforementioned evil Duke.) Sadly, the combination of Eddie Izzard and Christopher Eccleston made me wish Vindice would swear off the whole revenge business and just team up with Eddie Izzard instead, but that is my fault and not the film's.
Interesting points of diversion from the play: first of all, Castiza, Vindice's sister, who in the play gets two scenes to be Pure and Chaste and that's it, becomes a major player in the film. She's part of a knife-throwing act (awesome) who recognizes Vindice almost right away after threatening him with her giant knife (double awesome) and then gets to join in the revengination and laugh crazily along with Christopher Eccleston and the other brother when everyone dies (triple awesome, but also REALLY CREEPY.) Meanwhile, their mother is I think a blind crack addict? The blind part definitely, at least. To compensate for how awesome Castiza is, though, the filmmakers ramp up the incest storyline - in the play, the Duchess is sleeping with her husband's illegitimate son, while in the film she's sleeping with her own son. They also make Lussorioso even more evil and cut out all the wacky Jacobean disguise hijinks.
There are also some really crazy metaphors that I'm not sure I understand entirely, but would probably comprehend more if I was British. For a start, I am completely bemused by the hordes of angry Cockney-hating (but Eccleston-fearing!) Liverpudlians. There is also a fairly blatant Princess Diana analogy when a prominent character's wife dies, although that's also mixed in with (I think?) some JFK conspiracy theory action. And at the end after everyone dies there's a Big Dramatic Zoom on a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. And probably more things that I didn't even notice. And there's a Monty Python reference at one point. And apparently the whole thing is set in postapocalyptic England after some catastrophe destroyed the whole southern half, but I did not get that either until I read up on the movie afterwards. In sum: INSANITY. And completely creepy, although also often hilarious. But worth watching for Eccleston and Izzard, and for the awesomeness that is Castiza.
So after reading Revenger's Tragedy, I followed that up with the reading for my other class, Matthew Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk. After murder and rape and incest, I got . . . more murder and rape and incest! The Monk was famous in its day for being terribly horrific and licentious; it was written in 1794 by a very bored 19-year-old boy in ten weeks who'd been reading a lot of Gothic novels and thought he'd try his hand at his own.
Things I learned from reading The Monk:
1. If you go into a monastery, you will become cowardly, vain, and weak-willed, and may eventually be seduced by a demoness.
2. However, if you go into a convent, you will become pregnant and get locked in a dungeon with your dead baby by the evil nuns to Think About What You've Done, so the monks are probably better off.
3. If a girl stalks you into a monastery, sends you pictures of herself as the Madonna, and threatens suicide if you send her away again, she is BAD NEWS and you should not sleep with her.
4. Conversely, if you follow a guy into a monastery, save his life, express your intention to die for him, and then put out a whole lot, he'll never love you as much as if you played hard-to-get
5. If your plan to rescue your true love involves her disguising herself as the castle ghost to follow the route the ghost usually takes, and you then find someone who looks exactly like the castle ghost following the route said ghost usually takes, check and make sure it is not the castle ghost before you grab her and pledge her your life in very bad poetry.
6. The Bible is lewd, licentious, and inappropriate for gently-reared young females.
(6.a. But if you say this in your Gothic novel, the famous poet Coleridge will get very pissed with you and start a literary review bitchfight.)
In other words, as might be expected, the book was mostly entertainingly melodramatic, UBER-SKETCHY in parts (like, say, those dealing with incestuous rape), really anti-Catholic but surprisingly liberal in the concept that getting pregnant out of wedlock is not all that bad, considering, and had a cameo from the Wandering Jew. Homeward Bounders readers, you will know why that entertains me so.
At this point, I was really feeling the need to read something that did not end with half the cast dying tragically. Fortunately, anticipating this, I had packed light and fluffy: Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax.
Okay. I'm going to admit right now, I am a fan of girly romantic comedy novels, and I am discovering myself really fond of Heyer. The Unknown Ajax was absolutely adorable - and only half a romance, really; the other half the plot had smugglers! The story focuses on a poor-but-landed-and-titled family that has to call the long-lost lower-class grandson (the second son married "a weaver") home to inherit after the oldest son dies in an accident. There's an unmarried other daughter who is tall and spirited, and that part of the plot is, of course, utterly predictable. But the hero spent most of his time talking in broad Yorkshire and making utterly deadpan jokes, and the romance is not at all angsty but believably friendly and affectionate, and there were hugs! In fact, most of the romantic scenes went like this:
Hero: [Something deadpan tragic about his poor lower-class status/secret engagement to an illiterate blonde/cowardice in battle/etc.]
Heroine: You lie a whole lot, you know.
Hero: Happen I do. Hugs?
Heroine: . . . okay.
There's plenty of comedy, including a classic screwball scene at the end. And did I mention the smugglers? Overall, it made me giggle, and it made me happy, and did not at all make me think, which after Middlemarch and the revengers and evil monks was exactly what I wanted.
And if you read through all that babble and still have the patience to comment on something, you should get a prize.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 05:56 am (UTC)I don't remember large swathes of the story, just that it was Jacobean and there was lots of scheming and violence and probably a masque at some point?, but I remember having great fun with the design, because given the source material, I didn't feel under any obligation to be remotely subtle.
I've never seen the movie, but I remember Castiza in the play well enough to approve of her being given an injection of badass.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 06:04 am (UTC)Designing that must have been ridiculous amounts of fun - do you remember anything about yours? Especially the costumes. *curious!*
Badass Castiza is SO FABULOUS. She runs around in her tutu and waves knives at people, and I would kind of want to app her if she wasn't completely insane and didn't speak in Jacobean.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 07:03 am (UTC)Luckily I have Tam Lin back home in the States and the movie sounds odd but kind of good. Thinking of odd adaptations, have you seen Julie Taymor's Titus?
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 07:14 am (UTC)I have, but only bits! My professor showed us some in the first class of my Jacobean Tragedy course this semester, and it made me want to see the rest. Alan Cummings! Decadent Roman jazz parties! (It's funny that you should say that, too, because the back of the Revenger's Tragedy DVD case claims that the movie is "A Clockwork Orange meets Taymor's Titus.")
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 10:22 am (UTC)Its an incredibly brutal and horribly play but an oddly pretty movie while still being creepy.
For Henry V, we watching Brannagh's version which I love and My Own Private Idaho, that was just odd. Also that when the second Harry Potter movie came out so I'd seen Brannagh as Lockhart then all young as Hal, it was weird and fun.
I miss my English classes, I really should have been an English major, blasted Classics and its poetry and Greek, capturing me though I've an English minor.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 05:52 pm (UTC)Seriously, Classics is awesome, though. I'm just too lazy for the languages, so I stick to English and lots of Ken Branagh, whom I half love and half just want to giggle at and pat on the head. I do really like his Henry V, though. And his Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favorite movies of all time.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 02:57 pm (UTC)As to Revenger's Tragedy: DUDE. That sounds AWESOME.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 05:49 pm (UTC)I think that you would find Revenger's Tragedy really, really interesting. Although, of course, the unfortunate side effect is that I'm going to have Tam Lin's Thomas as Christopher Eccleston in my head for a few days even though I know they're absolutely nothing alike.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-24 12:50 am (UTC)See?!? The Monk is just full of Very Important Stuff Worth Knowing! In case you end up in a monastery or something.
I mean, #3 and #4? If you don't know those, you're going to be in BIG TROUBLE. And #5, well, SRSLY embarrassing.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-24 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-24 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
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