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I waited in (virtual) line for Dame Judi Dench’s audiobook, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent. Like Sir Patrick Stewart’s book, this is one of those things that as a Shakespeare Geek you simply must experience. These are the gods and goddesses of our art still walking the earth. When they speak, we must listen.

At first I thought I was going to be disappointed with this book, as I noted in a previous post. It’s not at all like Stewart’s book. This one is not a traditional biography, auto- or otherwise. This is a collection of interviews between Dench and the narrator, her longtime friend Brendan O’Hea. The good news is I still loved it. I have the perfect analogy. Ready?

Imagine you’re a child again. It’s Sunday afternoon and your parents tell you that you’re all going to visit your grandmother at the rest home. Your grandmother used to be a world-famous stage actress. You’re so excited! You love visiting your grandmother; you can listen to her stories for hours. You happily travel to where she lives, and you find her seated in her comfy chair, with a cup of tea, and a book of puzzles on the table next to her, perhaps a quilt in her lap. After hugs and kisses hello, you settle down at her feet and say, “Tell us about when you were an actress?”

That’s exactly this book. One chapter is about Macbeth, another about Twelfth Night or Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline. There’s a chapter about rehearsals and one about audiences. It’s basically O’Shea saying, “Now, Judi, you first played Ophelia when you were 15…” and Dench going deep into memory, telling us what she wore, what jokes the actors played on each other, even quoting her favorite passages like they’re still as fresh in her mind as they were 60 years ago.

Also, just like a conversation with your grandmother, there are odd non-sequiturs that pop up between the stories, like the time they argue over whether Judi burnt the pork chops. And I’ll bet she’s not the only grandmother to utter exclamations like, “What the fuck does YOLO mean?” Breaking news, Dame Judi Dench has a filthy mouth. O’Shea even tells her, in the extra material, that editing out all her f-words was the hardest part of the whole book.

Just like listening to our elders tell their stories, it’s important to listen. Dench has stories from over fifty years of performing most of Shakespeare’s canon, and oh my yes, she has thoughts. We’ll hear her thoughts on favorite parts and plays she hates, theories she believes in, and those she finds utterly ridiculous (watch out, people who want to argue that Much Ado About Nothing is about lady parts…) Many of her stories involve actors no longer with us, making them even more important. Speaking their names – John Barton, Peter Brook, John Gielgud – feels like conjuring their ghosts to rise again. She paints a vivid picture, and you’re right there with her.

Like Stewart’s book, this one absolutely benefits from the audiobook treatment. It’s a conversation, so the back-and-forth banter is part of the fun. Dench’s voice is also a thing of beauty. I’ve watched her recite Sonnet 29 on the Graham Norton Show many times, and this is like a whole book of that. At any time, you realize she’s switched to reciting, and you can just sit back and bathe in the luxury of it. And also, like too many of our own cherished loved ones, one day that voice will be gone. So we need to cherish it while it’s here. If they told me tomorrow that Volume Two was coming out next Shakespeare Day I’d put my name on the list for that one, too.

Of course, by that I literally mean, let’s talk about the different Shakespeare plays we all saw in the HBO Max series Succession.

Did I fool anybody?

I know, I’m late to the party. I tried watching Succession back when it was new, but my attention drifted to Ted Lasso. I knew that Succession was supposed to be this King Lear meets Fox News type of thing, but I really have to get myself in the mood to sit through that kind of doom and gloom,

Well, we finally saw down and watched all four seasons. So let’s talk about it. It’s been long enough, so I’m not going to bother warning about spoilers. But I’m also not going to tell you who ultimately gets the kingdom, either.

Is It King Lear?

The comparison here is the most obvious one. Three children all vie to control their father’s kingdom. The thing is, that’s where the comparison ends. There’s no Cordelia here. All the children are equally horrible, both to each other and to their father. For his part, Brian Cox (who can hold his own against real Shakespeare material any day) treats them equally horribly as well. There’s no Kent, no Fool, no descent into madness. Could you stretch it a little bit and go looking for those things? Sure, I guess. Has Roman got some Cordelia in him? Are Frank and Carl supposed to be some sort of Fools? I think that’s stretching it.

So What Is It?

Just like how the Lion King is as much Henry IV as it is Hamlet, we can say the same about Succession. Let’s look at a few:

• Julius Caesar – A fairly obvious one, to start. You don’t get to amass that kind of power without making plenty of enemies, no matter how much you may think you’re the good guy doing the right thing, The biggest question is how many of them ultimately are there, and which of your friends will be the one that tips the scales in their favor?
• Coriolanus – Listen, if you put in the work and rise up the ranks to become the hero of Company A, and then you’re unceremoniously outcast from that Company that you helped build, what’s the logical thing to do? Why, go and join their sworn enemy and try to take them down, of course.
• Hamlet – I read this one somewhere. I didn’t pick up on it myself, but there’s an argument to be made that later in the series, there’s a Fortinbras character making his steady march on Denmark, ready to waltz in and pick over the pieces after they destroy themselves. I was too busy being impressed by how much he resembled Elon Musk.

Mostly, though, it’s Macbeth. I wouldn’t have said that until the final episode, but really, for those who have seen it and know what I’m talking about? The show ended and I said, “So, it’s Macbeth. That was totally Macbeth.”

What other influences did you see? People want to say Richard III for all the “I’ll take out anybody that gets in my way, including family members,” which I suppose is true. Are there any plays that aren’t about ruthless leaders who will do anything to win?

A funny thing happened recently when Bardfilm mentioned that he’d just seen Love At First Sight on Netflix and recommended it the next time my wife and I were looking for something to watch. We talk pretty often, but almost always about Shakespeare. So, it was a bit out of sync with the norm.

Well, my wife and I had a movie evening tonight and decided to watch it. In the first scene, our narrator character is reading from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All right, Bardfilm, I see you 🙂

The film is a brand new 2023 release, based on the book “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight,” authored by Jennifer E. Smith. It stars Haley Lu Richardson (The White Lotus) and Ben Hardy (Bohemian Rhapsody). So it’s not some “straight to DVD” anonymous release that would have collected dust on a Blockbuster shelf. It’s a legit project.

If not for one thing, we wouldn’t be talking about this movie. It is generic on top of generic—even the title. I searched IMDB and came back with nearly 100 exact matches. I understand that it’s cribbed from the original book title and probably plays better than “Statistical Probability” of anything, but this is what writers are for. Surely, somebody could have grabbed a different catchy line to use.

Then it does the “what are the odds?” thing to the extreme. Our male lead is obsessed with the probability of things, so he goes around quoting statistics. Did you know that 1 in 50 relationships begin in an airport? But 50% of marriages end in divorce? In fact that’s the entire structure of the movie, as Jameela Jamil plays an omnipresent narrator who keeps showing up in unusual places to let the audience know that there was only a 0.06% chance of a happy ending, unless X Y Z happens…

So why, then, are we talking about it? Because for some reason, there’s the promise of a lot of Shakespeare in this one. And I say it like that for a reason. As noted, we open with the narrator reading from Dream. I wonder if our story is going to parallel Shakespeare’s in some way. Or if perhaps our narrator is a cleverly disguised Puck, running around and messing with lovers for his/her own enjoyment? Nah.

Later, we glimpse the hero’s parents, a pair of thespians, banging out a bit of Dream for our amusement. Later, there’s an entire Shakespeare-themed party where everyone dresses up as Shakespeare characters and performs. Only we don’t get to see it. We see people in costume, and we’re given the numbers of how many of each character there are and what speeches were performed, but NOBODY ACTUALLY DOES ANY SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN. Aw, come on! There’s a specific “Who are you supposed to be?” / “I’m Macbeth” moment … but at no point does this factor into the story. Nobody actually performs any Macbeth.

There’s a moment when our hero is running around looking for our heroine. They’re at a fancy house. I have that moment where I scream, “OH IF SHE COMES OUT ON A BALCONY….:” but even that, the most obvious of obvious Shakespeare opportunities, doesn’t pan out.

Bardfilm and I were left pondering why the story would go there. There is so much Shakespeare and yet so little. Shakespeare for the masses is a tricky business. Drop in some Romeo and Juliet, and everybody’s right there with you. But push your luck and start bringing up stuff people didn’t study in high school, and you’ll lose them. This one misses obvious chances while leaving in the bizarre ones. There’s more Richard III than Romeo in this.

A new form of movie rating scale came to me the other day. Forget stars or tomatoes. We should be rating movies based on how much money I would have been okay spending on this. If I’d seen this in a theatre? I’d be annoyed. But at home, streaming on Netflix? Love At First Sight was a pleasant change of pace and arguably one of the better new originals I’ve seen lately. Sure, it’s cliché as heck, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t well acted and produced.