If somebody made “deep fake technology” available to you quickly and easily, what’s the first thing you’d do? Swap out the celebrity you thought should have been cast in a particular movie? Get a politician to say something they shouldn’t? Porn?
Who we kidding, we all know what I did.
This technology comes from a tool called “Deep Nostalgia” by MyHeritage. It’s being marketed as a way to animate old vintage photos, and I admit that I did flip through a few family photos first for fun, but newer pictures of people who I could just as easily already have on video wasn’t very fun, and older pictures of people no longer with us was just too creepy to consider. So technically Shakespeare was my third choice 😉
I wonder how long before they do something where you can upload an audio clip and they’ll animate the mouth to match? That’d be pretty cool, I can already picture an animated Chandos reciting sonnet 18.
Ok, I realize this movie is ten years old, but I’d never seen it. I have the book around here someplace, but never really sat down to read it. I’ve known about the movie, it just never filtered up in my priorities high enough for me to sit and pay attention.
So I’m thankful that my wife has lately been in a “what movie can we watch with our teenagers” mood. Since they’ve grown out of generic animated things, we end up in situations where we immediately see anything Marvel or Pixar anyway, but then the boy only wants slasher gore (or anything generally R rated that he knows we won’t let him watch), while the girls want teen drama stuff that’s got a little too much “content you don’t watch with your parents,” if you know what I mean. So movies that look fun and safe and interesting to everybody, that nobody’s seen yet, have been a new quest. This week they found Letters to Juliet, entirely on their own!
The book and the movie are two different things. The book tells the story of the “Secretaries of Juliet”, a bunch of volunteers who take down the love notes left at Juliet’s balcony in Verona and answer them. The fictional story of the movie has our heroine (Amanda Seyfried, who specializes in playing characters named Sophie it seems) going to Verona on a “pre-honeymoon” with her husband who is so busy opening up his new restaurant that they haven’t had time to plan a wedding. He’s so busy, in fact, even in Verona, that she spends all of her time alone, site-seeing. She runs into the secretaries, they let her answer a letter of her own that turns out to be fifty years old, which results in the woman (and her grandson) coming back to Verona to hunt down her lost love, taking Sophie with them.
As far as romantic comedies go it’s as predictable as you’ve ever seen. As the movie was still in the opening credits I said to my family, “Is it just a rom com rule that whatever guy the girl is with in the beginning is not the guy she ends up with?” I’m still wondering if that is 100% true. It’s hardly a spoiler. A new guy enters the picture, they do the “we hate each other, we tolerate each other, we’re friends, we’re more than friends, will we end up together?” thing just fine. It’s all by the numbers.
How’s the Shakespeare content? Other than being set in and around Juliet’s balcony, there’s not much. There’s several tourist scenes of the crowd, including a line of people taking pictures while feeling up the statue. In the trivia I learned that they actually had to mock up the entire alley where this all takes place because the real one was far too small for the camera equipment. Fun.
The only Shakespeare content I spotted, oddly enough, came from Hamlet — “Doubt that the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move…” Strangely out place, but I guess I’ll take it.
All in all happy to check this one off my list. Nothing especially bad about it. In fact it was exactly the kind of movie we were looking for at the time. Sometimes that’s all you need.
I love when I learn new terms. This week, as part of that course I’m taking, I learned about closet drama. I’ve been doing this fifteen years and I don’t believe that’s ever come up, which is a pleasant reminder that you can always learn something new.
closet dramanoun a play to be read rather than acted
I think that’s particularly amusing because “Shakespeare was meant to be acted, not read!” has got to be the most common argument we’ve had over the years. Yet I can’t remember anyone, until now, saying “He wasn’t writing closet drama!”
I’m trying to imagine the dynamics of how this would work. I know that there’s the idea of actors getting together and doing a script in hand read through of a play (does this have a special name?) but as far as I know you do that with any play, whether they’re intended to be staged or not. I’ve read plenty of plays that I’ve never seen – Waiting for Godot, lot of O’Neill, lot of Beckett… and I enjoy reading plays, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read a play that was intended from the start to be read rather than performed.
Though some recognizable name pop up – Fulke Greville, Mary Sidney – show up in Wikipedia’s list of Elizabeth authors who partook of this format, they were doing so after Shakespeare died.
How would a closet drama be different? Is it a practical thing, like more emphasis on dialogue and less on stage direction, like an Aaron Sorkin project? I could dig that. Whenever I try to sit down to write fiction I find myself thinking that I prefer plays (I wrote several in college), primarily because, and I quote myself, “I care about what this character says to that character, and how that character reacts, and I don’t care what color the mountains are.” I think I stole it from some other famous author.
When googling the term, “Is The Tempest a closet drama?” came up as one of the autocomplete questions. Interesting. I wonder why that one? I’m trying to think of which Shakespeare play has the most interactive dialogue (as compared to, say, being heavy on the soliloquizing or exposition). Othello? I think you want a small cast. Hard to double when you’ve got people reading, with no exits and entrances, or costume changes.
Any experts in closet drama out there want to weigh in? I’m curious to learn more.
Every year about this time I get into a Shakespeare slump. I look back at the last few months, how few posts I’ve made, and debate whether I’ve lost my interest in Shakespeare. (Then again, I had a dream just last night that the prize in a video game was a Shakespeare quote and I literally cried with joy, so there’s that.)
I decided to try something different this year. I signed up for an online edX course called Shakespeare’s Life and Work, taught by Stephen Greenblatt, whose name might be familiar to Shakespeare geeks. I expect that the course is going to be a little basic, covering all the “where and when was he born” stuff that I think we generally already know, but I’m not in it primarily to learn a bunch of new information. I’m in it for the structure and reinforcement. I want to force myself to talk about Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related content for a few weeks and get myself back into the zone. Hopefully I’ll learn some new things, I don’t claim at all to be an expert in Shakespeare’s life.
I’ve tried this before – last time was a similar but far more advanced course about Hamlet’s ghost. I didn’t make it far on that one, but to be honest it had more to do with class participation than information. My introvert self loves the online learning thing precisely because I can sit behind the computer and not be forced to interact with others. When you tell me “The required homework for part one is to talk to three fellow students”, I’m probably not going to make it to part two. (This new class asked the same thing, though, and I forced myself to make it happen. Unclear yet whether it’s going to require that of me every time or if that was just a gatekeeping mechanism.)
Anyway, into the class we go. It’s funny now to see a video of someone standing in London describing the sites because now I can say, “I was there! I know where he’s standing!” which is probably nothing to the folks that live in the area but it took me a lifetime to get there so I’m going to geek out over it every chance I get 🙂
My plan is to blog here about how the course is going, especially if I find anything interesting outside general progress reports. The first bits so far are about the general universality (?) of Shakespeare and how “the world” owns him, what’s your personal attachment to Shakespeare and so on. I hope to hear more specifics about life at the time – economy, morals, the kind of stuff that contributed directly to why Shakespeare wrote, not just what he wrote.
Having only a casual understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets, I admit to being intimidated by All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (with a quote from Judi Dench on the cover, just to name drop some more 🙂 ). I already own a handful of copies of the sonnets, but most different only in design. This one is a different beast – a complete reorganization of all the sonnets (including those in the plays, not just the most well known 154). I read some early reviews where people were already arguing about some of the choices made. I don’t have the academic credentials to say much on that level.
All the Sonnets of Shakespeare
But I figured, that’s never stopped me before, and I can certainly tackle it from the only perspective I know, that of a casual reader, interested in learning more about the topic. It’s worked for me thus far.
The layout of the individual sonnet pages is very nice and already informative. Ordered by likely date they were written, each sonnet is presented along with a simple glossary of terms, as well as a simple summary of the sonnet’s theme (“You look beautiful and your name has a good reputation, which you use powerfully to hide your misdemeanors, but it is a power you should use with caution.”). I’m thinking those summaries alone might make a fun game, see if you can guess which sonnet goes with which summary.
Then comes the numbering, and why. The “original” number is marked, though this does not reflect the order that the sonnets are presented. For an easy example I went hunting for sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”) and found it near the front of the book in the 1590-1595 section. Some thoughts are provided on each sonnet, almost like a “What might Shakespeare have been thinking?” moment. Here, for example: “Dramatic analogy: Benedick on Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.” I’d never made that connection before. But it makes sense, I get it.
To give you an idea how the reordering/grouping ends up working, sonnet 130 is still followed by 131 through 137, then we break to show how 138 first showed up in The Passionate Pilgrim, side by side with the 1609 version, with notes comparing the differences. That’s kind of cool. That’s the bite-sized kind of new information I like processing. “Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries” versus “Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.” Did Shakespeare change it, or was one of them just a corrupt forgery? Papers have probably been written on the evidence for answers to that question.
The “regular” grouping of this set of sonnets continues up to #152 (with another Passionate Pilgrim side track at #144). So that’s where I get curious again, where do 153 and 154 end up?
#154 actually opens the book! It’s listed in the Pre 1582 section (making Shakespeare a teenager? fascinating!), and the notes suggest that this and #153 (which is listed next) being just paraphrases of a Greek epigram could mean that Shakespeare was recalling his schoolboy exercises.
On top of all that, there’s even more to this book. After all the sonnets are laid out as above, there’s a “literal paraphrases” section that goes through each and repeats it back in mostly modern language. This feels a bit like it was added to beef up the page count. They’re not formatted, shoving three paragraph looking sonnets onto each page. I’m not really sure who these are for, as typically a student who doesn’t follow the original language (even with the included glossary) would benefit more from a side by side and line by line translation, not “flip to the back of the book for a quick blurb on each one, if you can find it.”
But wait, there’s more! There’s an index mapping each sonnet number to its page number. Wish I’d thought to look for that sooner :), I would have known that sonnet 130 shows up on page 58, and sonnet 154 is on page 47. I said the book starts with #154, and I wasn’t lying – there’s a very long introduction 🙂
Hold on! Act now and you get another index! The addition of a “first lines” index is kind of neat, perhaps for the people who can remember enough to say, “I like that one that goes In faith my friend you never can grow old, which one was that?” and you can figure out that it’s sonnet #104 on page 200. Once you remember to get the quote right. 😉
Overall, this reminded me of an academic Shakespearean “choose your own adventure” book, as you could perhaps tell from my haphazard jumping through it. I picked an effectively random spot to start, then as I got curious, I flipped around where my interest led me, whether it was to see which sonnets came next in sequence, or where a sonnet was when it wasn’t where I thought it should be. I learned some things, and I’m sure if I eventually sit with it more, I’ll learn more. The information about each sonnet is not particularly dense, there’s not several pages defending the placement of each one and adding context for how that conclusion came to be. Not nearly as intimidating as I feared.
