A Bonus Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on KPop Demon Hunters!

It's a new episode of "A Good Story Well Told", where Jonathan Auxier and I discuss KPop Demon Hunters and various things we've meant to discuss over the course of the show! Season 2 coming soon!

And here it is on Spotify:

37 Days of Shakespeare, Epilogue: The BBC Power Ranking Countdown

Already, kids, I spent years doing my Shakespeare series, and you thought it was done, but I wanted to do one final wrap-up today, where I rank the whole BBC series, in countdown format. My opinion of the plays themselves and these productions specifically are all mixed up with each other here. Unfortunately, the series is no longer easy to watch, as it has just disappeared off BritBox, so you’ll have to get the DVDs (perhaps from your local library) or acquire it in, ahem, other ways.  Click on the title to see my write-up of each production. 

• In 37th place, Titus Andronicus: Director Jane Howell, who will also be seen near the top of the list, cannot overcome the tastelessness of the material, and “spooky” cross-dissolves just feel tacky.
• 36th, Troilus and Cressida: Director Jonathan Miller stages the whole thing as a comedy but nothing is remotely funny, causing the play to feel like a tonal disaster. Broad gay stereotypes don’t help. And it’s just a weak play. It surely seems like Shakespeare didn’t finish it. It has no ending!
• 35th, King John: Not so much bad as completely forgettable. I may remember a scene outside a castle?  A few months after watching it, I would not be able to pass any pop quiz about this play.
• 34th, Henry VIII: Shameless Tudor propaganda that distorts history to a ridiculous extent, but a somewhat nice production shooting on actual outdoor locations.
• 33rd, Cymbeline: Plagued like so many of these plays by Elizabethan dress despite Roman times setting, this production failed the capture the nuttiness or martial thrills of Shakespeare’s play. That severed head was never going to look good in close-up.
• 32nd, The Taming of the Shrew: It’s fun to see John Cleese doing Shakespeare, but it just spotlights the essential problem of the text, which is that we no longer consider spousal mental abuse to be funny. Sarah Bedel as Katherine plays it rather serious, resulting in a major tonal mismatch.
• 31st, The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare’s other super-offensive play gets a rather lively adaptation, with some genuine comedy thrown in there, but the inherent anti-Semitism of the material is only highlighted, not recontextualized in any way.
• 30th, All’s Well That Ends Well: Director Elijah Moshinsky’s only real mistake is to play the king scene as a sex scene, but he makes up for it with a very funny gibberish scene. The Helena - Bertrand reconciliation is unconvincing, of course, but it always is.
• 29th, Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Period-appropriate dress for once, and epic filmmaking on a shoestring video budget make for a rousing production of a weak play.
• 28th, Antony and Cleopatra: Director Jonathan Miller said in an interview that Cleopatra was just a “treacherous slut” and that attitude infects this production. More respect for her character would have gone a long way. Colin Blakely makes a fine Antony and the dress is once again blessedly period appropriate.
• 27th, Coriolanus: One of the weakest plays gets a glow-up from Moshinsky, with the most gorgeous lighting of the series. The homoerotic interpretation of the not-particularly-gay text is certainly …interesting.
• 26th, The Tempest: We’re getting into the better ones here. The cheapo special effects and homoerotic (there’s that word again) choreography on this one were both charming, and Michael Horden is excellent as Prospero.
• 25th, The Winter’s Tale: Jane Howell’s abstract stagework makes a weird play even weirder. It’s beautiful, but can’t smooth out the play’s wild tone shifts and egregious violation of the Aristotelean unities.
• 24th, Measure for Measure: Gravely serious performances from Kate Nelligan and Tim Pigott-Smith as the leads, alongside funny work from the other actors, somehow all comes together for a zesty final product.
• 23rd, Julius Caesar: Our first great text we’ve gotten to on this list receives a decent adaptation, with a good Brutus, Cassius and Anthony. Poor Cinna the Poet ends up being the only really sympathetic figure, but that doesn’t violate the text.
• 22nd, Macbeth: A great text, and well-acted, but tacky sets, lighting and camerawork undercut the performances. There are much better adaptations of this play.
• 21st, The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Ignore the Shaun Cassidy hair on the lead actor Tyler Butterworth, and this is a very engaging staging of an underrated play, mixing drama and comedy perfectly.
• 20th, The Merry Wives of Windsor: How wonderful to get to see Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, a part he was born to play, and Ben Kingsley is excellent as well as Frank Ford. Not Shakespeare’s best comedy, but the cast and director David Jones mine it for all its humor.
• 19th, Henry IV, Part 2: The first half of this play is quite forgettable, but it’s always good to just watch Falstaff be Falstaff. Anthony Quayle is great as the cowardly knight, and David Gwillim and Jon Finch are quite good as father and son Henrys.
• 18th, Love’s Labour’s Lost: Another underrated play gets a brilliant adaptation by Moshinsky, playing up the similarities to the works of Moliere by setting it late in the 17th century. Genuinely funny and sharply satiric of the enlightenment that was on its way.
• 17th, Much Ado About Nothing: One of Shakespeare’s best plays gets a lively adaptation with great sets. It can’t withstand comparison to Kenneth Brannagh’s version, but that’s an unfair standard. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, and they handle that nicely as well.
• 16th, Romeo and Juliet: The first episode got the series off to a rousing start, with lots of swordplay and swooning. Authentically casting 14-year-old Rebecca Saire as Juliet reminds us that this relationship isn’t a great idea, even before it ends so badly. And of course it’s great to see Alan Rickman as Tybalt, promising a lot more “no small parts” cameos to come.
• 15th, Henry V: Gwillim as Hal doesn’t have Quayle as Falstaff to support him this time, but he proves he can carry a production by himself as an inspiring-but-still-somewhat-callow king.
• 14th, Richard II: For the most part, the series failed to land the legendary Shakespearean actors I really wish we could have seen, but this and Hamlet, both starring Derek Jacobi, are exceptions, and they don’t disappoint. One of the big benefits of the series is to do the histories with consistent casting, so we get to meet Finch’s Henry IV here at the beginning of his journey and follow him to his death two plays later.
• 13th, Othello: What do we do with this play? Really, it should be ranked dead last for the egregious sin of doing the part in blackface, but once we roundly condemn that, there’s the uncomfortable fact that, other than that, this is an excellent adaptation, with Anthony Hopkins doing his typical great work in the lead and Bob Hoskins even better as a bitterly-laughing Iago.
• 12th, King Lear: One of the greatest plays, certainly, but I’m ranking these based on both quality of the play and quality of the production, which drags this down a bit. Director Jonathan Miller once again uses Elizabethan costume and the sets are tacky, but the performances are great.
• 11th, Henry IV, Part 1: One of the all-time great plays gets an excellent adaptation. Griffiths was so good as Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, and it would have been fascinating to see if he could have carried off the, ahem, heftier version of the character in the History plays, but I can’t complain about Quayle, who plays the character with an emphasis on the sadder side of the comedy.
• 10th, Twelfth Night: One of the best plays is blessed by a sprightly performance by Felicity Kendal as Viola, including a very funny swordfight. Director John Gorrie’s production is almost too boisterous, but that’s not a bad problem to have.
• 9th, The Comedy of Errors: The brilliant decision to do it Patty Duke-style, with the same actors playing each set of twins, completely transforms the play, making it believable for once that everyone would get so confused. A very funny performance on a beautiful set. Roger Daltrey of The Who is shockingly good as both Dromios.
• 8th, Hamlet: Derek Jacobi is back and it’s great to get his melancholy Hamlet preserved on film (well, video anyway). And Patrick Stewart (with hair!) is fascinating as an even-keeled Claudius. It’s a long full-text version of this usually-cut-down play, and overstays its welcome a bit, but you can’t complain with a great cast and interesting minimalist staging from director Rodney Bennet.
• 7th, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The teenagers and the players are both very funny in this high-spirited performance (kept under two hours by overlapping the dialogue.) Puck, meanwhile, is an angry punk, which is a fascinating interpretation. It would have been great to set this one outside, but director Moshinsky does a fine job with the interior sets he has.
• 6th, As You Like It: The one production that matches what the original plan was for the series, before they gave up on shooting outside. A youthful Helen Mirren leads a cast cavorting on the grounds of Glamis Castle. With David “Darth Vader” Prowse as the wrestler! My one objection is that they make no attempt to make Mirren look like a boy when she’s in drag.
• Tied for 2nd place, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III: Ultimately, I just couldn’t break up this brilliant 14-hour quartet, all directed by Jane Howell, so all four are sharing the #2 spot. All done on one set, we start with a brightly colored child’s playroom and then follow the doomed country of England as it goes from playful contests of chivalry to unleashing hell on earth. The set is gradually degraded until it’s pitch black, and in the end we end up with Julia Foster as Queen Margaret cackling atop a mountain of corpses. If you had asked me to guess before I started what my top five would end up being, I wouldn’t have been able to do it in a thousand tries. I had never seen the Henry VI plays, which are almost never staged. Having them share this spot on the list only reinforces the impression you probably have that they are inseparable. Indeed, this series makes a strong case for the greatness of these plays together, but I was left with the impression that they should be staged more often and that they could be staged individually. If Part I was simply retitled “Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc”, surely it would get staged more.
• 1st place, Timon of Athens: This is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s worst plays, if not the very worst, but here it is sitting atop my list. Director Jonathan Miller makes a strong case for the play’s inherent greatness, but the quality of this production must be primarily credited to Jonathan Pryce’s bitterly rueful performance in the lead role. Miller’s daring decision to stage most of the second half as long unmoving takes creates a huge acting challenge but Pryce more than meets it. 

 Okay, folks, that’s it for Shakespeare posts! Hopefully the new 89-part follow-up series (I’m not even kidding) starts next week!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Anne of Green Gables!

I got Jonathan to read a candidate for Great American Novel, so now Jonathan makes me read what might be the Great Canadian Novel, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Will I embrace my neighbors to the north? 

 Check it out on Spotify here or Apple Podcasts here:

 

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 37 (The Series Finale!): Titus Andronicus

The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, first broadcast April 27th, 1985 

• When was it written? Perhaps sometime between 1588 and 1593. Maybe his 6th play and probably his first tragedy.
• What’s it about? I’m too disgusted to regurgitate this loathesome plot. Suffice it to say that it has a horrific rape, a woman forced to eat her own sons, and not one, not two, but three behandings.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Bits of the Gesta Romanorum, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s play Thyestes, etc.
• Best insult: The only insult that stood out was really racist and I don’t want to reprint it here.
• Best word: None stood out.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read it or seen it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Trevor Peacock returns as Titus.

How’s the cast? 

• They’re all fine. They actually cast a Black man as the Moor this time (unlike when they cast Anthony Hopkins as Othello) and Hugh Quarshie relishes the evil role.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Howell, who did such a great job with the Henry VI plays, can’t save this terrible, terrible play. Unlike those plays, the set and production design here are drab and unimaginative. The pseudo-spooky cross-dissolves between scenes feel tacky in that BBC Doctor Who sort of way.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always Good Reasons to Go Chronologically

So now that we’re all done, let’s return to a question we began with, all those years ago when we began this series: Should I have done these plays in the BBC order or in the order they were (maybe) written? In some ways, it’s worked out to do the BBC order, but in other ways it hasn’t.

It’s a real problem when it comes to a play like this, which is in conversation with Othello (almost surely a later play). In retrospect, I can see how Othello revisits this play and tries to do a better job. Both plays feature white women in love with Moors, but in this early play Shakespeare clearly finds that union inherently revolting, while in Othello, though the relationship is equally doomed, the possibility that it could have been a good thing is very present. Othello is a deep, rich, three-dimensional character, capable of both good and evil, whereas Aaron the Moor in this play is as black-hearted as he is black-skinned, in a two-dimensional all-too-easy way.

Likewise, when we did our penultimate play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I found myself wishing I’d seen it before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which replicates elements of it. And I’d become convinced that all of Shakespeare’s wives were innocent of adultery before I finally watched his first three plays (the Henry VI plays) and found that he started his career with a very untrue wife indeed. And there are other things I could have traced the development of, such as his feelings toward democracy or homosexuality.

So, in the end, I think I probably made a mistake, and would have gotten more out of this series if I’d read the plays in their probable order. (But it sure would have been rough beginning with three four-hour Henry VI plays. I ended up really enjoying when I got to them later, but if I’d had to start with them, this thing might have ended before it started.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: If Something Is Tasteless, Can It Still Be Tasty?

I had been warned about this play for years, but nothing could have prepared me for how stomach-churning and tasteless it is. Utterly gruesome and deeply unpleasant to watch.

If you’ve been listening to my new podcast “A Good Story Well Told,” you know that I couldn’t stand the Kill Bill movies because of the rape and other violence toward women. Well this play makes those movies look like Strawberry Shortcake. The only reason I finished watching the Kill Bill movies was because I felt I had to for the podcast, and, to put it mildly, the only reason I finished watching this play was because I felt I had to for this blog, especially because it was the last one and I was already massively invested in this project.

But here’s the thing: The Kill Bill movies are wildly popular and even this play has its defenders. When Julie Taymor moved from Broadway to movies she was given a blank check to do anything in the world she wanted. She used up that whole check and then some on an adaptation of this play.

She seemed to be saying, “Sure, it’s tasteless, but also tasty.” Surely, as a mature adult, she must have found the play revolting on some level, but she seems to have found it revolting in an appealing way.

Personally, I don’t get it. For me, tasteless almost always means taste-less. I never enjoy feeling revolted, or revolting others. James Kennedy kept trying to get me to watch Rick and Morty and I couldn’t even handle that (though, once again, it’s very popular). If you write something like this, you’re going to lose a lot of good people as fans (not all good people, but some). To what end? I don’t understand the impulse.

I am hereby declaring this to be Shakespeare’s worst play. I would say that it’s a bummer to end this way, but it’s not surprising. The BBC let directors choose their favorites, which is why we ended up with a lot of duds towards the end. This was the figurative bottom of the barrel, and you can tell from that broadcast date that it aired long after episode 36, bringing the series to a belated, revolting end.

But this has been a good series! I’ve learned a lot and I hope you have, too. If you haven’t read the whole thing, now’s a great time to explore them.  And I may have a few wrap-up posts coming next.

After that: I launch a new(ish) 89 part series. I’m not even kidding.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 36: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost, first broadcast January 5th, 1985

• When was it written? Maybe 1594 or 1595. Perhaps his 9th play.
• What’s it about? Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, and three companions swear off women for three years to devote themselves to study and fasting, but when the Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive, the boys break their vows and fall in love one by one. In the end, all the couples are about to marry, but the princess then finds out her dad has died so she declares a one year period of mourning and all of the other ladies decide to put off their men for a year as well.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: None! This seems to be mainly original.
• Best insult: Too many to choose from:
• “that low-spirited swain, that base minnow of my mirth, that unlettered, small-knowing soul, that shallow vassal”
• Or: “This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This Signior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces, Sole imperator and great general Of trotting paritors”
• Or: “His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.”
• Best word: Well, thrasonical is good, but I’ll go with “God dig-you-den” which was apparently a greeting?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it nor read it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: David Warner is Don Armado and the always-lovely Jenny Agutter is Rosaline

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. Despite the unhappy ending announced by the title, the cast plays it as a very sprightly comedy until the very end, and they’re all very funny.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• This is the fifth one Moshinsky has done and he’s always been good. He makes the rather brilliant decision to set this one 100 years after Shakespeare’s time, which makes it feel more like a Moliere play than a Shakespeare play, especially since it has a lot of rhyming dialogue. Being a big fan of Moliere, I didn’t mind at all.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One Up Yourself

We really wish we knew for sure what was written first, this or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the two plays are so clearly in conversation with each other, and it would be great to know which was responding to which. Notably, both plays get their lovers together early, only to have them sit down to heckle a buffoonish play-within-a-play.

But they also contrast each other in key ways. In Midsummer, it’s implied the new lovers will marry right away, but this play puts off all the marriages by a year at the end. Puck in Midsummer says “Jack shall have Jill” but Berowne sums up this play as “Jack hath not Jill” (or to put it another way, Love’s Labours have been Lost). The best guess we can hazard is that this play came first, which is fascinating because it really feels like this one is a twist on that one, but I guess that’s just because that’s the order I encountered them. If this one came first and Midsummer is the rewrite, then it’s an even-better rewrite of an already-excellent original.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Spying Upon Spying Is a Good Source of Comedy

The funniest scene is a scene that Shakespeare went back to over and over, and other playwrights would borrow from him (even for non-comedic plays, such as The Lion in Winter). Each of our four scholars reveals his feelings of love in a soliloquy, only to have to hide as another enters, slowly filling up the hiding places in the room as they’re all spying on each other as each breaks their anti-love oath, then they get to leap out and accuse each other one by one, until they all realize that they’re fools. Double or triple-spying is a good source of comedy gold.

(Of course, this asks a lot of your set decorators, who have to create three believable hiding spots. This production fails to do that, and at least one could be easily spotted, harming the scene.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Satire is Superior to Spoof

Most of Shakespeare’s comedies would best be described as farces.  Is this the only one that could best be described as satire? 

Google offers some challengers to the title: Some call Troillus and Cressida a satire of heroic narratives in general, but I would consider it to be more of an (unsuccessful) spoof of Homer and Chaucer specifically (though I realize the distinction is fine). Some cynics find Romeo and Juliet so unconvincing as a serious love story that they declare it to be a satire (intentional or not) of romances. But no, I don’t count either of those, so I would declare Love’s Labours to be Shakespeare’s only true satire.

Shakespeare is lovingly mocking those who would have us live by reason alone. He’s essentially writing a satire of the Enlightenment, which hadn’t begun yet, which is why it’s so brilliant for Moshinsky to set the play late in the 17th century.

Satire is a higher art form than spoof because it doesn’t just make sport of pre-existing works, it explores the human condition, impeaching extreme characters in order to impeach milder impulses in that direction that we all have. Satires also tend to have happier endings, as everyone lives, loves, and learns to admit their faults now that they’ve been made fools of. It can be sharply barbed but is often gentler in the end.

This play looks forward to Moliere not merely because it rhymes more than any other Shakespeare play. Moliere was a master satirist. Shakespeare just dabbles at that here, but shows that he could have done more great work using those tools if he had chosen to.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Beloved!

It’s a new episode of “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier! We’re nearing the end of our Shame Shelf series, where we shame each other into reading or watching things the other somehow missed. This is the big one, where I force Jonathan to finally read the most acclaimed American novel of my lifetime, Beloved. It’s a heavy novel about slavery, but also a thrilling ghost / haunted house story and a touching romance.  Will I win him over to it?

Here it is on Spotify and here it is on Apple podcasts:

 

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on the Kill Bill Movies!

Can you believe I never saw the Kill Bill movies? Jonathan shames me into finally watching them and I have a strong reaction! Discussion is had of repeated beats, “Save the Cat” moments, and characters believing in themselves.

Here’s the episode on Spotify…

…and here it is on Apple Podcasts!

 

Check it out!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!

In this episode, I shame Jonathan into finally watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly! Note for clarity, since we use actor and character names interchangeably: Clint Eastwood plays Blondie (The Good), Lee Van Cleef plays Angel Eyes (The Bad) and Eli Wallach plays Tuco (The Ugly). Keep that in mind as you listen!

Here it is on Spotify!

And here it is on Apple Podcasts!  

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 35: Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing, first broadcast December 22nd, 1984

• When was it written? Probably 1598 or 1599, possibly his 17th play
• What’s it about? Soldiers return from war to a lovely palazzo in Messina, Italy. Young Claudio quickly falls in love with a young lady named Hero, and Benedick loves Beatrice too, but neither of them will admit it. Benedick and Beatrice’s friends trick them into admitting they like each other. Evil Prince John tricks Claudio into thinking Hero has cheated on him, which Claudio takes badly, so Beatrice makes Benedick swear to kill Claudio, but bumbling sheriff Dogberry eventually solves the case and all ends happily.
• Most famous dialogue: I’ll go with “Man is a giddy thing”
• Sources: Matteo Bandello’s Tales, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and others …but the Beatrice-Benedick romance seems to be original to Shakespeare!
• Interesting fact about the production: You may have noticed that these final plays are all bottom of the barrel, with the big exception of this one. If they were starting with the most appealing plays, how did it take them so long to get to this stone-cold classic? Well, the story is very interesting. They originally intended to start the entire series with this play and shot it with Michael York and Penelope Keith! (Yes, Margo from The Good Life / Good Neighbors!) For some reason that has been lost to time, the BBC decided they didn’t like the result and canned it, starting the series with Romeo and Juliet instead, which was originally supposed to be the second episode. After that, it just never worked out to reshoot it until they had almost finished the series, so here we get it as the antepenultimate episode. Hey, I’m not complaining, it’s nice to get one more classic in amongst all these forgotten ones.
• Best insult:
• Beatrice and Benedick say many cruel things about each other, and Claudio says many cruel things about Hero at the wedding, but somehow my favorite is when Benedick insults someone who is singing a song: “An he had been a dog that would have howled thus, they would have hanged him.”
• I’ll also note: “Scambling, outfacing, fashionmonging boys, That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander, Go anticly and show outward hideousness”
• Best words: unhopefullest, vagrom
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve seen lots of great ones. The best one was probably at the Globe in London, with a bicycle-riding Dogberry zipping through the groundlings. But of course my heart lies with a Barbie-themed production wherein my daughter made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Jon Finch as Don Pedro.

How’s the cast?

• They’re delightful. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, then they play the weightier scenes just as well.

How’s the direction by Stuart Burge?

• He does a great job eliciting strong performances and the show looks great too. This is the only episode of the ones I’ve seen so far with really gorgeous realistic sets. All shot indoors of course, but it seems to have 10x the budget of other episodes.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Give Them Layers of Text to Play

My favorite filmed Shakespeare is the Kenneth Brannagh version of this play, so this had a lot to live up to. As it turns out, this is also excellent, but can’t compete. Most obviously because that one could shoot outdoors, but really on every level. The performances are all good here, but in the hands of all-time great actors like Denzel Washington and Emma Thompson, the parts shine a little brighter.

Brannagh finds little moments to add more kick to. When Don Pedro suddenly says to Beatrice “Will you have me, lady?” it’s usually played as just merry banter, but Washington and Thompson have a delicate moment. The two characters manage to both play it off as a joke but they both also recognize that it’s potentially serious, and the performers let that all play on their faces, lightning fast.

(The only element where this production is superior is Prince John. Keanu Reeves can be a great movie star, but Shakespeare is not his happy place.)

Rulebook Casefile: Look for Ironies

Benedick and Beatrice are always sparring whenever they meet each other. Their friends think they really love each other, deep down. So a group of men contrives to be overheard by Benedick saying that Beatrice is secretly in love with him, and likewise a group of women let themselves be overheard by Beatrice saying that Benedick loves her. As it turns out, that’s all it takes.

What makes it delightful is that this is an elaborate deception, but no one’s actually lying. The friends really believe that each loves the other already.

After hearing about Beatrice’s hidden feelings for him, Benedick is suddenly besotted and, when he takes his usual abuse, he sees nothing but hidden meanings …and he’s right. She is thinly veiling her love for him in her abuse. He has been deceived in a way that reveals the truth.

Straying from the Party Line: Does This Play Shoot Down Advice I Had in My Book?

In this post from 2013 (and in my first book) I complained about stories with couples who might say “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor-sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” I point out that screenwriters might cite His Girl Friday as their source, but they’re misreading that movie, because the man and woman there don’t just have conflicting personalities, they also have conflicting goals.

But of course, it now occurs to me that I should have pointed out that the real origin of such couples was this play. And this is more of the platonic ideal of the trope, because Beatrice and Benedick really don’t have conflicting goals, just conflicting personalities. As soon as they are tricked into seeing each other differently, they realize there’s nothing keeping them apart (yet).

So why does this play work so well, when I said in that post (and my book), that it shouldn’t? One key reason is that Beatrice and Benedick haven’t just met. They are reuniting after the war and resuming a quarrel they’ve had going for years. We don’t see the origin of this bickering, which may have once had a good reason that no longer exists.

In the negative examples I cite in that post (including Daredevil and John Carter), we see this dynamic emerge instantly between men and women who have just met.

But let’s try to find other exceptions. What about the “Cheers” pilot? That certainly falls into the category of “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” and that’s a case where they have just met, but that script is great. But again, that’s a case where they do have conflicting goals.

I’m finding myself disagreeing with my old post. The basic point was sound: conflicting goals are stronger than conflicting personalities, but as this play shows, you can get great stories out of conflicting personalities. But just to be safe either give them conflicting goals (Cheers), or make it a long-time conflict (Much Ado) or both (His Girl Friday).