More Shakespeare Fanwakery -- Somebody please make this movie!

[capri0mni]

In his television documentary mini-series, In Search of Shakespeare (which aired on PBS in 2004, and the BBC a couple years earlier), Michael Wood rebutted the meme that Shakespeare's real life is shrouded forever in mystery, and that we can never know the truth about what happened. As he pointed out, Elizabethan and Jacobian England was as paranoid about traitors, and obsessed with beaurocracy, as the Soviet Union -- informers were everywhere, and the papers they filed are still stored in the catacombs of Britian's halls of government. Wood combed through those papers, and found Shakespeare's name in court records and tax collectors' books, as were the names of the actors he worked with, and his cousins and relations, and neighbors and all.

Then, Wood, working on the duel ideas that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical, and that they were written in the order they appear in their published collection, compared what Shakespeare wrote in his sonnets with what historians have written in the history books. And lo, and behold! the two sets of writings sure do seem to match!

So here's my idea for a movie: A dramatic (if fictional), bio-pic of Shakespeare, based on the sonnets, with the film punctuated with voice-over readings of some of them. The story would include the death of his son and his grief, his bisexual love of his patron, the growth and death of his affair with his Dark Mistress, and all that political intrigue and headaches that go with being sponsered by royalty.

Um, someone make this movie, please? I think this would be exciting and sexy, and lush, and sad, and funny, and would convince more people that Shakespeare is so much more than "Romeo, Romeo wherefore art though Romeo?" and "To be or not to be..."

Comments

[uncacreamy.livejournal.com]

Fill me in on the Patron thing.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Ah... Well. Shakespeare was originally commissioned to write a group of sonnets for a young man of 16 (whose name excapes me at the moment, but I know where to find it in my books), to convince him that getting married is a good idea, and pretty soon, Shakespeare goes from writing things like: "You are too beautiful to die without progeny," to "You are so beautiful, and I love you." But I don't think the love was ever consumated physically. BTW, according to Wood, the idea of bisexuality was not as scandelous in Shakespeare's world as it is in ours. The scandalous bits of his sonnets, for his contemporaries, would have been where he takes a submissive role to his relationship with his mistress (I did say this would be a sexy movie, didn't I?).

Michael Wood pieces together details from the sonnets to figure out that he was commissioned to write the sonnets shortly after his son, Hamnet, dies suddenly at age 10 (Which, you can imagine, throws him into a major mid-life crisis). And I think that, in Sonnet 31, Shakespeare admits the reason why he loves this young man so much:

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead

(trans: When I'm with you, I see again, all the people I've loved and lost. So when I'm with you, I can take a break from my grieving)

[uncacreamy.livejournal.com]

I think Wood is wrong about the bisexuality thing, but I find these details interesting. Ah, courtly love.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not just Wood who has come to the conclusion that Shakespeare was in love with his young patron. It was pretty much taken for granted in all the lit crit I read about the sonnets, way back when I was in college (20+ years ago). But you may be right about the scandal aspect.

[uncacreamy.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, the scandal aspect is what I meant, actually.. I've no problem believing the bisexuality thing.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I'll have to go back and check exactly what he said about that. He may just have meant "scandalous among his peers," or something similar.

Since all woman parts in all the plays were played by beautiful young men with girlish faces, there was undoubtedly a lot of gender-bending in the theater, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, occasionally, it slipped beyound the bounds of "Strictly professional." And it wouldn't surprise me if that fact of life wouldn't surprise his contemporaries, either.

Might not have been accepted in the upper levels of society, or in public life, but I bet there was a lot of winking and nodding and turning blind eyes, backstage, and in the taverns where they met... A lot has changed in the last 400 years, except for human nature.

Shakespeare Sonnets Movie

[brassfire.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. Best movie idea ever.

Do you think you could write it?

Of course, I'm one of the few people who adore Shakespeare's sense of language.

What references do you have for this post, btw? Books, articles, etc? I'd love to take a look.

Re: Shakespeare Sonnets Movie

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, theatrical scripts is my weakest form, when it comes to writing, and I know nothing whatsoever about writing a screenplay. So I don't feel confident to write such a movie in the immediate future. If I a mentor or tutor to help, though, I might pluck up the courage...

As for sources, check out the link I posted in this entry, which is a website all about the show, that includes much of the same info that appeared in the series. It's a great documentary, available on DVD and VHS (maybe you could get it through netflix, or something). And Michael Wood also wrote an accompanying book: William Shakespeare.

Even if you ultimately disagree with Wood's conclusions, using him as a source for the film would certainly lead to something closer to reality than Shakespeare in Love (as much fun as that film was). The idea for this movie came to me when I was thinking about what O'Toole said, about Shakespeare being over-rated as a playwright, and under-appreciated for his sonnets.

Re: Shakespeare Sonnets Movie

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

And the specific episode in that documentary that covered most of what I imagine the movie would be about is in episode 3: The Duty of Poets (http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/theshow/theshow266.html).