still not sure how I feel about this "thirty day meme" trend...

[a_t_rain]

... but you must know that I can't resist getting a chance to natter about Shakespeare for thirty consecutive days, so here goes. Stolen from angevin2 and several other people.

Your favorite play

Gah, why do they have to start with the one really impossible question? Favorite for what purpose? I'd have to say Henry V to write scholarly stuff about, Merchant of Venice or Othello to teach, Much Ado about Nothing to watch over and over, possibly Antony and Cleopatra to read. Need I go on? I mean, one of the things I love most about Shakespeare is the sheer variety.

But all right. I see that the meme has separate questions for "favorite comedy," "favorite tragedy," and "favorite history," so today I will write about my favorite neither-tragedy-nor-history-nor-quite-comedy.



The Winter's Tale was the first play that I saw at the Globe, back in 1997, and I think that production made me fall in love with it. I think it pushed all my twenty-one-year-old flaky-hippie-feminist buttons: Powerful, outspoken women. Magic that might be innocent and lawful -- or not. A complicated reworking of the myth of Proserpina (which Perdita alludes to, wholly unaware that this ancient story is structuring her own. One of the appealing things about Perdita is how unconscious she is of her own importance to the play, and how many wrongs from before she was born are righted, or at least resolved, by her reappearance).

(It's also a reworking of the Eden myth, although I don't think I really got this when I was twenty-one -- it's about innocence lost and regained, and that loss is SO not the woman's fault; the serpent lurks in Leontes' own mind. I like the little dialogue between Polixenes and Hermione in the first scene, just before everything falls apart: he muses about the lost innocence of boyhood and implies that women are tempters and somehow to blame, and she calls him on it. And in retrospect, you see the tragedy of the next two acts being set up, but for the moment it's light, gentle banter between two friends who don't know they're standing on the edge of a precipice.)

Also, I really love the pastoral interlude of Act 4 -- which is so much longer than it needs to be, but I picture Shakespeare getting caught up in creating the world in which Perdita grows up -- Autolycus's world, and Dorcas's and Mopsa's -- and losing all track of necessity. And it's so joyous and energetic, full of music and dancing and harmless con artists and young love, and I guess that is necessary as a counterbalance to the high seriousness of the palace scenes.

And in conclusion: Yay Winter's Tale!



Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line