Day 9: Your Favorite Tragedy

[a_t_rain]

This, I must say, was not a tough call at all, even though I'm not really a tragedy person (or perhaps because I'm not really a tragedy person).



Antony and Cleopatra is one of those massive plays -- a cast of about forty, action that ranges over most of the Mediterranean world, and, I'm pretty sure, more individual scenes than any of Shakespeare's other plays. Yet it doesn't feel monumental to me, just capacious. It's hyperbolic and generous and teeming with life, and it's about people who are giddily in love with the world and all that it has to offer -- gallons of wine, and eight roasted boars at a breakfast, and sex and music and perfume and gallantry and gambling for absurdly high stakes and dressing up as gods in the marketplace. And, ultimately, death. These people know how to do death, especially Cleopatra, who uses her last moments to outstage Caesar and rob him of his triumph.

And words. Really, really gorgeous words. "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space. / Kingdoms are clay." "O sun / Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in; darkling stand / The varying shore o' th' world." And you know (if you're Enobarbus, and I think the whole audience is Enobarbus) that dismissing the world so casually is mad, but it's also magnificent, and you can't help being seduced. Nature itself is seduced. (Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver, / Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes.)

And the bit parts always get me: poor Charmian and Iras, who seem like such frivolous little butterflies when we first meet them, and end up showing such fortitude. And Eros, Antony's freedman, who kills himself because he can't bring himself to kill his captain. And you know that there is no way Caesar, or any of the other Romans, will ever inspire that kind of loyalty; it passes out of the world with the title characters, leaving everything chillier for its absence.



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

Comments

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Yes. YES to all of this. I am both terrified of and looking forward to teaching this play because I have NO CLUE how to do it.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I have taught this play, and I STILL have no clue how to do it. But I'm damned if I'm substituting Coriolanus (unless, perhaps, the new film version turns out to be very good), so here I go again...