KD^3C^3 - 20250209 The lion's on the phone
I feel like I haven't written much about the movies I've watched this year. As always I have watched a lot of movies. I think I'm up to 48 so far this year, which is actually ahead of pace for where I was this time last year. What's funny is that I haven't intentionally been watching movies with a goal based on numbers watched, but I have been trying to clear out my backlog and find movies I enjoy watching. Turns out when I enjoy watching movies I'm more likely to watch them.
One movie I watched this week was the filmed performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare's Globe. The Globe is a recreation of the stage that Shakespeare’s group performed on some 400 years ago. I think it’s really neat that there is a reconstruction of a theater that old and not only that, but they perform works that are contemporaneous to the original stage. Their productions are not, however, purely historical recreations. They do put on Shakespeare’s plays (among others) but for a modern audience. This means that the don’t necessarily have all male casts and are often race conscious when casting as well, and cast towards a stage reflecting the diversity of modern london audiences.
Something I became aware of when watching Two Noble Kinsmen is that it’s so rarely been performed or adapted, at least for a Shakespeare play. It’s not one of his better known works, and I hadn’t even seen or read it before now.
As far as I can tell, this Globe production is the only professionally shot adaptation of the play available anywhere. It hasn’t been turned into a full movie by anyone. Or at least not a full movie with a professional release behind it. Even The Movie DB, which attempts to have every single movie ever released in any fashion on there (and has slightly less strict criteria than the Internet Movie Database) doesn’t have any other adaptations.
People often hold up Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language, and while I’m not here to debate superlatives, I do think he made some pretty good plays. Shakespeare feels like his work is almost ubiquitous, but I suspect there is a particular lean in the bell. curve towards his most well known plays. Most people ave probably heard of Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and maybe Much Ado About Nothing, but those plays cast a large shadow over the much larger body of work that Shakespeare produced.
I have seen multiple times (and in multiple languages!) the play The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) which is a humorous jaunt through the complete works of William Shakespeare (as advertised) but in cutting down all of these plays to fit into a roughly 2 hour time frame means a lot gets left on the cutting room floor. They really only present those pieces I mentioned above, the Shakespeare the audience is at least reasonably aware of.. Heck, the entire second act is spent on Hamlet alone. So a lot of the plays people don’t know are relegated to the “other works” section and barely get a passing mention. Have you ever read or seen King John? I haven’t. I have seen Timon of Athens, and I don’t think it’s as good as Two Noble Kinsmen, but Timon of Athens has multiple film adaptations. There was a project/TV series called BBC Television Shakespeare, which as it sounds from that very descriptive title was a production of Shakespeare’s plays for BBC Television, does not include it. This was possibly because Two Noble Kinsmen is a co-authored work, although the Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare contained The Two Noble Kinsmen from as early as 1986, so it's not exactly new to the cannon.
Theatre of the 16th century was a different beast in a lot of ways to the theatre of today. I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully and accurately cover all thee ways in which it is wrong, but the idea that Shakespeare sat alone in a dark room and came up with these brilliant stories all by himself, wrote them down and then they were performed by a troupe of actors perfectly performs the words, is a vast oversimplification. Theater was and is a collaborative art form. There’s no reason to believe a line or a scene was re-crafted in the rehearsal process by collaboration with the actors, and we know confidently that Shakespeare co-wrote at least a few plays. In addition Shakespeare stole ideas from absolutely everywhere. There is a wonderful (and very expensive) multi-volume set of books called The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare that takes over four thousand pages to describe all the places Shakespeare took his ideas from, as well as can be documented.
So Shakespeare worked with John Fletcher to write The Two Noble Kinsmen. Is this why it’s a lesser-known Shakespeare work? Maybe. But lots of Shakespeare’s plays have evidence of collaboration, you’ve probably heard of them. And most of them have had adaptations to the screen. For what it’s worth, I think the biggest problem is that the play is an adaptation of another relatively well known work. Most of Shakespeare’s work is based on other stories, as I have said, but The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer’s The Knights Tale from the Canterbury tales. I wouldn’t say that The Canterbury Tales are as well known as the works of Shakespeare, but you have heard of them. So if one was going to adapt The Knights Tale (no not the one with Heath Ledger) why not go back to the original (and still recognizable) one?
I’ll contradict myself here and point out that it’s not like the world is overflowing with adaptations of The Knights Tale either. So maybe it’s just that the obscure play is obscure, even within a body of work as well known as Shakespeare’s.
So what about the play itself? I thought it was pretty good! The core of the story is about the two noble kinsmen (it’s literal!) who are cousins imprisoned after a war. From their cell they both see and fall in love with the same woman, a maid of the Queen’s. They fight over her both in jail and after they both escape through different methods. One of the cousins is freed by the Jailer’s Daughter, who falls in love with him, but it is not reciprocated. There’s a subplot where she goes mad and lives in the woods. Unlike say, Ophelia in Hamlet, this scorned madwoman is traced down by her caring father who tries to save her and get her to marry someone else. Of course this is done by pretending the new suitor is the man she fell in love with, so it’s all based on a lie (not great.) It is interesting to see such a similar story as Ophelia’s played for comedy instead of tragedy. The play itself actually challenges the traditional binary of Comedy ending in marriage and Tragedy ending in death, because this play has both! The Cousins end up in a duel (sponsored by the king) for the Maid’s hand in marriage and one wins, but is almost immediately killed in an unrelated accident so the loser gets to marry the Maid after all. That means we get a death and wedding both at the ending. So is it comedy or tragedy or both? Sure!
Maybe that ambiguity is part of why it hasn't been adapted? How do you market a movie like that? "Come see a woman go mad, but in a funny way! Also There are two Cousins who kill almost kill each other over a woman. But it ends happily! Sort of!"
Ooh, I just thought of a really dark adaptation. There's a very good scene early in the play where the cousins are in jail, and they agree to be best friends for what they assume will be a lifelong imprisonment. They decide to make the jail cell their whole world and forsake everything else, focusing only on each other and making the best of what they have. It's a funny scene about a pact that is immediately broken when they spy the maid through the bars of the cell. But what if they never escaped? What if you presented the whole play as performed by these two dudes in makeshift costumes from within their cell? Sort of a Marat/Sade thing. It would become a sadder play, because everything is in their imaginations and they are acting out the story of themselves as they wish for it to have happened. There's a lot of fun metatextual stuff you could do there. You might even be able to go one step farther and have the Cousins in jail actually be William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his co-author, and the play is them (still in jail) but pretending to be someone else. THat might be harder to pull off. Does anyone have a connection at Blumhouse? If they gave me a million dollars I could probably make this movie in a few weeks.
One movie I watched this week was the filmed performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare's Globe. The Globe is a recreation of the stage that Shakespeare’s group performed on some 400 years ago. I think it’s really neat that there is a reconstruction of a theater that old and not only that, but they perform works that are contemporaneous to the original stage. Their productions are not, however, purely historical recreations. They do put on Shakespeare’s plays (among others) but for a modern audience. This means that the don’t necessarily have all male casts and are often race conscious when casting as well, and cast towards a stage reflecting the diversity of modern london audiences.
Something I became aware of when watching Two Noble Kinsmen is that it’s so rarely been performed or adapted, at least for a Shakespeare play. It’s not one of his better known works, and I hadn’t even seen or read it before now.
As far as I can tell, this Globe production is the only professionally shot adaptation of the play available anywhere. It hasn’t been turned into a full movie by anyone. Or at least not a full movie with a professional release behind it. Even The Movie DB, which attempts to have every single movie ever released in any fashion on there (and has slightly less strict criteria than the Internet Movie Database) doesn’t have any other adaptations.
People often hold up Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language, and while I’m not here to debate superlatives, I do think he made some pretty good plays. Shakespeare feels like his work is almost ubiquitous, but I suspect there is a particular lean in the bell. curve towards his most well known plays. Most people ave probably heard of Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and maybe Much Ado About Nothing, but those plays cast a large shadow over the much larger body of work that Shakespeare produced.
I have seen multiple times (and in multiple languages!) the play The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) which is a humorous jaunt through the complete works of William Shakespeare (as advertised) but in cutting down all of these plays to fit into a roughly 2 hour time frame means a lot gets left on the cutting room floor. They really only present those pieces I mentioned above, the Shakespeare the audience is at least reasonably aware of.. Heck, the entire second act is spent on Hamlet alone. So a lot of the plays people don’t know are relegated to the “other works” section and barely get a passing mention. Have you ever read or seen King John? I haven’t. I have seen Timon of Athens, and I don’t think it’s as good as Two Noble Kinsmen, but Timon of Athens has multiple film adaptations. There was a project/TV series called BBC Television Shakespeare, which as it sounds from that very descriptive title was a production of Shakespeare’s plays for BBC Television, does not include it. This was possibly because Two Noble Kinsmen is a co-authored work, although the Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare contained The Two Noble Kinsmen from as early as 1986, so it's not exactly new to the cannon.
Theatre of the 16th century was a different beast in a lot of ways to the theatre of today. I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully and accurately cover all thee ways in which it is wrong, but the idea that Shakespeare sat alone in a dark room and came up with these brilliant stories all by himself, wrote them down and then they were performed by a troupe of actors perfectly performs the words, is a vast oversimplification. Theater was and is a collaborative art form. There’s no reason to believe a line or a scene was re-crafted in the rehearsal process by collaboration with the actors, and we know confidently that Shakespeare co-wrote at least a few plays. In addition Shakespeare stole ideas from absolutely everywhere. There is a wonderful (and very expensive) multi-volume set of books called The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare that takes over four thousand pages to describe all the places Shakespeare took his ideas from, as well as can be documented.
So Shakespeare worked with John Fletcher to write The Two Noble Kinsmen. Is this why it’s a lesser-known Shakespeare work? Maybe. But lots of Shakespeare’s plays have evidence of collaboration, you’ve probably heard of them. And most of them have had adaptations to the screen. For what it’s worth, I think the biggest problem is that the play is an adaptation of another relatively well known work. Most of Shakespeare’s work is based on other stories, as I have said, but The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer’s The Knights Tale from the Canterbury tales. I wouldn’t say that The Canterbury Tales are as well known as the works of Shakespeare, but you have heard of them. So if one was going to adapt The Knights Tale (no not the one with Heath Ledger) why not go back to the original (and still recognizable) one?
I’ll contradict myself here and point out that it’s not like the world is overflowing with adaptations of The Knights Tale either. So maybe it’s just that the obscure play is obscure, even within a body of work as well known as Shakespeare’s.
So what about the play itself? I thought it was pretty good! The core of the story is about the two noble kinsmen (it’s literal!) who are cousins imprisoned after a war. From their cell they both see and fall in love with the same woman, a maid of the Queen’s. They fight over her both in jail and after they both escape through different methods. One of the cousins is freed by the Jailer’s Daughter, who falls in love with him, but it is not reciprocated. There’s a subplot where she goes mad and lives in the woods. Unlike say, Ophelia in Hamlet, this scorned madwoman is traced down by her caring father who tries to save her and get her to marry someone else. Of course this is done by pretending the new suitor is the man she fell in love with, so it’s all based on a lie (not great.) It is interesting to see such a similar story as Ophelia’s played for comedy instead of tragedy. The play itself actually challenges the traditional binary of Comedy ending in marriage and Tragedy ending in death, because this play has both! The Cousins end up in a duel (sponsored by the king) for the Maid’s hand in marriage and one wins, but is almost immediately killed in an unrelated accident so the loser gets to marry the Maid after all. That means we get a death and wedding both at the ending. So is it comedy or tragedy or both? Sure!
Maybe that ambiguity is part of why it hasn't been adapted? How do you market a movie like that? "Come see a woman go mad, but in a funny way! Also There are two Cousins who kill almost kill each other over a woman. But it ends happily! Sort of!"
Ooh, I just thought of a really dark adaptation. There's a very good scene early in the play where the cousins are in jail, and they agree to be best friends for what they assume will be a lifelong imprisonment. They decide to make the jail cell their whole world and forsake everything else, focusing only on each other and making the best of what they have. It's a funny scene about a pact that is immediately broken when they spy the maid through the bars of the cell. But what if they never escaped? What if you presented the whole play as performed by these two dudes in makeshift costumes from within their cell? Sort of a Marat/Sade thing. It would become a sadder play, because everything is in their imaginations and they are acting out the story of themselves as they wish for it to have happened. There's a lot of fun metatextual stuff you could do there. You might even be able to go one step farther and have the Cousins in jail actually be William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his co-author, and the play is them (still in jail) but pretending to be someone else. THat might be harder to pull off. Does anyone have a connection at Blumhouse? If they gave me a million dollars I could probably make this movie in a few weeks.