Henry VI, Part II
Mar. 27th, 2005 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksWe had a ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lignota-organized Shakespeare reading here this afternoon, in which the six of us (me, eredien, mixedborder, cosmorific, a person whose LJ I don't know, and of course lignota) took all parts and went straight through Henry VI, Part II. I had not previously read the play.
It starts a bit slowly, but there are some beautiful things in it when it gets into its stride, and I am not simply referring to 'First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers'. I wish it were performed more often, for there's utterly magnificent black comedy in it, and with just a little streamlining it would stand on its own. Everything involving Suffolk is great, and we laughed so hard during the scenes where Henry's courtiers are plotting death or concealing murder in his presence while he recites his oblivious pious platitudes that we had to stop for breath on several occasions. I had the luck of reading Margaret d'Anjou, and she really lays it on with a trowel-- the sequence in which she describes to Henry how, fearing that she would not reach him and England due to storms while on the boat from France, she threw her diamond heart pendant over the side in his direction is a masterpiece of overemphasis, dripping with poison totally visible to everyone but Henry. The way York stalks through the background setting up the Wars of the Roses is also enjoyable. I'd cut some of the rebellion, I think, and the duel between the armorer and his apprentice which does nothing except to vaguely discredit York, and I'd give the audience a family tree in the program, but remarkably little background is really needed.
It's also beautiful how alive it comes when spoken, even unrehearsed, and how vividly it springs off the page. I am already plotting to have a reading of The Duchess of Malfi this way, because I want to hear someone other than myself doing all the vocal parts. I vividly remember pacing up and down the third-floor stacks of Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr, quite late at night in an exam week, hearing the whole play build up in crash after crash of violence until the still, brave nobility of 'I am Duchess of Malfi still', and then the eerie calm of the inevitable.
Why, oh why, does nobody perform the Jacobeans?
lignota-organized Shakespeare reading here this afternoon, in which the six of us (me, eredien, mixedborder, cosmorific, a person whose LJ I don't know, and of course lignota) took all parts and went straight through Henry VI, Part II. I had not previously read the play.It starts a bit slowly, but there are some beautiful things in it when it gets into its stride, and I am not simply referring to 'First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers'. I wish it were performed more often, for there's utterly magnificent black comedy in it, and with just a little streamlining it would stand on its own. Everything involving Suffolk is great, and we laughed so hard during the scenes where Henry's courtiers are plotting death or concealing murder in his presence while he recites his oblivious pious platitudes that we had to stop for breath on several occasions. I had the luck of reading Margaret d'Anjou, and she really lays it on with a trowel-- the sequence in which she describes to Henry how, fearing that she would not reach him and England due to storms while on the boat from France, she threw her diamond heart pendant over the side in his direction is a masterpiece of overemphasis, dripping with poison totally visible to everyone but Henry. The way York stalks through the background setting up the Wars of the Roses is also enjoyable. I'd cut some of the rebellion, I think, and the duel between the armorer and his apprentice which does nothing except to vaguely discredit York, and I'd give the audience a family tree in the program, but remarkably little background is really needed.
It's also beautiful how alive it comes when spoken, even unrehearsed, and how vividly it springs off the page. I am already plotting to have a reading of The Duchess of Malfi this way, because I want to hear someone other than myself doing all the vocal parts. I vividly remember pacing up and down the third-floor stacks of Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr, quite late at night in an exam week, hearing the whole play build up in crash after crash of violence until the still, brave nobility of 'I am Duchess of Malfi still', and then the eerie calm of the inevitable.
Why, oh why, does nobody perform the Jacobeans?
