Juliet is a better poet than Romeo. Remember he’s famous for comparing her to the sun. now she identifies herself with the Sun, and all we can say is, Watch out! For Romeo, she’s just this passive source of light (the jewel in an Ethiop’s ear); she is a dynamic force ready to set the Earth on fire. In the balance of this speech we will see her go supernova.

Since the way this soliloquy builds is the key thing, I’m going to give you a bigger chunk than I usually do all at once. Try reading it aloud, or watching one of the many, many readings available on YouTube. (Here are two I chose at random to get you started):

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms untalk’d-of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle, till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

I’m cheating a little by highlighting the occurrences of “night” in this excerpt—from “love-performing night” to “all the world will be in love with night,” nine in 21 lines, four in a phrase of the form “Come, night” (by the way, there are six “come”s in the passage, and since the sense of “come” as “have an orgasm” was first recorded at just about this time, we can’t rule it out here). Let’s separate them out:

“Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night”
“Come, civil night”
“Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night”
“Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night/
Give me my Romeo”

Even from these bare bones, can’t you feel the intensity building with each repetition until it attains the force of an incantation (“Come night. Come night. Come night!”)? Mercutio tried to harness the magic of the Queen of the Night. Juliet invokes the night and its magic directly. Now see what happens when we put the meat back on the bones.

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms untalk’d-of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night.

Nobody quite seems to know who the runaway is here; I like the thought that it’s Cupid, connecting with “if love be blind” and either turning a blind eye or winking at the lovers, but the sense is clear enough; when night falls Romeo can come to Juliet secretly. Lovers don’t need light anyway; they generate their own.

Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle, till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.

Perhaps “matron” here is meant to recall the Nurse, who is on her way back to Juliet’s room at this very moment, though Shakespeare never tells us what the Nurse wears. More interesting is that Juliet is starting to engage in wordplay; “lose a winning match” straightforwardly means to lose a match one should have won (to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as it was once said), but what Juliet means is to win the match by “losing,” that is, surrendering to Romeo. The stakes, that “pair of stainless maidenhoods,” get echoed by “hood.” You don’t need to know all about falconry, where this image comes from, to understand the night as a hood hiding Juliet’s blush until she can act on her “strange,” that is, timid, love.

Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.

And with this threefold repetition of “come” the incantation really gathers steam, bringing Romeo into the picture and identifying him as “day in night,” and playing with day/night and light/dark images. Some critics say that “new snow on a raven’s back” is absurd, because when is there ever old snow on a raven’s back? More to the point, when do ravens stand still long enough to get snow on their backs at all, but the quarrel misses everything. The point—Romeo’s brilliance, redoubled by contrast with the black background—is obvious, and it’s expressed in a really striking way. To object to “new snow” shows that the image got to you.

Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Juliet’s wordplay signifies her growing self-awareness. Here, “die” meaning “have an orgasm” was the Elizabethan version of “come,” and even more common. (It persists today, if only in French, which refers to an orgasm as “le petit mort.”) But Juliet pretty clearly means it literally as well; when she dies physically, Romeo will be taken up and made into a constellation (“cut him out in little stars” is both beautiful and macabre; it’s one thing for Romeo to be taken up into the heavens, but he might not be dead when he’s being cut into little stars) that will make the world forget the Sun—light in dark indeed. Note also that we in the twenty-first century, but not you as members of the world premiere audience, know the further irony that Juliet will die much sooner than she thinks.

The soliloquy concludes with what I take to be Juliet speaking as a woman:

O, I have bought the mansion of a love
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d. So tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

Our trusty friend Eric Partridge glosses “mansion of love” as “The human body as the vehicle of love’s physical activities, and “sold/Not yet enjoy’d” looks at the situation from Romeo’s point of view. Plainly Juliet is eager not just to express her spiritual passion but to engage in adult sexuality. And it is the wonderful final lines that cinch it in my view. They express a simile: Juliet compares herself to the child who can’t wait to wear her new dress (the child we saw introduced in Act I scene iii), meaning that she is not that child. And yet, clearly, she still is in several senses a child. I suggest that by this very choice of simile Juliet shows that she is aware of her double nature. She sees herself as adult and child at once.

Since Juliet is a virgin, it would be a bit much to liken this soliloquy to Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses, but it does have something of the freight-train intensity of that tremendous yes I will Yes, and it is a similar embrace of life. It is the high point of Juliet’s brief life so far, of the life as an innocent that is about to end. Although she is still basically passive—waiting for the Nurse again?—her emotions are ratcheted into the stratosphere. Shakespeare, of course, conveys this through the words he gives her; they soar that much higher, the further she has to fall. And the higher Juliet flies, the greater is our pity, knowing what she is about to learn. It’s a peripeteia in the good old Aristotelian sense, and to have its full effect the irony must be as sharp as possible. That’s the technical, dramaturgical reason it was not just wrong but clueless of Zefferelli to cut the speech (and for Lurhmann, to be fair, to cut half of it).

And Juliet’s fall from this height is astonishingly swift. Her next lines are

O, here comes my Nurse.
And she brings news, and every tongue that speaks
But Romeo’s name speaks heavenly eloquence.

Like Phaethon, Juliet is about to crash in fire. But that is the subject of the next post.

Possibly the best thing about writing this blog is working closely through a passage in Shakespeare and realizing, in a flash: This is even better than I thought. I knew this soliloquy of Juliet’s is singularly beautiful and moving, but didn’t understand how much was going on until I sat down to explain it to you. I hope I convey the exuberance of that discovery.

When we left off with Romeo and Juliet we’d looked at Act II scene v, where Juliet learns, despite the Nurse’s withholding the information as long as possible, that Romeo does want to marry her. Since the joy of the marriage catastrophe has intervened, and we pick up at Act III scene ii, with Juliet, ignorant of the terrible events of the morning, again waits for the Nurse (who has been tasked by Romeo with obtaining a rope ladder with which he can get into Juliet’s bedroom).

Juliet opens this scene with an astonishingly beautiful speech that is also bitterly ironic in light of what we know and what she doesn’t. It’s not just beautiful, it’s key to the story thematically and imagistically. You may remember my complaint that one of the worst sins of Zefferelli’s adaptation was cutting it. Here I explain why.

JULIET

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately.

In case you need a refresher on your mythological imagery, Phaethon was the son of the sun god Helios; he lost control of his father’s chariot, and had to be slain by Zeus before the Sun crashed into the Earth. So, clearly, Juliet is venting her impatience; she’s urging the Sun to set right now and night to come so that she can be with Romeo. More than impatience, desperation; she’s willing to see the Earth destroyed by Phaethon’s fiery crash if that’s what it takes.

But hold on a minute. Is this passage really saying nothing more than “I wish it would hurry up and get dark so I could be with Romeo?” Then why doesn’t she just say that? Isn’t this a perfect example of the obscure language that has turned off generations of students to Shakespeare and led some pundits (as before, I’m not going to link to them) to propose that he be “translated”? Why does Shakespeare use, and why should we have to read, indirect language (Metaphor! Simile!) that has to be explained? I have three points:

1. Things have to be explained? Boo hoo. If you don’t understand something, look it up; it’s easier than ever. I hear they have this thing called Google now. Not knowing or not understanding something is a good thing, a spur to your curiosity. You are curious, aren’t you? If not, there are plenty of websites that track the straightforward, easily understood sayings of the Kardashians.
2. Heightened language is what’s appropriate to Juliet’s character and what she is experiencing. There are many, many characters who speak in a straightforward “on the nose” (as they say in Hollywood) manner. There are probably even some in Shakespeare. But that isn’t the kind of person Juliet is or the kind of experience she is undergoing. She is in the full flush of first love. She’s consumed with impatience and longing and passion, emotions she’s never felt. She doesn’t just want it to be night, she wants it to come like a racehorse. She wants it bad enough to risk setting the Earth on fire—and destroying herself. Do you really expect her to express all that like a Valley Girl?
3. Language is so much more exciting when it does more than one thing at a time. One of the lovely things about this passage is how it mirrors Juliet’s emotions; Earth may be safe from Phaethon, but she is already on fire. Juliet’s language may verge on the operatic, but that’s exactly what is called for in these circumstances. It’s not just a device of characterization but of character development. This is not a thirteen-year-old girl talking. This is a girl rocketing toward womanhood. Her chariot is as out of control as Phaethon’s. Just wait until she loses her virginity!

All this in four lines. Still think Shakespeare needs to be “translated”? Be my guest.

One thing that’s so amazing about Romeo and Juliet, one thing that justifies our paying attention to it after 400 years, is how Shakespeare transforms puppy love (she’s thirteen) into Western culture’s archetype of romantic love. For that to happen, Juliet must become not just a woman, but a woman as formidable as Lady Macbeth. This speech is one of the places where that happens. And Zefferelli dropped it in exchange for the excruciating earworm “A Time for Us.” Shall we pick up where we left off?

Either that, or you can put this on a loop all day. Or like me, do both:

As I’ve said before and will say again at length when the time comes, Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s least audience-friendly play. It’s not just me who thinks so. Frank Kermode, the most august of scholars, has the following to say in his Shakespeare’s Language: Coriolanus is “probably the most difficult play in the canon,” and its language is characterized by “stubborn repetition, free association, violent ellipses; in short, a prevailing ruggedness of tone.” Kermode states upfront, in the introduction to the book, that

It is simply inconceivable that anybody at the Globe, even those described by Shakespeare’s contemporary, the critic Gabriel Harvey, as “the wiser sort,” could have followed every sentence of Coriolanus.

But it’s not just the language that makes this a difficult play to like. Coriolanus is one of the most hateful characters, and quite possibly the most hateful protagonist, in the whole of world literature. His only virtues are the military ones. He hates everybody else in the play (and, one strongly suspects, himself), even the two he also loves—his opposite number the Volscian general Aufidius and his mother Volumnia, the only woman in Shakespeare even stronger-willed and creepier than Lady Macbeth. The rest—the rank-and-file Volscian enemy, the Roman rabble, the Roman senate—he hates without mitigation, and virtually every word out of his mouth expresses his contempt for them. It’s fair to wonder what led Shakespeare to make this man his protagonist in the first place, and not surprising that the dominant way of approaching the play remains the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) it largely inspired Bertolt Brecht to theorize—although I quite like Richard Nathan’s suggestion in a comment that it could work beautifully as black comedy.

All this makes a film of Coriolanus an improbable proposition; Ralph Fiennes’s new version would seem to be the first that isn’t based on a previous stage production. When I saw it at TIFF I’d heard very little buzz and had no idea what to expect. I’m delighted to report that the inconvenience I experienced to see it was fully worth it. Coriolanus may not be a perfect realization of the play, in that it doesn’t capture every level of meaning Shakespeare put in. But it’s a triumph; not only an exciting film that I expect will draw new audiences to this difficult play, but a rare reimagining that isn’t just a translation of a stage production. Seeing it on the same day as Anonymous is the only thing that mitigated my depression about the latter movie.

One point to get out of the way: Ralph Fiennes’s head is shaved through almost the entire movie, and yes, the first time you see him it’s hard not to think: Voldemort’s nose grew back! But you get over it. I don’t think Voldemort had a dragon tattooed on the back of his neck, an effective visual pickup on the multiple comparisons in the play of Coriolanus to a dragon (particularly anticipating the line late in the play that he “is /grown from man to dragon” [V.iv.12–13] ; the seed of his isolation from humanity is already present). Or is it just a shoutout to Stieg Larson?

That said, we can disitnguish two strands in Coriolanus. There’s a whole set of issues about power and authority, clustered around the relations between Coriolanus, the rabble, and the Senate, especially the tribunes and the genial Menenius; and there’s the weird open-ended triangle formed by the individual relations of Coriolanus, Volumnia, and Aufidius. Any successful adaptation (stage or screen, straight, alienating, or black comedy) is going to have to capture these relationships and keep them in rough balance, as Shakespeare does.

The opening of the movie might appear to upset that balance. Shakespeare begins with the rabble, preparing for action in the Roman food riots. This is significant in all kinds of ways. The individual plebs are designated “Citizens”; they have a voice and must be heard. (Compare the opening of Julius Caesar, where the first speaker is the tribune Flavius, who with his colleague Murellus is there just to drive the commoners away from the Caesar’s triumphal procession. The tribunes in Coriolanus have a very different relation to the plebeians.) Fiennes opens instead on an intensely individual image—an incised knife, obviously a fighter’s prized property, being sharpened. In the background, a TV projects BBC-style coverage of the riots and a talking-head interview with Coriolanus. The knife sharpener turns out to be Aufidius—who doesn’t appear in the play until Act I, scene 2. The emphasis is shifted to the Coriolanus-Aufidius axis (and at least subliminally we pick up that that knife is being sharpened for Coriolanus). Shortly after, we see the Romans watching a tape of Aufidius shooting a Roman soldier in cold blood (his last words are “Know’st thou me yet?” anticipating what Coriolanus will say to Aufidius much later). These scenes clearly orient the film on the side of the individual character relationships.

Others may disagree, but I don’t think this comes at the expense of the political content, for we cut quickly to the citizens, at first in closeups, then disclosing that they are watching the senator Menenius on TV. This is visually clever, reinforcing the media theme that turns out to be pervasive, but it means there can’t be any back and forth, which means Fiennes has to sacrifice the best single speech in the play, the fable in which Menenius compares the body poiltic to the human body and the belly, the essential organ without which the whole would die, to the Senate (those of you who have read Naked Lunch will recall how William S. Burroughs moves the essential organ further down the digestive tract; but then he would, wouldn’t he?) A pity, but if you hadn’t read or seen the play you wouldn’t know the speech had been cut.

In any event, Fiennes needs to engage the audience quickly, and he succeeds. With the key figures introduced, we move to food riots at a warehouse, presented in 21st-century fashion, with handheld, highly mobile, Paul Greengrass–style camera (is it coincidence that James Nesbitt, so memorable in the equally political Bloody Sunday, plays the tribune Sicinius?) until, as in the play, Caius Martius (as he then is) fails to persuade the rabble to disperse and a phalanx of cops in riot gear and shields come in. If there was any question about the political content of this movie, it is swept aside by this scene, an uncanny anticipation of current events.

In such a situation, what’s a general to do but go to war? After a peaceful interlude that serves to introduce Volumnia and Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia (alas, ditching the little speech in which Virgilia describes Coriolanus’s son tearing apart a butterfly), we witness the pitched house-to-house battle for the Volscian town of Corioles that earns Martius the name “Coriolanus.” This is an extraordinarily vivid rendering that will remind you of The Hurt Locker, for the excellent reason that Fiennes’s cinematographer Barry Ackroyd had the same duties for that film (recall that Fiennes had a cameo in The Hurt Locker and was the star of Kathryn Bigelow’s still criminally underrated Strange Days). Like the prologue with Aufidius, this episode goes beyond the events of the play for the express purpose of drawing in the audience, but here too I see Fiennes respecting the text, and in a surprising way. What seems to be nothing more than a blatant ripoff of The Hurt Locker, a scene in which Coriolanus encounters an innocent, terrified old man and accepts his offer of water, actually dramatizes a strange and profound little exchange between Coriolanus and his general Cominius:

CORIOLANUS

The gods begin to mock me: I, that now
Refus’d most princely gifts, am bound to beg
Of my lord general.

COMINIUS

Take’t, ’tis yours. What is’t?

CORIOLANUS

I sometime lay here in Corioles
At a poor man’s house: he us’d me kindly,
He cried to me. I saw him prisoner,
But then Aufidius was within my view,
And wrath o’erwhelm’d my pity. I request you
To give my poor host freedom.

COMINIUS

Oh well begg’d!
Were he the butcher of my son, he should
Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus.

LARTIUS

Martius, his name?

CORIOLANUS

By Jupiter, forgot!
I am weary, yea, my memory is tired.
Have we no wine here?

[I.ix.78-89]

The one time Coriolanus expresses a positive human emotion, he can’t follow through on it.

There is little time for reflection in the film, though, for Coriolanus, covered in blood, is immediately hunting down Aufidius. After a spectacular knife fight in a roundhouse, we cut back to Rome, where preparations are afoot to welcome Coriolanus home. Naturally Volumnia is in the vanguard of the welcoming party, in a pea coat and beret that make her look more military than her son.

The core of the play—Coriolanus’s rise and fall—follows. The cinematography and point of view return to the kinetic news report style of the opening, cutting back and forth between reality and TV: Coriolanus’s “trial” takes place in a studio resembling Newsnight‘s; the real-life BBC presenter Jon Snow pops up every now and then; there is even a red band at the bottom of the screen. The Fidelis network of Coriolanus’s Rome is plainly our BBC. And importantly, this isn’t just a postmodern flourish on Fiennes’s part. By taking us out of the action and underscoring that we are watching a spectacle, Fiennes finds a cinematic counterpart to the Alienation Effect—one whose familiarity from a thousand movies and TV shows makes it all the more effective. (Though maybe not effective enough: here is a commenter who completely misses the point.)

We see the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, played with just the right balance of sincerity and hypocrisy by Paul Jesson and James Nesbitt (the star of an extremely political film, Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday), acknowledging the returning hero yet already starting to scheme against him. Later, in a remarkable scene not staged this way by Shakespeare, we see Volumnia bandaging Coriolanus’s wounds in their house late at night. Again Fiennes finds a very effective way of staging the relationship, charged on so many emotional levels, between Coriolanus and his mother. The scene is even more charged when Virgilia comes in on them unobserved, leaves and kisses their sleeping son, and returns to bed to find Coriolanus there, with a pretty clear, however metaphorical, postcoital implication.

The next day Coriolanus is officially welcomed back and awarded the honorific “Coriolanus,” the hero of Corioles. There’s a telling visual moment when Coriolanus, unable to take all these speeches praising him, steps outside and encounters a janitor operating a floor buffer. The look of contempt they exchange foreshadows the events soon to come. For in order to become consul (a goal he doesn’t quite know why he’s pursuing), he must show himself to the people in the marketplace. He doesn’t want to do it, and recoils at even the suggestion of a touch. Looking as if he is surrounded by zombies, flinching in disgust at their touch, he says that he has heard their “worthy voices, worthy voices.” The contempt in the repetition is palpable, undercutting the immediately preceding speech that concludes “Indeed I would be consul” and in which he uses the word “voices” seven times in seven lines.

Showing himself is sufficient to achieve the consulship, but he’s quickly outmaneuvered by the tribunes and, after a trial in the TV studio, is banished. Or more accurately, banishes Rome:

CORIOLANUS

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air: I banish you!

[III.iii.124]

This is the emotional high point of the play, as the language makes clear even in this snippet, and Fiennes is fully up to it.

I like the symbolic manner in which Fiennes depicts Coriolanus’s self-banishment. Setting off on foot, he passes through the slums of Rome; tarpaper shacks, tin roofs, children and dogs playing in the dust, indifferent to the passage of their ex-consul. A cut, and his hair and beard have grown out, indicating the passage of time. Does it also indicate that he is loosening up, that this solitary life on the road, sleeping under windbreaks, suits him? The brief scene (IV.iv) in which Coriolanus arrives in the Volscian city of Antium and resolves to meet Aufidius is extended into a walk down the main street in which Coriolanus passes couples in cafes, groups of men talking and so on, all comfortable with each other in pointed contrast to this man who is not even comfortable with himself. That contrast is carried through to Aufidius, discovered dining with his men. Coriolanus genuinely does not know how Aufidius will react to his “Know’st thou me yet?” [Iv.v.64] but if we think back to the beginning we can predict the outcome. Here, though, Coriolanus is greeted with a hug for dear life. This is one of the scenes about which some argue that Shakespeare is presenting a gay relationship (as Stanley Wells discusses in Looking for Sex in Shakespeare); I think Fiennes undermines this tiresome reductionism, but I’ll have more to say about this when we get to the play itself. For now, it’s enough to note that the connection shown in this embrace, by these two men who have been through so much with each other, expresses their whole being. There is so much more to it than sex (to the extent that enters into it at all).

It isn’t long before Aufidius has cause to regret his decision to bring Coriolanus in as second in command against Rome. In an extraordinary night scene in their junkyard billet, a Dragon Brigade forms around Coriolanus, fashioning a throne for him out of a broken barber chair, dressing like him, having their heads shaved like him, and having their necks tattooed with his symbol, the dragon. I’ll leave it to you to make something of the facts that the piece playing under the scene—just about the only music in the whole movie—is called “Night of the Long Knives” and that Aufidius’s troops are dressed in brown.

The final emotional crux soon follows. Menenius is turned back and slits his wrists rather than return to Rome, clearing the way for the last-ditch conference of Coriolanus with his family—which, as ever, really means Volumnia. Redgrave particularly rises to the occasion, a mother for whom “proud” isn’t the word, on her knees beseeching her son to call off the invasion—and succeeding, Coriolanus proving himself a mother’s boy at last at what he knows is the cost of his life. That price he soon pays, surrounded on a closed road by Aufidius and his men, who surround and stab him as if he were Julius Caesar in the forum. The knife we saw Aufidius sharpening at the beginning deals the fatal blow, and Coriolanus falls covered in blood as he was when we saw them fight earlier.

There are (at least) two kinds of Shakespeare films. Most are filmed stagings; these generally don’t take place on stage, but even when they open up the setting they’re content to perform as if they were on stage. These are the usual suspects: Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, any Branagh except for his unspeakable Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Calista Flockhart A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on and so forth. Then there are reimaginings; a more nebulous category of films that try to come to their own terms with Shakespeare and result in something that is not just a staging with the much better special effects movies can provide. These include certain classic foreign-language productions such as Throne of Blood and Ran, and the fragmentary visions of Orson Welles. In our time—since 1990, say—I can think of only a handful of examples: Romeo + Juliet, Julie Taymor’s Titus, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. Coriolanus belongs in this company (though for a review that entirely misses the point, see here). This is an exhilarating film that should excite new audiences about this difficult play. I can testify that it’s done so for me; just in the course of writing this review I’ve come to see far deeper into Coriolanus than I had after reading the play. I wish Fiennes would take over from Kenneth Branagh as the successful actor who also directs Shakespeare adaptations. Mr. Fiennes, if you’re listening, won’t you think about adapting Troilus and Cressida?

22 November 1963 is the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an event that has receded into ancient history even though for years its memory was as traumatic as that of Sepember 11. It is also the day before the premiere of Doctor Who, so I’ll mark that anniversary here. Yes, I am already waiting for the Christmas special.

Yes, John Neville will be remembered—for a very long time—as the titular character in Terry Gilliam’s still criminally underrated The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It’s a little flabbergasting (if anything can be a “little” flabbergasting) that Baron Munchausen was the most expensive movie ever made to that point; its estimated $46 million price tag would be $89 million today, which is probably about average. (The Motion Picture Association of America no longer releases average budgets; for 2007, the last year it did so, the average combined production and marketing cost of a Hollywood film was $106.6 million; as a rule of thumb, 20 percent of that is marketing.) Gilliam’s troubles with cost overruns, strikes, and other tribulations are well known—there’s a whole book about them—and they pretty much ended his Hollywood career, but he got the movie made and it’s the movie he wanted to make. Viewed today, it’s an exercise in imagination that is also a monumental, whimsical, beautiful, exuberant, messy meditation on the need for imagination, a theme Gilliam must have wanted to scream at the studio. The special effects hold up amazingly well after a quarter century, the main performances are superb (though what would you expect from Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, a young Uma Thurman, a very young Sarah Polley in her first role, and even Robin Williams as King of the Moon, a role in which his schtick for once is not fatally annoying?). But it’s Neville, fittingly, who makes the movie, creating a Munchausen who more than lives up to the trickster requirements of the role, but who is also genuinely affecting, as in this scene with the nine-year-old Polley.

Terry Gilliam directed Faust at the English National Opera last year. I’d love to see him do Shakespeare. I think he might be especially good for the problem plays (including Pericles and Timon here). What do you think?

But the big news while I was gone, of course, was the final flush of the toilet on Anonymous. The latest figures from boxofficemojo.com, which include this weekend’s estimates, reflect a gross of $4.15 million for a $40 million film. The Armada (which de Vere singlehandedly destroyed, but Emmerich and Orloff couldn’t quite squeeze that in) put in a better showing. You may object: “But Diamond Jim, it never played in more than 513 theaters, so what do you expect?” I expect a better per-theater gross than the peak of $1,547 reached on Saturday, October 29, its first weekend. Why is this pathetic? Suppose that there are only two shows on Saturday that account for most of the box office, the after-dinner and late evening shows. (Contrary to fact, of course; but including, say, two afternoon shows and one midnight show will lower the numbers even more. Exercise for any readers who actually care.) Then the per-show gross is $774 (rounding upward). Assuming a movie ticket is $12 a pop these days (I wouldn’t know; I haven’t been to a movie theater since the Bloor Cinema closed for renovations, and my cost as a member was $5), that’s 65 people per showing (again rounding upward). It’s hard to generalize about movie theater sizes, as common experience attests, but this thread indicates that on its peak evening Anonymous would not have filled the smallest theater in Riverdale, Georgia (population 12,478; see Mike Spaeth’s comment for theater sizes).

So the lingering question raised by Anonymous, not that I give a flying fig about the answer, is: will John Orloff ever find work again? As the PR mill lumbered along, Orloff, at first in Emmerich’s shadow, emerged as a more and more despicable figure, the twisted henchman to Emmerich’s genially cynical Bond villain. That figures, since Orloff was the one who had the real investment in this film, as a matter of belief and of craft. But as pretty much every non-Oxfordian has noted, Orloff wants to have it both ways—to have Anonymous taken as both an Oxfordian tract and a Hollywood movie whose most bizarre, exaggerated choices are justified in terms of their greater entertainment value. From his obstreperous public performances (no, I am not going to link to his and Emmerich’s “debate” with Alan Nelson, the world’s leading de Vere scholar) to the evasive, hypocritical Wall Street Journal article linked to above, Orloff’s blithe disregard for truth at least has the virtue of consistency.

So I’m going to leave you, and this dreadful little excuse for a movie, with two items. First, this wonderful bit by Eric Idle in a recent issue of The New Yorker: Python FTW! And second, there’s this from one Bob Ellis, an Australian whose de Vere–friendly piece is only worth reading for this quote:

 And I was, as well, I must admit, in the room when Ian Richardson said to Sir Derek Jacobi, the fanatical Oxfordian, “Derek, you came from the wrong side of the tracks, and were under-educated. But you crossed the Thames, and began to perform, and within very few years you were the toast of the town. Acclaimed. Unstoppable. If you could do it, Derek, why couldn’t he?” And the irritable, wet-eyed twitching of Jacobi’s face was a wonder to behold.

Ian Richardson, as I hope I don’t actually need to tell you, was one of the great Shakespeareans of his generation, but probably the only one best remembered for a commercial—those Grey Poupon ads where two Rolls-Royces stop next to each other, a window rolls down, and a voice asks to borrow some Grey Poupon. In the United Kingdom, though, Ian Richardson is remembered as having created one of the greatest characters of British television: Francis Urquhart, the scheming Chief Whip who weasels, schemes, manipulates, and murders his way to the office of Prime Minister in the serial House of Cards (with its sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut). The echoes of Richard III in the House of Cards trilogy are way too obvious to miss. Just look at how Urquhart addresses us at the beginning of the trilogy: winter of our discontent, anybody?

But there are many, many other allusions to Shakespeare in the trilogy; her’e a clip that is crawling with them:

Urquhart is the role of a lifetime for any actor, and Richardson is more than up to the task. He portrays Urquhart so beautifullythat the character is still widely remembered in the UK and his catchphrase is still actually used. I think there are no better words to leave the discussion of Anonymous and indeed the whole authorship controversy. Here it is:

entertainment-arts-15420422

(Later I’ll figure out how to get WordPress to show a preview of a linked video from the BBC. But right now I am tired.)