“A Quiet Passion” is the Great Biopic Emily Dickinson Deserves

Emily Dickinson is my favourite poet apart from Shakespeare, and, in my estimation, also happens to be the greatest poet beside Shakespeare. The differences between the Bard and the Belle of Amherst are multitudinous and immense, but they are connected in how I see each of them by two common traits: a Herculean, colossal cognitive struggle with (and, in some ways, triumph over) the cosmos, which marks the distinct originality and greatness of their poetry; and the shockingly (yet, somehow, aptly) minute amount we know of each of their outer lives, as well as the regrettable absence of a chronicle of their monumental inner lives. The character of Shakespeare has already been featured in a small handful of films, sometimes not totally in earnest, but Terence Davies’s assuredly masterful and astoundingly emotional biopic A Quiet Passion features the first appearance of Dickinson on the screen. And, as befits the greatest poet of her continent and one of the greatest in the language, the film is an exquisite and unforgettable masterpiece that — I note bitterly as awards season is underway — has not received the recognition it certainly merits. If it had been released in theatres in South Africa last year, I may well have placed it right at the top of my list of favourite films of the year.

I have only seen one other film by Davies, his first, Distant Voices, Still Lives, from 1988. If that film and this one, his latest, are anything to go by, he is undoubtedly one of the great artists of the time, and has also been unduly neglected and forgotten in the popular media. I had at least hoped we would hear of some or other Best Actress nomination for Cynthia Nixon, who plays Emily Dickinson in the film, and in doing so gives one of the most intense and insightful biopic performances in recent years; alas, the film has been unjustly sidelined. Yet, as frustrating as this may be for those who worked on it, this suits the story of the determined artist who craved acknowledgement and vindication and never got it while she was alive.

As Schoolboys From Their Books

Gloria Castrillon on Teaching “Romeo and Juliet”

I had enjoyed Shakespeare at school, but no more nor less than, for example, The Great Gatsby. I had enjoyed some Shakespeare at university (notably Macbeth taught by Professor Martin Orkin), and had not enjoyed others (King Lear, taught tragically boringly by another professor who shall remain nameless). I only enjoyed Lear after I saw the movie Ran and re-read Lear alone. By 1989, I had decided to abandon the English Literature department (into which I had been accepted for Honours) and move to the African Literature department – a move I was never to regret. I completed my Honours and Masters in African Literature, and there developed a love for Shakespeare that was fed, ironically, by the greats of African literature, whose works spoke back to the English literature they had studied, and forward to the authors they in turn would inspire.

Then, in 1990 and 1991, I was a full-time teacher at a school in the Johannesburg CBD. I was tasked with teaching Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet to matriculants from townships all over the greater Johannesburg area. I was a little mollified by the fact that Romeo and Juliet is as simple a Shakespearean text as Wuthering Heights is a difficult Gothic text. I was determined to make Shakespeare not scary for the students (they told me they were terrified). I was determined they would enjoy it. What I did not expect was how much I would enjoy teaching it to them. The innuendos, the ribaldry, the puns were perfect for a teenage audience. The love story was ideal. The fact that there was a Romeo in Grade 11 and a Juliet in Grade 12 (although they did not love one another) was a synchronicity I could not have asked for.

Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun

For the week of commemorating Shakespeare’s life and work on this blog, I had asked a friend of mine – a composer and music teacher at Pretoria Boys High School – to contribute a piece to the blog, knowing that he’s something of fan. Rather than write his own bit on what Shakespeare means to him, however, he directed me to Gerald Finzi’s setting of the song from Cymbeline to music.

Beautiful as it is – in my judgement, it’s the finest song in all of Shakespeare – it’s a dark elegy, sung over Imogen by her brothers, who believe her to be dead, returning to “fear no more” as the only consolation in death.

In a critical essay on the play Cymbeline, Harold Bloom has this to say about the song:

“Since the song ‘Fear no more’ is too grand for its context (Imogen merely sleeps), I have no difficulty hearing in it Shakespeare’s own stance toward dying, and regard it as the locus classicus of Shakespeare upon death. The two prime Shakespearean values are personality and love, both equivocal at best, and here, with all else, they come to dust. This poem is a dark comfort, but its extraordinary aesthetic dignity is the only consolation we should seek or find in Shakespeare.”

Thinking Makes It So

Alyssa Vratsanos on Shakespeare and Language

A painting by Alyssa’s favourite post-impressionist, Vincent van Gogh

William Shakespeare: a name so often heard fall casually from the lips of your average intellectual (and certainly pseudo-intellectual) type. Shakespeare is revered in literary circles as some kind of deity, a purveyor of all that is right with English and its literature. Abrasive ignorance, bad grammar, ill manners, American brashness, and general uncouthness are nothing a spot of Hamlet can’t cure.

But only a true enthusiast of the Bard will know that Shakespeare was anything but a traditionalist, let alone a language prescriptivist. He was as linguistically irreverent as Doctor Seuss. The way he used and manipulated the English language is something to behold. Granted, he did a great many phenomenal things with his talents, but for me – as a linguist-in-training – it seems only fitting to commemorate the man with a tribute to his use of language.

To dear England’s finest: A eulogy.

“Bard,” a Sonnet by Tineke W. Harris

To dear England’s finest: A eulogy.

Valiant word-smith and blazer of trails

On stage and screen, a poet prodigy.

William Shakespeare: A teller of tales.

Ancient chronicler, whom all do revere,

Of lovers and princes, and of a Muse

E’er fixed in flaming fire; the Mighty Sphere

With infinite realities infuse.

But what good is the Theatre and its plays

For us these days? What could Hamlet, Henry

And those merry wives tell of modern ways?

(And in Mackers nought but barbarism be…)

The answer’s here: People are “merely players”

Who still act these parts – “little life” slayers.

Tineke W. Harris is a Medicine student at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Image: www.dailyfinance.com

And This Gives Life to Thee

Paul Wombo on a Life Encompassed by Shakespeare

“Romeo and Juliet” by Henri Pierre Picou

William Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer of all time. I gladly reassert that he is not only the greatest writer of all time but he also dethrones Houdini as the greatest magician of all time. How else can you describe the act of taking vowels, syllables, adjectives, verbs, and so on to create a living creature that roams through the minds and lives of billions through the ages other than being magic? Shakespeare’s magic has changed my life in the sense that I truly love the English language and also the electrolytic fluidity of the creative mind.

“When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father then both cry.” My father moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo with two children and a new wife to South Africa in 1994. The initial plan was to move to Canada from South Africa but the beauty of South Africa’s infant democracy held a vice grip onto my father’s heart. Deep in the Joburg CBD the Wombo family began to deepen their roots into the soil that was finding fertility after decades of oppression. My father and mother both made so many sacrifices to ensure that we as children went to the best schools and we were brought up in such a way that we would contribute to and partake in the Rainbow Nation. English is held with high esteem in our otherwise French household and this is where my love for English blossomed. My first interaction with Shakespeare was in a cartoon version of Romeo and Juliet on the television when I was six. I did not know it then but it was the beginning of a relationship with Shakespeare that seeped into my whole life.

We In It Shall Be Remember’d

On “Henry V” and a Shakespearean Mother

As I wrote on Saturday, I asked a few people to contribute pieces to this blog on their own experiences with Shakespeare, for a week of commemorating his life and work, beginning on the 400^th anniversary of his death. This short work was sent to me by a friend of mine.

I would not call myself an expert on Shakespeare’s works. In fact, my knowledge is limited to the very basic grounds that we covered in high school. I was first introduced to him when I was thirteen and watched Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. To be honest, the only things that stuck out for me were a young Leonardo DiCaprio’s incredibly good looks and a weird, irrational, and totally unrealistic love story. As I got to high school, we covered the brief history of Shakespeare, “analysed” a few of his sonnets, and read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and Othello – the only one of the lot that was mildly entertaining for a 16-year-old who found English class exhausting. An appreciation did, however, start to build when we did Shakespeare In Love as a film study. I was intrigued by Shakespeare’s “perceived” way of life and his influences. I started to become interested – I wanted to know more. I wanted to know which plays were represented and how they influenced the film.

We then, for our matric set work, studied Henry V. I went to a convent where most girls around me detested it. I loved it. It grew to become my favourite Shakespeare and the first of his that I was able to relate to. The lessons of leadership and how to deal with people were very pertinent to me at that particular point of my life. I guess that Is the beauty of Shakespeare. He was, and still is, able to strike a chord with everybody in some way – each person must relate to at least one of his works.

Thorough Brush, Thorough Briar

John Greenop on The Fairies of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

“The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania” by Joseph Noel Paton

It didn’t take me long to decide on a topic relating to Shakespeare – I find the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream incredibly fascinating. I remember playing the Sims 2 as a child. In the game there was a place called Veronaville, and in this town, the developers had placed Sims with the modern likeness of Shakespeare’s characters.

In one house we had Titania, Oberon, Puck, and Bottom. Titania and Oberon were the parents, Puck was portrayed as a red-haired teenager and Bottom was a tanned little girl. This got me interested in these fairies, and I have always like mythology and folklore. I shall, in a few words, discuss my feelings on the main fairies in the play.

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

Laurnelle Beukes on “The Tempest”

The words from the mind of Shakespeare are undeniably beautiful. At least this is my own opinion. I am far from an expert on the English playwright and in comparison to my brother, when it comes to reading his works, I am merely a dabbler. However, that which I have experienced has produced a kind of mixed reaction.

On the one end as I’ve mentioned in my opening line I find the use of language and the stringing of words to be mesmerising. I’ve often caught myself reading a page or two out loud just for the pure joy of hearing the nearly foreign speech pirouette off my tongue as if reading from an arcane book hidden for centuries.

This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son

A Four-Century Legacy

A painting by Theodore Chasseriau: “Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches on the heath”

We live in a world of Shakespeare. Which is not to say that we’re governed by laws and housed in systems that he hatched, nor that our world is the one he’d like to have lived in or have seen come to pass. Rather, we live in a world of which our very comprehension and observation was substantially and irreversibly altered by Shakespeare’s work. Since Shakespeare, fiction can not only evoke a life and characters a person, but one’s life – entire life, that is, and not only the apparent biographical details – can be revealed and enlarged, and a person – a real human figure, and not only a character with a name and backstory and good dialogue – can be made to seem real and living in all but the flesh. And through this radical revolution of literature and of consciousness, Shakespeare’s own name has come to be an emblem of that revolution and of the art of literature itself.

I missed the opportunity on this day – the feast day of St George, the patron saint of England – two years ago to celebrate the 450^th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare – England’s preeminent luminary, along with Elizabeth I and King Arthur – in the modest county of Warwickshire in the West Midlands of England. But today is the 400^th anniversary of his death, and I’ve been poring over sonnets, soliloquies, and salacious misattributions in quietly exuberant commemoration. William Shakespeare and Emily Brontë were my first loves in literature – and the works of both enjoy far more of my admiration and adoration than 11 years ago, when I first encountered them – but the Bard must ultimately triumph over the Yorkshirewoman, in eminence as well as in the height of artistic achievement, despite Brontë having one of the greatest creative minds to have composed in English.

Ode on Romance and the Romantic

DVD Notes: "Bright Star"

Abbie Cornish reads a poem from her beloved in "Bright Star"

The Romantic poets emphasised instinct and intuition over reason and rationale, and cultivated an interest in mysticism and the supernatural, parallel, and often connected, to a reverence for the natural world. Jane Campion's 2009 film, "Bright Star", in telling the story of the romance between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), embodies these features enchantingly, with its adoring shots of the two lovers, of the flowers and trees constantly surrounding them, and the graceful unfolding of its love story. It preoccupies itself with the spontaneous expression of emotion, though restrained, making it a charming work worthy of the attention of any audience member, poetry scholar or otherwise.

Brawne is 18 years old at the opening, self-possessed, middle class, a prodigious flirt and devoted student of fashion, and Keats a 23-year-old writer, somewhat melancholy and seemingly idle, though he has moments of spirit and humour. She attracts his attention, and, after some minor misunderstanding over whether or not each likes the other, their fondness and attraction burgeons into a delicate love affair.