To bleed or not to bleed

Date: 2009
Posted by: metalshakespeare
Cast: Viceroy Matthew [Matt Stikker] (lead guitar, backing vocals), Lord Simms [Jason Simms] (vocals, rhythm guitar), William Sly [Randy Bemrose] (drums), Sir Raleigh the Valiant [Riley Geare] (drums), Duke Luke (‘Bottom’) [Luke Dennis] (bass)
Credits: Not given
Duration: 4.58

The Metal Shakespeare Company bringing together Shakespeare and heavy metal music. They may not do so entirely seriously, but they certainly go about their business with skull-banging gusto. This full-blooded assault on Hamlet (chiefly Hamlet’s lines on Yorick’s skull, from Act 5 Scene 1) shows as much respect for the tenets of heavy metal as it does for Shakespeare’s verse. The costuming and settings are pure heritage Shakespeare, but the energy of the performance takes the video beyond a mere comic sketch. Chiefly, it demonstrates how neatly Hamlet works seen through the music of modern tortured adolesence (though the addition of an ass’s head from A Midsummer’s Night Dream is a bit odd).

The Metal Shakespeare Company hail from Portland, Oregon, USA. Previously known as Dagger of the Mind, they describe themselves as “70% metal and 30% theater”. They cite their influences as being Iron Maiden, Manowar, Dio, Judas Priest and Mercyful Fate, while they feel that their sound can best be described as “Shakespeare turning in his grave”. Turning rhythmically, at least.

Links:
Metal Shakespeare Company site
Myspace page
YouTube page

Shakespeare Shakedown

Date: 2007
Posted by: justjill
Cast: Not given
Credits: Produced by Patrik Fleming and Jill Blum
Duration: 6.63

An enjoyable skit from a Shakespeare class at the University of Baltimore, in which Gladys and Lorraine gossip about Ophelia and Gertude, the Macbeths’ marital disharmony and the three witches’ skin care problems, and King Lear, interspersed with advertisements for the King Lear Guide to Retirement Planning and Rid-a-Kin, the ideal poison for troublesome relatives. Some audio problems along the way, but bitchy fun.

Links:
YouTube page
Internet Archive page

Straight Outta Denmark

Date: 2004
Posted by: soonest2turn
Credits: Not given
Cast: Not given
Duration: 2.58

School project Shakespeare raps are scattered all over YouTube, and most are lame and annoying. This Grade 12 English project video from Canada stands out from the crowd by some realistic venom amid the goofy performance, and its strong language (a broadminded English teacher was involved, clearly). The lyrics show a strong engagement with the play, more than vindicating the exercise:

Straight Outta Denmark a crazy m———r named Hamlet
I’m a bad ass hero that’s tragic
Thoughts are pending, time’s not mending
Tragic means I die in the ending.

The full text is given on the YouTube page. Just a shame about the half-hearted lip-synching.

Links:
YouTube page

My Dinner with André the Giant

Date: 2007
Posted by: Alex Itin
Credits: Created by Alex Itin
Cast: none
Duration: 2.02

American painter and experimental filmmaker Alex Itin is a member of The Future of the Book, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens”. With his starting point the celebrated Wallace Shawn play (and Louis Malle film) My Dinner with André (1981), in which two men debate a wide range of cultural themes over a meal, Itin creates a sampled video by associations. He describes his film thus:

The video is my play on Wallace Shawn and Shakespeare along the way to Orson Welles doing Lear and Mobydick… The drawing of what seems to be Italy with Chinese is from Imagination in The Library. I think he hails from China. The kicked by Sexy Italian Boot Sicily is from my brush wiping page next to the moby ink pot. It’s random, but I thought sort of pretty. It is from the pages of an old book on chess strategy. The Chinese say, “Life is Chess (war); Living is strategy and tactics”.

Also buried within lies the witch from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (based on Macbeth), alongside Brando in Apocalypse Now, The Third Man, The Kinks, and who knows what else besides (the background pages come from Moby Dick via an earlier Itin video – he recycles his own material as well as that of others). It’s an absurdist delight, with a magnificent title (André the Giant was a wrestler and actor popular in America) and a sublime closing dissolve from camera in the hand to skull in the hand. Sometimes movies should only be like this.

Links:
Another Green World (‘remix’ of some of the same footage)
IT IN place
Vimeo page

Hamlet – the video blogger

Date: 2007
Posted by: LivingPassion
Credits: Filmed by Stefani Waters
Cast: Stefani Waters (Hamlet)
Duration: 4.32

American student and vlogger Stefani Waters decides to make a switch from reporting the personal to the camera to reciting Shakespeare. She gives readings of the soliloquies ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not’ and ‘To be or not to be’ from Hamlet, in the same confessional mode as she does for her regular vlogs. The renditions are fine, every word heavy with meaning, the eyes at time engaged with the camera, at other times needing to look away. How curious it is that speeches that were designed for delivery to a theatre filled with people work so naturally in this intimate one-to-one setting. But it’s not really curious at all. The theatre for Shakespeare was only a means to an end, which was to speak to an audience. The more we experience Shakespeare outside the theatre’s narrow confines the better.

Links
YouTube page

The Play’s the Thing… That I Hate

Date: 2008
Posted by: TheLionHaired
Credits: Filmed by Derek
Cast: Derek
Duration: 3.57

TheLionHaired (handsome title, but his real name’s Derek) hates Shakespeare. He hates Chaucer too, but particularly he hates Shakespeare. Why do the characters take so long to say so little? Just look at Hamlet. Why to the characters do dumb stuff which just isn’t plausible, much like characters in horror movies? Romeo and Juliet were just idiots. All they had to do was run away to Mantua. And in Macbeth, what was the point of murdering Banquo? And Brutus killing Julius Caesar, that’s just wrong. Titus is OK, but he just held back too much. “If Lavinia had been my daughter – and what happened to her – I would have been a little more active”. In general he hates Shakespeare. Or maybe it’s just the plays. Because he quite likes the poetry…

Sorry, Derek, but I don’t believe you. This diatribe shows too much eloquence, just a little too much knowledge of the plays. I can hardly think of a better example of a video to stimulate a class discussion than what is on display here. I think Shakespeare’s has got to you more than you may know, as yet.

Links:
YouTube page

Hamlet Act 2

Date: 2003
Posted by: abnormalpapsmear
Credits: Inappropriate Emotion Theatre presents. Music and animation by Greg Wrenn. Some models provided by Eggington Productions
Cast: Greg Wrenn (Hamlet), Philip Michaels (Ghost)
Duration: 3.26

Very enjoyable jokey computer animation, depicting Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost. There is more invention here in three minutes than many films have at thirty times the length. Swooping camera, dynamic low-level tracking shots, striking changes in angle, surprise visual references (the use of a slot machine), grand music and of course the unexpected factor of having the parts played by what the filmmaker calls mutant teddy bears. Yes it’s silly, but all the words are there, and it’s done in a spirit of affectionate fun.

Links:
YouTube page
Cheese Wars (website with Hamlet Act 2)

Vincent Victoria’s ‘Hamlet Monologue’

Date: 2008
Posted by: Kylevic9
Credits: Created by Vincent Victoria
Cast: Vincent Victoria (Hamlet)
Duration: 1.15

Among the considerable number of ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquies to be found on YouTube, few show the sort of originality displayed here. American ’serio-comic’ actor Vincent Victoria has developed an unusual specialism, creating videos in which the words are heard off screen and his face, filmed in close-up, reacts to what it is hearing. Here Hamlet’s words (presumably spoken by Victoria) are uttered while his face is shown through a barrage of jump-cuts, dissolves, slow motion and stop motion effects. The result is a memorable depiction of a disordered mind, weakened slightly by cutting the soliloquy short and signing off cheaply with the words, ‘To be or not to be – that is always the f——- question’.

Links
YouTube page
Vincent Victoria’s web page

Ophelia’s Suicide Soliloquy

Date: 2008
Posted by: fidelis1400
Credits: Written and performed by fidelis1400
Cast: fidelis1400 (Ophelia)
Duration: 4.32

Oh, that my expiring heart, craving for love
Had not been inflamed by thee, thee the most unfeeling creature…

Shakespeare did not provide Ophelia with a suicide speech, and we learn of her death only through another’s description. Though few who have tried to embellish, imitate or rectify Shakespeare according to their own tastes have proved successful, fidelis1400 has made so bold as to write and perform an imaginary final speech for Ophelia. Whether or not it’s needed does not matter much. As a performance it is done with feeling, filmed in searching close-up in semi-darkness (the watery sound effects off-set somewhat by the glass door in the background). The poetry is not exactly iambic pentameter, but this needs rather to be seen as a critique of Shakespeare, who made Ophelia a victim without words enough to let us understand her own tragedy.

Links:
YouTube page

the tragedie of hamlet

Date: 2008
Posted by: ishakespeare
Credits: Directed by William Mann
Cast: William Mann (Hamlet), Christopher Lynch (Horatio)
Duration: 8.21

The Chamber Shakespeare Company (also known as the ishakespeare company) describes itself as a

not-for-profit artistic collaborative to research and explore the possible application of mythic and symbolic theatre traditions, such as Greek Tragedy, Japanese Noh and Ta’ziyeh, to productions of the work of William Shakespeare.

The Company takes a ‘minimalist’ approach, with an emphasis on bare staging, multi-part casting and ritualistic presentation, with the intention of creating production which are not constrained by social and cultural boundaries.

The Company is in the process of filming its productions, but the sample videos that it has published on YouTube are of a more experimental in kind, constructed as exercises in style. In chamber hamlet I.2 + I.5, Hamlet learning of the ghost’s existence from Horatio is depicted in blurred and grainy close shots, with handheld shots framed as best they can to Hamlet’s face as he moves about the small ’stage’, Horatio’s calm voice off-camera. The result is intense and not always easy to look at (an entire production filmed this way would be unbearable) or, at times, to hear. But as an attempt to present a mind becoming disordered it is effective, and might be argued to be more successful in depicting a stateless Hamlet than the original staging would have achieved, with all the distracting reality of the ‘theatre’. They have recognised that film changes as it records, and have let the camera dictate the action, with hallucinatory results.

Date: 2008
Posted by: ishakespeare
Credits: Directed by William Mann
Cast: William Mann (Hamlet), Christopher Lynch (Player 1), Hayley Roberts (Player 2)
Duration: 4.11

In this second video extract, chamber hamlet II.2, two players put on a performance for Hamlet of the slaughter of Priam by Pyrrhus during the fall of Troy. The dramatic style is that of Japanese Noh theatre, while the low position of the virtually static camera recalls the methods of film director Yasujirō Ozu (the camera being like an unacknowledged third person seated in a typical Japanese setting). Poor sound recording, however, dims the impact.

Links
See also the Company’s video interpretation of Othello
hamlet I.2 + I.5 YouTube page
hamlet II.2 YouTube page
Chamber Shakespeare Company