Shakespeare on Film

Perhaps the most impressive of Shakespeare's women is Margaret of Anjou, who appears in Henry VI Parts I, II, III, and Richard III. She is the only character to appear alive in all four plays and evolves from a sweet French maid, to a tough, scheming woman, to a warrior queen, and finally, in Richard III, to a Cassandra-like prophetess who curses all those who have wronged her with a dramatic viciousness that works wonderfully on stage but is too often cut (e.g. by Olivier in his Richard III film).

I saw Penny Downie play the role over three evenings in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Plantagenets, a conflation of the four plays mentioned above. She was magnificent, embodying the great range of the character brilliantly.

One of Shakespare's most powerful scenes takes place in Henry VI Part 3, at the Battle of Tewkesbury, when Queen Margaret sees her young son, Prince Edward, stabbed to death by the Yorkists. She speaks to her dead child:

"O Ned, sweet Ned! speak to thy mother, boy!
Canst thou not speak? O traitors! murderers!
They that stabb'd Caesar shed no blood at all,
Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame,
If this foul deed were by to equal it:
He was a man; this, in respect, a child:
And men ne'er spend their fury on a child.
What's worse than murderer, that I may name it?
No, no, my heart will burst, and if I speak:
And I will speak, that so my heart may burst.
Butchers and villains! bloody cannibals!
How sweet a plant have you untimely cropp'd!
You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr'd up remorse:
But if you ever chance to have a child,
Look in his youth to have him so cut off
As, deathmen, you have rid this sweet young prince!"


She returns, in Richard III, to curse all who've wronged her, and her curses prevail:

"What were you snarling all before I came,
Ready to catch each other by the throat,
And turn you all your hatred now on me?
Did York's dread curse prevail so much with heaven?
That Henry's death, my lovely Edward's death,
Their kingdom's loss, my woful banishment,
Could all but answer for that peevish brat?
Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?
Why, then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses!
If not by war, by surfeit die your king,
As ours by murder, to make him a king!
Edward thy son, which now is Prince of Wales,
For Edward my son, which was Prince of Wales,
Die in his youth by like untimely violence!
Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen,
Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self!
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's loss;
And see another, as I see thee now,
Deck'd in thy rights, as thou art stall'd in mine!
Long die thy happy days before thy death;
And, after many lengthen'd hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England's queen!
Rivers and Dorset, you were standers by,
And so wast thou, Lord Hastings, when my son
Was stabb'd with bloody daggers: God, I pray him,
That none of you may live your natural age,
But by some unlook'd accident cut off!"

I saw Jacobi's Richard II at the Phoenix Theatre, London, in 1988. Thought he was very good, but at 50 a bit elderly for the role. I'd like to have seen him play the role earlier and will look for the Hollow Crown version (1978). Jacobi's performance as Alan Turing in Breaking the Code a few years earlier is one of the monumental performances. I think the first times I saw him on stage was the early 1980s, as Cyrano and Benedick, with the RSC.

Ben Whishaw was excellent as a studious Brutus in Julius Caesar, directed by Nick Hytner at the Bridge Theatre. I think it was filmed.

Looks opportunistic to me. I haven't been able to find an online copy of the filing, but the few reports I've read about it indicate their complaint is about being deceived, then intimidated. The California statute allows relief for sexual abuse and specifies the types of offenses covered, but I'm not sure this situation, even in 2023, would fit. 

My 9th grade English class went to see it in a theater as a field trip.

 
This ramshackle Italian production (1954, Renato Castellani) is a lot more fun than the '78 version though it features a younger, romantic looking Gielgud as Chorus (wish I'd seen his Hamlet) and several notable names, including a young Laurence Harvey (Manchurian Candidate) as Romeo. Free on tubi.