Shakespeare's History Plays

Now that I’m finished with my month-long Hamlet spree and summer camp counseling without access to the internet, I figure it’s time to resume my blog.  Instead of just randomly reviewing as before, I’ve decided to set myself a project.  Unlike my Hamlet project, it’s not for school, and it won’t be done on a particular schedule, so reviews will come when they come, but I’m setting myself a list of movies to review that I think will work well as a set of comparisons. 

My current Shakespearean obsession is the history plays: any and all of them really, though of course, I have favorites.  For the upcoming months I’ll be reviewing a number of films based off the history plays, with a focus on those films that tie multiple of the plays together.  Instead of watching all the movies of a certain play in a row, I’ll watch each sequence of histories in a set, and comment on the individual films as well as how the series created an overall narrative. 

Unlike in my Hamlet project, I’m not aiming to be particularly thorough with my reviews; I’m not finding every single god-awful version possible just for the sake of saying I did.  I’m also not bending over backwards to get movies that are hard or rather expensive to obtain.  My goal is to get a relatively broad survey of the films of the history plays, and have a bit of fun in the process. 

The following is a rough outline of the movies I might look at, but this is subject to change at anytime and may or may not happen in this order. 

-Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles’ movie on Falstaff’s life, compiled from excerpts of both Henry IV plays and Merry Wives of Windsor.  

-Shakespeare’s An Age of Kings series, made by the BBC in 1960, covering the whole span of the eight chronological history plays, from Richard II to Richard III. 

-The BBC series from 1978-79, directed by David Giles, covering Richard II through Henry V. 

-The BBC series from 1982-3, directed by Jane Howell, covering Henry VI Part 1 through Richard III

-Dominic Dromgoole’s two parts of Henry IV, recorded live at the Globe Theater in 2011

-The BBC’s newest history series, The Hollow Crown, first broadcast this summer for the 2012 Olympic Games

-Richard Loncraine’s Richard III from 1995, starring Sir Ian McKellen

-Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V

and

-Laurence Olivier’s 1955 Richard III

I already have a review of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, but I may go back to it after my project and see if my thoughts on it are any different after seeing the play done in other ways. 

I’ll probably end up watching and reviewing these in whichever order I please, but I will post the reviews in the groups that I stated above, and I’ll post an overall summary of each set that consists of multiple movies. 

Please let me know if there’s anything I’ve left off this list that I shouldn’t have! 

-Mara