Spending the past few days sick has given me plenty of time to think and watch movies. One movie that I watched last Friday, I’d like to muse about today. It was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It was hilarious, complete with dry British humor. The whole concept of the film/play was the story of Hamlet told from the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which got me thinking, “What other secondary characters in Shakespeare’s plays could use more fleshing out?” I mean, we have many fully developed characters but what side characters do we simply forget about? We saw in Winter’s Tale Autolycus steal the show because the actor had such a presence, but what others could do so as well?Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Spending the past few days sick has given me plenty of time to think and watch movies. One movie that I watched last Friday, I’d like to muse about today. It was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It was hilarious, complete with dry British humor. The whole concept of the film/play was the story of Hamlet told from the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which got me thinking, “What other secondary characters in Shakespeare’s plays could use more fleshing out?” I mean, we have many fully developed characters but what side characters do we simply forget about? We saw in Winter’s Tale Autolycus steal the show because the actor had such a presence, but what others could do so as well?
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Wow that really is such an interesting idea to tell the story from a different perspective!
ReplyDeleteI think some other characters that would be interesting to hear from would be Horatio (Hamlet's main guy)or even from Paulina (though she isn't a side character) in Winter's Tale because we may be able to understand some of her motives.
Well one thing that's great about the film is that it shows these two characters outside of the scenes they play in...it's really interesting and seriously amusing
ReplyDeleteThere really are so many characters in his plays that have so much possibility but they are barely present in the production. Like Ophelia, I feel like she was just used and abused in Hamlet and never made into a fully developed character.
ReplyDeleteOphelia
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Ophelia-Lisa-Klein/dp/1582348014/ref=cm_rdp_product - I'm pretty sure this is the one Meg mentioned in class...if not, there's always:
http://www.amazon.com/Dating-Hamlet-Ophelias-Lisa-Fiedler/dp/0805070540/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317958108&sr=8-1
or
http://www.amazon.com/Ophelias-Revenge-Rebecca-Reisert/dp/0340771194/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1317958151&sr=8-2
Sorry Katie, couldn't find anything for Horatio...