Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' [video] | Hacker News Reader

Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' [video]

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36 pointsmartialg29 comments

Context for anyone not familiar with it - Julius Caesar has been assassinated by a group led by Brutus. They reluctantly allow Antony (a close ally of Caesar) to give a eulogy at the public funeral. According to Plutarch and others, Antony's eulogy set off a riot, leading ultimately to the overthrow of Caesar's assassins. The speech in this video is Shakespeare's imagining of Antony's eulogy in which he initally appears to praise Brutus ("Brutus is an honourable man") but gradually turns the crowd against him.

Just brilliant - there's a reason we're still reading shakespeare 400 years later...

I'm afraid that English teachers here are killing Shakespeare. They hardly make their pupils read Shakespeare, but instead try to make it fun! Oh, so much fun. Yes, youngster, let's make fun. Shall I tell you about Shakespeare's dick jokes? Haha, I'm sure you're going to like that and pay attention.

And then all they remember is vague jokes they can't tell, because they don't have the vocabulary.

Shakespeare's dick jokes were equally for the contemporary audience. Man knew his patrons, who didn't all know the finer points of their letters.

It’s not just trying to make it fun - a lot of teachers just don’t know the material well enough to teach it. My daughter’s English teacher (in a highly regarded high school) taught them that “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” was archaic English for “Where are you?” because Juliet didn’t know where he was (like “Wherefore are my car keys?”, he said). If the teacher doesn’t understand one of the most famous and most important lines in one of Shakespeare’s most read and most taught plays, how will the students ever learn to understand it?

It's not making it fun. It's making them read at all. Go into a classroom of 8-10th grades and have your fucking mind blown. Both comments yours and the guy who says that they don't know the source material anymore are just so unbelievable pretentious and condescending it hurts.

I get where you are coming from (and take no offense). If I understand your intent correctly, you are right that I should be more generous to teachers. In the context of larger educational challenges (and a recovery from the pandemic), I did not mean to suggest that teachers’ intimate familiarity with Shakespeare should be a high priority in our schools, merely that in a perfect world (without other challenges), students would learn Shakespeare better (which I think would be a benefit) from teachers that know the material.

Sadly, our educational system has much deeper challenges than that, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. The conversation was about Shakespeare specifically and how his works are taught, not the broader state of education.

OTOH, English teachers once did know their Shakespeare. And Goethe, and Moliere. I had a colleague who could recite some Shakespeare, I even can remember some Heine (even though I hated it), and my former boss could recite the opening of the Odyssey, in Greek. All taught in secondary school. And in these same formative years, my daughter is taught dick jokes. It doesn't require much imagination to see what that does to education. It certainly downgrades the teachers.

Too much emphasis has been placed on knowledge being useful, without actually knowing what comprises useful knowledge, and fun in the classroom, in the unproven expectation to improve performance, while at the same time "broadening" the curriculum and lowering the standards, so more children can participate.

Teaching middle schoolers is just about the worst job in the world. But at least it pays poorly /s

On the contrary, it's one of the best jobs in the world. Kids that age are just old enough to comprehend complex ideas, without (yet) having spent enough time in the educational system to have all of their curiosity and creativity beaten out of them. The best trick is to pitch whatever you want them to do as somehow slightly subversive, and they'll follow you anywhere.

On the other hand, yeah: teaching has been made into one of the worst careers (at least for educated people) there is, which is why I'm not doing it anymore.

it's probably that some people don't think it's the worst job in the world that it continues to pay so little.

for me, it would be. YMMV.

That's fair. Teaching provides immense non-monetary rewards for people who have the temperament and ability to achieve them. (It also provides non-monetary rewards for people with toxic and authoritarian personality traits, but that's kind of a separate issue.) The educational system continues to run (to the extent that it continues to run) because it takes (economic) advantage of people's idealism.

Education isn't the only sector that does that. Medicine has become that, as well. OSS would be a tech-related example.

Some years ago I read a piece, only partly tongue in cheek, by an economist who posited that rates of pay are inversely correlated with the good any particular job does for humanity. I see that observation regularly confirmed.

I know this won't be a popular opinion but maybe it's just kids not liking being forced to care about stories spoken in an archaic form of english that make them unintelligible and thus unenjoyable to read?

no kid in history has ever liked it. It's the teacher's job to make sure they learn something anyway.

As a former theatre student with a BA in Drana, I love performing Shakespeare, but hate reading it or watching someone else perform it.

The stories may be universal, but everything else about them is a product of the time they were written in. Yes, they’re important but don’t burden kids with having to learn the finer nuances that even escape most adults.

Not everybody has to like it. If you reach 10%, that's good enough. The rest can consume it as general knowledge. At least it'll elevate their knowledge of English a bit more than focusing on dick jokes.

The quality of Roman oratory (as attested to in the historical record and imagined by Shakespeare later) is impressive.

Performed, for the thinking public, to plant a thought inside their heads.

Political speeches are so hamfisted, lowest-common-denominator affairs these days.

And why should they not be?

(Also, I'll watch Damian Lewis in anything)

If you think they’re good, just wait till you read the Athenian speeches. So good.

WATCHING Shakespeare is what unlocked his work for me. Reading his works is naturally entertaining and insightful, but it is like reading a Hollywood script vs. watching the movie.

I kind of feel like this is a RUSH or Grateful Dead conversation too, "oh man, you've never experienced it until you've seen it live" kinda vibe.

TY for posting!

I gave up on reading plays shortly after school. They are made to be enjoyed live.

See also the William Shatner version in "Free Enterprise" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73tjF0bzAi4

Interesting because the movie portrays it as a ridiculous idea - a musical of "Julius Caesar" in rap form. But funnily enough, a hip-hop musical of the life of Alexander Hamilton was a great success. Maybe every stupid idea is close to being great.

What did I just watch? O_o

I love this take on it, I've watched it a few times.

It goes to show that when you have writing and acting of this quality you don't need any other embellishments.

I prefer James Purefoy's performance in Rome, playing a more thuggish (and probably more realistic) Mark Antony.

Twenty or so years ago I had the pleasure of playing Antony in a school-tour version of this play. One of the best experiences of my career was the time ~300 incredibly rambunctious middle-schoolers boo'd and boo'd the actor playing Brutus, until he got them to shut up and listen to his speech (preceding this one), at the end of which they were cheering. Then I got to go out and flip them back around with this one.

The principal afterwards apologized to us that the students were "so loud", and we were like "No, that was perfect".

That recollection still gives me chills.

Why is this flagged?

There’s no disputation in the comments to suggest there’s any issue.

The video appears perfectly straight forward.

Also recommend Marlon Brando from the 1953 movie.

Yes was about to say this. It is the only version I have seen

This is terrible! He's on a balcony speaking to a crowd, not close-up in a studio. And it's meant to be a fiery oration, not an understated monologue. This could work for Brutus' speech, maybe, but not Antony's.

It's a YouTube video, not a stage show. Lewis interprets the scene as a more intimate gathering to fit the intimate style of most YouTube videos.

Every performance is an adaptation of the original work to a different medium, place and/or time.

Also the whole point of the speech is that its tone and meaning changes radically as it goes.

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