Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Snark and other miscellanea

[selenak]

I know you're not into movies, but the film Stage Beauty, which I reviewed here, while taking great liberties with chronology within its Restoration context, does a reasonably good job reconstructing the stylized acting with attitudes as practised by Ned Kynaston at the start of the film. (And in a way that still gets across how good he is, and how effective it can be.) Personally, I suspect it might have felt somewhat similar to Japanese Kabuki theatre, which I did once have the chance to see performed when in Japan.

There's also the factor that every young actor, and more rarely, actress, is credited with performing more naturally when they get their star turn - after Garrick, it was Edmund Kean's time to be praised for his naturalness and for Garrick's era to be seen as stylized. A bit similarly to how Garrick was praised for bringing Shakespeare back to the British stage in the original form, except well, not as we'd see it today - he still worked with self written changes like letting Juliet wake up before Romeo dies (but after he's already drunk the poison) so that they can talk one last time, or the famous "Richard is himself again!" line he added to Richard III which became so entrenched in British performance practice for centuries that it's still in the Olivier movie) - but he certainly used way way more of the original text than was the custom before. (And no more happy ending for Lear!) It's always a matter of contemporary context.