Shakespeare Day 2020: The best of Shakespeare on DVD and YouTube

On Shakespeare Day, discover why the literary great is the mainstay of drama in the English language.

Actor Ralph Fiennes in a scene from 2012 film 'Coriolanus'.

April 23 is a day we remember William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright who ever lived, because he died on that day and was certainly born around then as well. He was a man who sometimes saw his theatres closed down because of plagues and what a companionable thing his work can be if you decide to watch it on DVD or YouTube.

Hamlet is his most famous play and the one where he seems to have held up some mirror to his own subjectivity or perhaps to the actor’s capacity to play himself as he gazes into the mystery of this mirror.

The record breaking Broadway Hamlet with Richard Burton, at the zenith of his stardom in 1964, is captured on DVD. It’s not the way I imagine Hamlet but it’s a terrifically energised performance: magnificently muscled in its rhetorical power and with the kind of savage deadly wit Burton brought to his George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with his wife Elizabeth Taylor. They wanted to film Macbeth together as they had filmed The Taming of The Shrew with Franco Zeffirelli and they would have been marvellous in that bloodcurdling scenes from a marriage play.

Zeffrelli: master of Shakespearean translation

Zeffrelli, one of the most dynamic translators of Shakespeare to the screen ––the man who made every girl of my generation want to wear a Juliet cap because of his great 1968 film of Romeo & Juliet with Olivia Hussey as the balcony girl ––is also the director of the 1990 Mel Gibson Hamlet with the man who played Biff to Warren Mitchell’s Willy Loman for the Sydney Theatre Company acting in very high Australian as a kind of truculent bewildered tough guy Hamlet with Glenn Close as the Queen, Alan Bates as the King and Helena Bonham-Carter as Ophelia.

Mel Gibson and Glenn Close in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 adaptation of Hamlet.

Roman Polanski made a famous film of Macbeth not with the Burtons but with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as a very youthful thane and lady on the battlements. The great Australian actor Zoe Caldwell was Lady Macbeth to the quite young Macbeth of Sean Connery on Canadian television ––which is on YouTube––and he said it taught him how to play James Bond.

Laurence Olivier was knocked back by the J. Arthur rank organisation when he tried to get those producers to fund a film of Macbeth even though his 50s thane to Vivien Leigh’s Lady M lives in legend as the greatest Macbeth of the century.

A close runner up is Trevor Nunn’s 70s production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench which is on DVD. Olivier, though, made a number of Shakespeare’s films that attracted the kind of mass pre-TV audience that went to the pictures at least once a week. He was a tortured, very introspective and ingrown, but blonde and physically beautiful Hamlet in a tumult of turbulent stormy blacks influenced by the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. He was a matinee idol Henry V, in early colour towards the end of World War II, and then in 1956 an eerily creepy Richard III —the great tenor voice at once old maidish and Hitlerian in its steel and stridency.

Marlon Brando as Mark Antony

We’re sometimes prejudiced against American Shakespeare but another Shakespeare that commanded a big audience was the 1953 MGM Julius Caesar which was the exception that proves the rule because it had Marlon Brando’s overpowering Mark Antony. The actor who rewrote the book of acting with his Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire taught himself to do Shakespeare by listening over and over to recordings of Olivier and he’s dynamite. My sportswriter father said, quite rightly, that Brando did ‘Friends, Romans and countrymen’ like a wharfie and his soliloquy over the body of Caesar ‘O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth that I am meek and humble with these … BUTCHERS’ is to die for. This Julius Caesar directed by Joseph Mankiewitz (who made All About Eve) also has an towering Cassius in Sir John Gielgud and a soulful saturnine Brutus from the great James Mason, Stanley Kubrick’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita. The most visually incandescent of American Shakespeares in fact sprang from the imagination of the great Max Reinhardt who fled to Hollywood to escape Hitler and did a ravishing 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mickey Rooney, then a boy, as Puck and with Jimmy Cagney as Bottom.

Marlon Brando in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 Julius Caesar film.

The comedies almost always work on screen. The BBC did a TV version of Zefirelli’s stage production at The National Theatre of Much Ado About Nothing with Maggie Smith and her lightning comic timing as Beatrice and both Emma Thompson and Kate Beckinsale are everything you would desire as leading lady and juvenile lead in Ken Branagh’s movie of Much Ado with himself as Benedick and a stellar Hollywood cast.

His film of Henry V was his first effort at filming Shakespeare and he also did an uncut Hamlet which runs for 4 hours and has everyone from Jack Lemmon to Julie Christie (as the Queen). Another Hamlet on dvd, brilliantly filmed, is David Tennant’s 2008 performance which will thrill his Doctor Who fans and has a lean intelligence.

Notable King Lears

There are notable King Lears on DVD. Olivier’s may seem a bit too crack-voiced and frail but his supporting cast with Diana Rigg and Dorothy Tutin as the heartless daughters, John Hurt as the Fool and Australia’s Leo McKern as Gloucester is as good as it gets. Ian McKellen’s King Lear for Trevor Nunn (which toured here) was a revelation on stage and the DVD captures why. It’s one of the best Lears since Paul Scofield’s.

Scofield (who won an Oscar for A Man For All Seasons) is the greatest Lear of his generation and Peter Brook the legendary stage director filmed this sweeping, savage, utterly heartbreaking film of King Lear with its dazzling central performance using Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist to capture an icy dangerous Nordic wasteland of a world in which old men could freeze to death and lose their minds. Samuel Beckett’s friend Jack MacGowran is a sublime Fool and Irene Worth a very compellingly frail Goneril: we flinch for her during Lear’s terrible tirades even though we know what revenges she will take.

That early horror story of a play Titus Andronicus —almost too melodramatic for words with its lopped limbs and tongues ripped out and people baked in pies — was made into an exceptionally viable film with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Jessica Lange as Tamora, the Queen of the Goths by The Lion King lady Julie Taymor who book ended this with her film of what we think of as Shakespeare’s last play, that serenity haunted desert island play that seems to take the theatre as the fundamental metaphor for life, The Tempest. The Taymor version is the one with Helen Mirren as a female magus, Prospera and Ben Wishaw as a dazzlingly good Ariel, the sprite and messenger (Wishaw is always superb in Shakespeare as his minor key Richard II for the London Olympics mini Shakespeare TV festival showed.)

Sir Anthony Hopkins in: Julie Taymor’s 2000 Titus film

If you want a traditional male Prospero you can choose between Michael Hordern for the BBC Complete Works (a steal for a couple of hundred dollars) or that weird one man Tempest, Prospero’s Books with Gielgud as everyone, directed by Peter Greenaway.

The greatest Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra you can watch on TV is Janet Suzman’s from an early 70s Trevor Nunn production with Richard Johnson as a steady Antony and Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus. Again, neither Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor got to play Shakespeare’s Cleopatra on screen though Leigh did George Bernard Shaw’s and Taylor, with Burton, did Joe Mankiewitz’ Hollywood epic Cleopatra.

Among the later plays there are a couple of superb offerings for the BBC complete set by Australia’s Elijah Moshinsky. One is a Coriolanus with a superbly flinty man of war from Alan Howard (he was the thief in Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief) and again Irene Worth as his tough, searingly moving mother, Volumnia.

You could also get hold of the Ralph Fiennes film of Coriolanus in contemporary camouflage gear and with the greatest Shakespearean actor of her generation, Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia. (It’s a pity we don’t have her Cleopatra to watch or indeed her Rosalind in As You Like It.) We do have Mirren on the BBC As You Like It and she’s in the Moshinsky version of that extraordinary challenge of a late play ––so strange it always seems unfamiliar no matter how often you experience it ––Cymbeline.

Helen Mirren (right) as Rosalind in As you Like It for the BBC 1978

Shakespeare also wrote —and they are among his greatest works — some pretty formidable history plays. The BBC Olympics Henry IV directed by Richard Eyre has Simon Russell Beale as Fallstaff and Tom Hiddleston as Hal but the really towering performance is Jeremy Irons as the King which I have never seen equalled. The greatest attempt at Henry IV is Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight in which the genius creator of Citizen Kane makes a sublime meal of the Fat Knight and has Jeanne Moreau, that great French actor, as his Doll Tearsheet. Welles made a number of Shakespeare films including a Macbeth in Scots and an Othello with the Irish actor Micheal MacLiammoir as a mesmerising Iago.

Too big for the screen

Olivier’s early 60s Othello with dark black makeup and his voice lowered and octave is almost too big for the screen though it was one of the most celebrated performances of its day and the DVD may paradoxically work better on the bigger TV screens of today.

Maggie Smith is his Desdemona. When Anthony Hopkins two decades later did a virtuoso Othello for the complete series BBC it was the last moment a white man could play the role.

Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith in Stuart Burge’s 1965 Othello.

It’s a pity we don’t have Paul Robeson’s Othello because the African-American actor singer caused riots when he toured in it across the face of America in the 1940s. And it’s a shame there isn’t a DVD of James Earl Jones as the Moor, though there is one of him as Lear. You can get Laurence Fishburne from The Matrix and Mystic River as a compelling and charismatic Othello in a voice a little like the slightly West Indian tinged one Olivier used.

In the case of another play with a racial tilt, Olivier’s Shylock from his National Theatre production by Jonathan Miller is the great revelation on DVD as this Victorian businessman in a skullcap mincingly if unsuccessfully tries to muster an upper class accent. The pathos as well as the savagery is overpowering and the sound and music of Hebraic lament end Jonathan Miller’s production very sombrely. Others may prefer Al Pacino’s very different New York style Shylock.

But you shouldn’t find it hard to find Shakespeare that can divert you endlessly if you have a taste for the sound and fury of his drama and the magnificence of his poetry. There’s a 1970 Twelfth Night on DVD with two of the greatest actors who ever lived, Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby and Alec Guinness as Malvolio. You can get a DVD or download of the Trevor Nunn film of Twelfth Night with Helelna Bonham-Carter as Olivia.

If you go right back to the days of black and white TV the BBC has boxed DVD sets of the Roman plays The Spread of the Eagle dominated by the Australian actor Keith Mitchell as Mark Antony. Then there’s The Age of Kings which has superb performances of each of the history plays ––Paul Daneman who played King Arthur in Camelot here in Australia back in the early 1960s is Richard the III and Sean Connery plays the headstrong rebel Hotspur in the Henry IV. Plus the young Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins.

But Shakespeare is the great treasure house and mainstay of drama in the English language and he’s a pretty compelling master of beauty and truth and diversion. You could do worse for a plague year.