Monday, October 20, 2008

If Silence be the Food of Love . . .

Twelfth Night. Dir. Charles Kent. Perf. Florence Turner, Charles Kent, Julia Swayne Gordon, and Tefft Johnson. Vitagraph Company of America. 1910. Silent Shakespeare. DVD. Image Entertainment, 2000.

Silence, as we all know too well, is the perfectest herald of joy (at least according to Claudio in Act II, scene i of Much Ado About Nothing). So I thought that the week of silents at Bardfilm could continue—at least for the present. Besides, we haven't yet gotten to some of the lengthier comedies!

For example, here's a version of Twelfth Night. At five minutes and twenty-five seconds, it's shorter than the original, which runs about a minute per night of the play (i.e., twelve minutes), but it contains all the essentials, including a shipwreck (note the lovely wrecked ship in the background when Sebastian is saved), a falsified letter to Marvolio, and marriages for (almost) everybody!

Due to circumstances beyond our control, this clip is temporarily (or permanently) unavailable.

Thank you for your understanding.

—The Management

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest