Charlie Rose

JoeEarls  03/16/2012 08:51 AM Report

Law's enthusiam and articulate approach had my wife buy tickets to his NY show. Production okay, actors weak, Law really, really terrific.

sheryl  10/14/2009 07:37 PM Report

This is the 5th interview I've seen Charlie do with Jude, and it's by far my favorite (and I've enjoyed all of them). The commitment and intelligence he demonstrated in his preparation for the role as well as his ongoing excitement in doing it is impressive. This was definitely not a case of vain use of celebrity to sell tickets, despite the attitudes of the London critics before Jude ever set foot on stage last May. This is a man who is most committed to his craft and takes nothing about it for granted. My friends and I made the trip last week to see the play, and I was able to watch this interview twice before going and am glad I did. I had lunch with another friend today to update her on how our trip went, and she told me that she had also watched the interview and was very impressed by Jude's intelligence and passion. Thanks, Charlie, for another good interview. You are a class act.

pungalo  10/07/2009 04:44 AM Report

i did not expect to like this interview but could not stop watching once it started. never seen hamlet, but jude law's enthusiasm and ways of describing things and charlie's obvious joy in the conversation are so positive and fun and intellectual. well done

robdverity  10/05/2009 09:13 PM Report

Grammar police check: Intelligence and enthusiasm are always fun to watch.

robdverity  10/05/2009 08:00 PM Report

Whew, REMant I'm impressed with your pedagogic, pedantism. Got out my Shakespeare to try (again) to read Hamlet. And failed yet again. My Elizabethan(?) decoder is (still) broken.

My enjoyment is once or a thousand times removed (filtered) through the enthusiasm of the likes of Jude Law. Intelligence and enthusiasm is always fun to watch.

REMant  10/05/2009 01:13 PM Report

I first saw Hamlet in the Burton film version, and it may have also been the last, because I'm afraid I've always thought of it as a yawner. It was, however popular with the public, tho its critics at the time claimed that it was a lower-class play, and that has something, I think, to do with Bloom's observation and the drift of this conversation, yet there may be more to it than meets the eye, for a contemporary noted that "the wiser sort enjoyed it." Despite all that has been said on the subject, I think you have to view Shakespeare in the context of a classicism where philosophy, character, emotion, effect and voice are not separated or at odds, and a moral is intended, and Montaigne's rather Stoic ethics and "protestantism" would fall in line with this emphasis. It is only relatively recently that morality has not been viewed as the central element in dramatics. Freud may, ironically in view of his Sophoclean borrowing, have had something to do with that.

It is fun tho to conjecture if there were any ulterior motives or veiled references in the plays, particularly now that we have a good idea of who he was and who his friends were, not that there wasn't plenty of material around to draw on. It may be, rather obviously, a commentary on events surrounding the life of James I, subject of many intrigues, which, if true, should interest historians. The bookish James, who acceded to the English throne in 1603, with the assistance of his friend Robert Cecil, was apparently on friendly terms with Shakespeare's "beloved" Southampton, and the king's wife, Anne of Denmark (Protestant, but opposed by Elizabeth), whose father enlarged the castle at Elsinore, was a theater buff. Shakespeare, who was chided for his pretensions, and his company were not only absolved, like Southampton, of involvement in the Essex affair, but also were elevated to "Grooms of the Chamber," and henceforth known as "The King's Men." Hamlet wore the royal imprimatur when it was published a year later.

Altho the Bard avoided direct political references after Essex's attempted coup against Elizabeth, (he wrote Othello, Macbeth and King Lear at this time), this play may well have been aimed at her and her ministers. When he was very young, James's father, Lord Darnley, had been murdered, apparently at his mother Mary, Queen of Scot's behest, allegedly because of his Protestant ties, and Mary either took up with, or was coerced by, the man many believed to have done the job, so, perhaps, the motive for revenge, and Hamlet's indecisiveness. (As it happened, that man, the Earl of Bothwell, was later taken captive by Frederick II of Denmark, Anne's father, who chained him to a pillar where he remained for a decade until he died.) But James was never much of a Protestant, despite his interest in the English crown, nor, it seems, very heterosexual. It has been suggested, as well, that Essex's rivals, William Cecil (Elizabeth's minister, who had Mary executed) and son, Robert (who became James's spymaster) were the models for Polonious and, his son, Laertes, tho in the context of trying to prove that daughter Anne Cecil's husband, the Earl of Oxford, authored the plays, which no longer seems creditable.