Shakespeare Meme

Day #12: Your favorite scene

I give up. I have honestly tried, and spent the week thinking but I can't even narrow it down to my favourite scene in any given play.

Matters are not helped by the way it tends to vary with version, because there's scenes where I love it in the way they're done in one adaptation and hate in others (Hamlet's death in the Mel Gibson/Zefferelli version springs to mind).

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I see LJ have changed the graphic you see if someone makes an LJ cut. I think I like it even if I don't understand why they've done it.

Shakespeare Meme - Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene

I shall have to go with the obvious, which is the bit in Act 1, Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet where it's all

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

Romeo: Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg'd.

Kisses her.

Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg'd!
Give me my sin again.

And so on, it's the most ridiculously over-the-top thing ever, and perfectly fitting the characters. Teenagers, never change.

I've gone with this because I've been told promising to kill your best friend is not a romantic gesture (also, it reflects badly on Benedick that Claudio is his best friend), and most of Viola's pronouncements don't work written down. The bit at the end of Hamlet, Act five scene 2, from 'I am dead, Horatio' to 'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest', breaks me every time, but how romantic it is varies with version. Macbeth's act five, scene five soliloquy is heartbreaking, and Lady Macbeth's death is the point where Macbeth dies, the rest of it is just his body catching up with him. I might not like chunks of the rest of it, but the Peter Hall/ Ian McKellen Macbeth is my favourite version of this scene.

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