Poetry as drama

[french frank]

Any suggestions for full-length/long form poems that might be suitable for Drama on 3? In the past Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, David Jones's In Parenthesis, Tennyson's Enoch Arden have been quite successful (and I didn't think Manfred was that bad :-/). Did they once do George Crabbe's The Borough with the Peter Grimes story?

Anyway, if anyone can think of anything please suggest it here.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Weren't Paradise Lost, Lamia and (albeit "in translation") the Aeneid and Beowulf serialised in the past, too? I wouldn't mind The Faerie Queene done in this way.

[agingjb]

Supposing a Radio 3 drama to be about an hour, how many lines of verse is that?

Anyway: looking through anthologies of longer poems:

Sohrab and Rustum, Arnold
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
The Rape of the Lock, Pope
The Mary Gloster and McAndrew's Hymn; Kipling

[vinteuil]

.

Samson Agonistes - but I feel it's already been done.

I think Don Juan could be spiffing....

[Flay]

Tam O'Shanter would dramatise well. Perhaps for Halloween?

[DracoM]

Beowulf
But above all:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

(And I wouldn't mind a dramatisation of Y Gododdin, for that matter.)

[Richard Barrett]

Goethe's Faust of course.

[agingjb]

I suppose dramatisation, rather than reading, requires that the poem has a narrative voice (perhaps several). That voice can be the poet or a fictional persona.

Of my suggestions, the Kipling and Coleridge are all or mostly first person narratives. Anyway, if the form is the dramatic monologue in verse, then perhaps Browning, who wrote several.

[aeolium]

Eugene Onegin.
The Nibelungenlied.

(both would have to be pretty severely edited to fit in a Do3 slot)

[Padraig]

Anyway, if the form is the dramatic monologue in verse, then perhaps Browning, who wrote several.

This was my own feeling but I was hesitant to suggest it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

How about The Canterbury Tales - one a week with a central cast, each of whom gets to tell a different story (adding suitable "rhubarbs" in the various Prologues)?

[Padraig]

I would also suggest two poems from Ireland, one from medieval literature and the other from the mid 18th century:

Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney, a version of Buile Suibhne, anon.

The Midnight Court, Brian Merriman, trans various.

[french frank]

Gosh, thanks for those. Last time I looked there hadn't been any replies. Several suggestions that I had thought of, but length is probably quite crucial - and, judging from previous Do3s, things that lend themselves to different voices + narrator.

[DracoM]

Sir GGK is in Fits, so different composers / music directors could be invited to supply either new pieces, or use echt 14th century music?
Locations vary from posh castles to the truly wild, wild places, encounters with giants, knights, servants, ladies. It's a fantastic resource, and could be / should be used to celebrate Christmas. So it could be played over four nights over the appropriate season, and then as a one night repeat of the whole thing. Narrative, dialogue, terrific sfx, crowd scenes and soliloquy / inner reflection, wooing, terror, self-doubt and best of all, fantastic gentle but salutary joke at Gawain's expense at the very end.