Customer Reviews

The Plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. 5 - The Merry Wives of Windsor

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This video was so bad that I could barely watch it. And the fact that I had paid over $..... for it made me even madder. Shakespeare is abused in this video! The acting is terrible. Probably the worst I have ever seen. I am a high school drama teacher, and I have 14 and 15 year olds who can act better than these so-called professional actors! The direction was horrible, too. They say that this was probably how Shakespeare was actually played in the 16th Century. Bull! If any acting company ever played him like this, they would have been out of business really soon. I feel sorry for people who watch this and think that this is what Shakespeare is about. Don't buy this video!

I was extrememly dissatisfied with the quality of the product, 'The Plays of William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor' on DVD . Despite the claim that this series is 'Shakespearian Drama of the Highest Quality", this DVD is an amateurish home video-translated production. The audio was unitelligible, large parts of the play were out of focus and the digital navigation was impossible to use. While none of this is the fault of Amazon, the end result is a little like selling a book with several chapters missing. I wouldn't give this product to a high school, let alone sell it for [price] to a good customer. I asked for my money back, and strongly recommended Amazon reevaluate its relationship with this company, Kultur.

While it's not Olivier starring in this very accessible production, the acting is certainly better than adequate. Use of American actors makes Shakespeare a great deal easier to understand for US students, and the recreation of the original Globe sets adds authenticity. Kultur is to be congratulated for providing this DVD at a reasonable price when the school market isn't exactly welcoming the new format with open arms; one is certainly spared an infinite amount of winding backwards and forwards by the scene search function.

Rarely have I encountered a commercial DVD of such poor quality. The video transfer is appalling. Like so many Kultur offerings, this DVD was produced from older sources without the slightest regard for the quality of the original or of the reproduction.

Even if this DVD was free, it would not be worth your time.

This play is acted as badly as I spell!
I could see that when done well the result might be of some humor,
but much of that is lost in bad delivery and relatively poor staging.
The sound quality and picture quality is equally ugly.
Several of the player are better than the overall quality,
but dragged down by the
production as a whole.
A quarter of the way through I almost gave up watching as
it hurt me to see the good lines so undone!
It may be a good thing this is Shakespeare's only prose play,
because such misuse of a play is a crime of the stage.