Category: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, endures due to its timeless themes of love, magic, and transformation, as well as its universal appeal to audiences of all ages and cultures. The play’s cleverly woven plot, richly drawn characters, and poetic language continue to captivate audiences and inspire countless adaptations, interpretations, and productions around the world. Additionally, the play’s exploration of the power of imagination and the blurred lines between reality and fantasy resonates with audiences, making it a beloved classic that continues to be celebrated and enjoyed over 400 years after its creation.

Browse the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream entire play here!

Top Shakespeare Costumes for Halloween

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

Ok, ok, I want to play too. Over the last week or so I’ve seen lists for tv shows, family movies, horror movies – everything to get you in the Halloween mood. But what about our little corner of the world? Doesn’t Shakespeare have anything to get us into the Halloween Spirit? Here’s my contribution:

Twelfth Night

You’re a girl? Dress up like a boy. You’re a boy? Dress up like a girl dressing up like a boy. Twelfth Night’s main character spends the whole play in costume. We discovered, a few months back, that she’s not even called by her real name until the very end of the play!

Julius Caesar

Why just be any ghost, when you can be Great Caesar’s Ghost(*)? Don’t skimp on the knife wounds, or the blood. Lots and lots of blood. Or if you really want to wear a toga and don’t want to get blood all over it, dip your arms in the red stuff up to your elbows, then go as Brutus.

(*) Bonus points if you can actually convince somebody to dress up like J Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman movies, and then spend the night pointing at you and shouting that.

Hamlet

I knew Hamlet would make a good costume when my 4yr old spotted the idea on one of his cartoon shows. After random channel flipping he comes running into my office to tell me “Daddy, somebody on tv is dressed like Shakespeare!” Along comes the 6 and 8yr olds to tell me “Well, not Shakespeare – he’s dressed like Hamlet. He’s holding a skull and talking to it.”

Of course you could also go with Ophelia, although taking a quick jump in the pool before going out trick or treating might cause you to catch your death (ha!). Then again why not go as Hamlet’s father’s ghost? I’ll leave it up to reader imagination to depict how exactly you’d walk around wearing your beaver up.

Or you could do like I did, and go as Yorick.

The Tempest

A witch (although, granted, she doesn’t really make much of an appearance), a wizard, a sea monster, an airy spirit. Plenty of opportunity here to take a traditional Halloween costume and really run with it. If you want to get really creative, grab a partner and dress up as Stefano and Trinculo. I always described them as pirates to my kids, although “court jester” is probably more accurate.

Titus Andronicus

How can you not have fun dressing up like Titus? Put on a chef’s hat and bloody apron, carry a cleaver and a big stew pot. Throw a prop head in it, maybe a prop hand while you’re at it. Shakespeare’s goriest tragedy is often compared to a modern slasher movie, so why not just go completely over the top with it? Bring along your daughter. Don’t let her talk.

Macbeth

Ghosts make plenty of appearances in Shakespeare’s work, The Tempest and Midsummer are both loaded with magical goings on … but really, is there any play scarier than Macbeth? Dress up like a weird sister, dress up like Banquo’s ghost. Or maybe a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, covered in blood? For the really inside reference, go as Macduff – carry around Macbeth’s head.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Fairies are timeless, in more ways than one. If you need a couple’s idea, why not Titania and Oberon? I love the idea of an entire family dressing up as Midsummer, with the kids playing the roles of Cobweb, Mustardseed and the others. Or go in a completely different direction and make an ass of yourself, literally.

Have I forgotten any? You can always throw on your monk’s outfit and go as Friar Laurence (carry around a pickaxe, crowbar or some other tomb-opening implement for extra credit), or really grab any random “Elizabethan” or “Renaissance” costume from the local store and say that you’re the lead in As You Like It, Much Ado, or any of the other romantic comedies.

What else? Who’s got the creative ideas?

Shakespeare Geek’s Top 10 Shakespeare Plays

~ duane ~ 10 Comments

Over the years I’ve seen many Shakespeare lists.  Instead of linking to yet another one I thought it would be fun to combine several and come up with my own, the Shakespeare Geek Top 10.  This is not my opinion, this is the mathematical analysis (according to my own algorithm :)) from a variety of places, some here and some elsewhere, that people have voted on a general “top 10” for Shakespeare’s plays.

How you define “best” is up to you and I fully expect that people use different scales all the time.  That’s why I’m looking at it statistically – if most people pick Dream as the best play, then does it really matter why they think they picked it?

Ready?

#10. The Tempest.   Maybe it’s the fascination with “Shakespeare’s last play”, maybe the fairy tale, happy ending nature of the story (I know it’s the latter that gets my vote), but I’m happy to see one of my favorites just make the top 10.
#9. Julius Caesar.  I appreciate that this is one of the great tragedies that most of us will read in high school, but I was surprised at the showing it made.  I don’t understand.  If the Twilight lady announced that she was filming a new version of Julius Caesar I’d bet you can hear the crickets chirp.

#8. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I know there are folks out there who will put Dream up against Hamlet as one of the best, and I have to concur.  I’ve ranted at times that I get sick of seeing it, but really, as I called it the other week after seeing a production, it’s “pretty near perfect on the page.”

#7. Richard III.  I’m not familiar enough with this one to have cast a vote on it.  Tell me why you love it?  Just the evilness of the title character, or something more?

#6. Henry V.  Do we all love it because of the Crispin’s Day speech and the Muse of Fire, or is there more to it?

#5. Romeo and Juliet.  Now we get into some of the more obvious ones, will there be any surprises in the top 5? Does Romeo and Juliet deserve a spot this high or is it just because we’re all so familiar with this high school favorite?

#4. Othello.  I’ve seen many people speak of Othello as one of the great underrated tragedies, and I have to agree.  When you really take the time to dig into it, it’s far better than the more shallow analysis might suggest.

#3. Macbeth. Glad to see the Scottish play fare so well, it’s one of my top choices.

…and the big question *still* not answered:

#1 King Lear and Hamlet
We have a statistical tie for the #1 spot with Hamlet and King Lear both getting the exact same score!  (That just means I need more data, hint hint hint.)

Disclaimer : Only 7 of my top 10 made the final list, so I’m not skewing the results to my own personal choices.

I can’t say there are many surprises.  If I pulled it out to a top 15 we’d start to see some of the popular comedies, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night … but at some point I run out of numbers to make a meaningful argument, too.

Disagree?  Make your own top 10 and post it in the comments!  I’d love to keep my statistics up to date and have a true and accurate top 10 list, as defined by the audience of Shakespeare geeks as a whole and not just one person’s personal opinion.  I may have even added you already, if you’ve made a list. Who knows? 🙂

Movie Review : Get Over It

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

(My apologies to whoever pointed me this movie, I’ve forgotten whether it was here on the blog or Twitter or elsewhere.)

Get Over It is, for the most part, your standard high school romantic comedy:  nerdy guy has awesome girl, nerdy guy loses awesome girl to handsome jerk.  Even more awesome girl (Kirsten Dunst) comes along who loves nerdy guy, but he doesn’t see it because he’s too busy trying to win back awesome girl #1.  Blah blah, awesome girl #1 learns what a fool she’s been and wants nerdy guy back, nerdy guy decides that awesome girl #2 is the better choice, happily ever after.

Now, take that plot and drop it on top of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Interesting.  Especially when you have handsome jerk playing Lysander, nerdy guy as Demetrius, original awesome girl as Hermia and new and better awesome girl as Helena.

Now, do it as a musical.  Directed by Martin Short, playing one of those standard “washed-up actor who goes on to direct high school theatre” roles (very similar to the Hamlet 2 thing that just came around last year).  Is it me, or does Kirsten Dunst try to sing in all her movies?  It’s… cute. 

With any movie like this, I typically watch it for the Shakespeare.  While the jokes are pretty standard stuff, there are some funny bits.  When was the last time you caught yourself humming a catchy tune from Macbeth?  Shakespeare may have been a great poet, but he’s no Burt Bacharach!

The ending, truthfully, was a surprise.  I mean, not in the “Nerdy guy gets the right girl” thing. That always happens.  I mean, how it all goes down.  Actually it came down to a single word, which I found possibly the funniest part of the whole movie, but I can’t explain it without ruining the joke. If you collect this sort of stuff you might have missed it when it first came around.  I know I’d never heard of it. 

Moons Of Uranus

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

So a friend asks me today if I know the story of Uranus’ moons.  Of course I know that they are named for Shakespearean characters, but he asks me why that is – why aren’t they named in the more traditional Greek style of the time.

Interesting question! The most I can find from wikiing around goes a little something like this:

In 1851, there were 3 known satellites of Uranus.  Then a fourth was discovered.  Astronomer John Herchel, son of William Herschel (who had discovered the first two), proposed the naming scheme:  Umbriel, Ariel, Oberon, Titania.  Umbriel being the newest one.  It’s unclear whether the other three had names which were then changed, or if they simply hadn’t been named yet (they were discovered as far back as 1787, so it is unlikely that they had no names at all).

Here’s how I think the story goes. But first, a story of my own.

Once upon a time, I started a new job, and they gave me two server computers to set up.  As the computer geeks out there may know, particularly in Unix land, you have to name your servers.  Naturally, I named them Macbeth and Macduff.  Seemed logical since I had the set.  Well, later on, we hired someone to do that job for us who decided that my naming scheme had been “mac- words” and proceeded to go to town, so to speak, creating things like “macaroniandcheese”, “macgruffthecrimedog”, and a few others I can’t remember.

This later became “mc” words, including “mcfly” (Back to the Future), which somebody took and turned into “80’s catchphrases” and named a machine “bueller” for Ferris Bueller, and so on.  Sometimes naming schemes take a funny turn.

Now, back to the story.  Folks may recognize “Umbriel” as a character from Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock.  It is also reminiscent of the Latin umbra-, for shadow.  Umbriel is the darkest of Uranus’ moons.  So I like to think that maybe Herschel was poetically inspired by the darkness and selected Umbriel as a fitting name.

It so happens, and this is where it gets interesting, that there is also a character in Pope named Ariel.  “Aha!” thinks Herschel, “Ariel is also a Shakespearean character!  And you know, there’s lots more Shakespeare characters than Pope characters to choose from.  Maybe I should use Shakespeare instead.”  Thus we got Ariel, Oberon and Titania (the two biggest, by the way, and thus the king and queen).

Almost a century later we got Miranda, and these days there’s something like 27 of them, as noted in the originally linked post.  The only hole in my theory is that he named them all at the same time. If he really wanted to be consistent he could have chucked Umbriel and gone all Shakespeare.

I have no idea how the names really came about, I just like the idea of a guy 150 years ago using the same sort of creativity to name planets that I use to name my computers. Perhaps the geekiest bit of the story is that as late as 1986 somebody named one of the moons Belinda….which is back to the Pope scheme again!  So surely there’s an astronomer out there with a geeky sense of humor just like mine who decided that not only was he not messing with the naming scheme, but he was actually being more true to the original.  I like him.