William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the most influential playwrights in history, and his plays have been performed and studied for centuries. From the timeless tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the hilarious antics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s plays continue to captivate audiences around the world. Whether you’re a fan of tragedy, comedy, or romance, there’s a Shakespeare play for everyone. So why not revisit these timeless classics and discover the magic of Shakespeare for yourself?
The movie will set Shakespeare’s tragedy in contemporary New York and follows a Brooklyn waitress and a musician from wealthy family.
Oh, so, West Side Story. I think it’s crazy difficult to do an “adaptation” of Romeo and Juliet because the expectation scale is so out of whack. Beyond “two people in love who can’t be together,” what exactly are the required elements before we care about this one, and it’s not just another Camp Rock 2 or Gnomeo and Juliet? Does there have to be a Mercutio? A Tybalt? A sleeping potion, a Friar Laurence?
Something that’s often forgotten in modern Romeo and Juliet adaptations is where Shakespeare says, right there in the first line, “Two households, both alike in dignity…” Shakespeare never said “worlds apart” or “from different sides of the tracks” or made them two different religions or races or socio-economic classes (although I’ve heard it argued that the Capulets were much better off than the Montagues). I don’t think modern audiences want to do the extra brain work of keeping track of who is on Romeo’s side and who is on Juliet’s. “Can’t you dress them all a certain way so I can tell by looking at them?”
My younger daughter is studying Romeo and Juliet at the moment. We’ve been over that play so many times over the years that for the first few lessons I learned that she wasn’t even reading the book, she was just going from memory! Unfortunately she had her events out of order and was getting them wrong (Mercutio and Tybalt do not fight in Act I Scene 1…) but that’s not the point of this story.
Driving to school the other day…
Geeklet: “We have a Romeo and Juliet quiz coming up.”
Me: “You going to crush it?”
Geeklet “I think so.”
Me: “Should we study?”
Geeklet: “What kind of nut does Queen Mab ride around on?”
Me: “I have no idea. But we could find out.”
Geeklet: “It’s a chestnut, isn’t it? I think it’s a chestnut.”
I’m driving, so I ask Google assistant to pull up the Queen Mab speech. My oldest is sitting in the front seat so she reads. “See if you can find anything about a nut in there,” I tell her.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
Geeklet: “Oh. I was close.”
Me: “Wait, so, is that actually a question you’d be asked? What kind of nut?”
Geeklet: “Oh she’ll definitely ask that, and if you get it wrong you’d get the whole question marked wrong.”
Me: “That’s stupid. Ask about the point of Queen Mab, or why Mercutio tells us about Queen Mab, or what that tells us about Mercutio’s character. But to get quizzed on that level of detail? That entire speech is nothing but that level of detail! Children, children – please, what kind of *bone* is Queen Mab’s whip made from? Hmm? Anyone? A grasshopper? No, I’m terribly sorry, the answer we were looking for was cricket. Cricket bone. You fail.” Maybe it’s just to prove they read it. Great – prove they read it by translating it into their own words or something. That would show significantly more comprehension, rather than pure word by word memorization.
So instead we turned the rest of the drive into a lesson about why Mercutio is awesome.
Geeklet: “He’s the one that starts the fight with Tybalt, though, right? Because he was defending Romeo.”
Me: “That’s why Mercutio is awesome. He’s a poet *and* he’s a fighter. He’s that guy where, if there’s a party and you weren’t gonna go, then somebody says, “Dude, Mercutio’s gonna be there,” you’d be all, “Oh, sh*t, Mercutio’s going? What are we waiting for!”
Geeklet: “Isn’t he also a drag queen?”
Me: “You’re thinking of the 1996 Romeo+Juliet movie. But they were all going to a *costume* party. Everybody was dressed up. Mercutio just kind of got into the spirit more than some others.”
My kids like Shakespeare because we talk about the characters like they’re real people. If you’re supposed to like them we talk about why, and if you’re not supposed to like them we talk about why, too. I don’t quiz them on perfect recall. Half the time I get my quotes wrong, too.
But most kids who have to study Shakespeare in school don’t have me. Nor do they have a parent who plays the same role. So they’re stuck with whatever’s asked of them in class. And if all that’s ever asked is to memorize, there’s never going to be any appreciation.
(In my daughter’s teacher’s defense, I am not in the class, and I have no idea if my daughter’s description is accurate. My point is still valid, though, because it’s how she sees the class. She *thinks* that is the kind of thing that’s expected of her, and that’s enough to have her spend her time studying the trees rather than appreciating the forest. Perhaps that’s indicative of a larger problem with the default way that students go into classes like this? As far as I know, her teacher never gave any indication that this sort of memorization was expected – my daughter just assumed it.)
Both my two oldest now are studying Shakespeare — Othello for one, Romeo and Juliet for the other — so the content comes so fast and furious it’s hard to keep up. My oldest has to write a paper on Iago, in fact, because they finished the play when I wasn’t looking.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” she says. “I had to look something up about Iago for research … and you came up. That was weird.”
Sure enough, if you Google “Othello’s ancient” here’s what comes up:
The funny thing is that there in the car I said, “It means his right-hand man, right?” Which is exactly what I wrote in 2011. And she said, “No, it means flag bearer,” which is also what I learned in 2011 🙂
Yesterday I wrote about how it’s ok – nay, expected – that you know the ending of a Shakespeare play, but you still go see it again and again, because it’s about how they tell the story to get there. The only caveat to this rule would be those movies where it’s all about “the twist” (an M Night Shyamalan production). I noted that Shakespeare doesn’t really do twists.
But what if he did? I started wondering, which plays could be presented such that you don’t see it coming until the big reveal at the end.
Twelfth Night is an obvious example. What if we leave out Viola at the beginning, and pick it up with Cesario? Then you’ve got a classic romantic comedy where Cesario’s lusting after Orsino, Olivia is lusting after Cesario, Orsino’s lusting after Olivia but kind of really confused about his feelings for Cesario, and so on. Enter this guy Sebastian, who mentions a shipwreck and searching for his lost “sibling” and we think, “Aha! Twins! This will be good!” But then we get to the big finale where we find out Cesario is actually Viola. Cue happy endings and wedding music.
But I think it’s cheating to just do the easy comedy. Could we do it with a tragedy? I was wondering – if we took out all Iago’s soliloquies and behind the scenes machinations, could we make a twist out of it? Basically tell the whole story from Othello’s perspective, rather than Iago’s. He has to deal with his new father in law’s fury. He has to deal with his right-hand man Cassio getting into drunken bar fights. All the while he puts growing faith in loyal Iago, who hates to say this, but who thinks that maybe Cassio might be fooling around with Othello’s wife.
I think this one would be much harder to splice together, but imagine the payoff at the end? Suddenly Emilia comes out of nowhere to unveil that it was her husband all along? Then the husband f%^&*(ng STABS HER?! And then, when they catch him, he’s all, “Yup, not going to explain myself. At all. You get nothing.” That would be legendary.
Now I’m sad that knowing the real ending, I could never get to see how that would actually pay off, even if they made a movie exactly like that tomorrow.
This has more potential than I thought. What other plays could we twist? The only rule is that you can’t add more original content. If Shakespeare didn’t answer the question, we can’t answer it. We can’t, for instance, learn that it was actually Gertrude that killed her husband (or Ophelia). You have to stay as close the original material as possible, just mess with how the audience gets to see it.
A false memory is a psychological phenomenon where a person recalls something that did not happen or differently from the way it happened.
You ever have that thing where you have a very strong memory of something, and other people say, “Yeah, yeah, me too!” Only it turns out that it never happened? And your memory – even though other people claim to have the same memory – is entirely false? That’s called the Mandela Effect.
So I may have mentioned, my daughter is studying Taming of the Shrew. And last night she was working on an assignment where she was supposed to discuss how an all female or all male production might change the interpretation and performance. She was supposed to pick a scene and talk about different ways it could be interpreted in this context.
I said, “Well, let’s think about it. Kate puts on this nasty exterior, but maybe down inside, hidden from everybody, she *wants* to like one of these guys. She *wants* to get married. It’s supposed to be a good, happy thing. So along comes this guy and she turns on the shrew and she gives him everything she’s got, and he stands toe to toe with her and takes it. And maybe she comes away from that meeting thinking, interesting, maybe this guy’s different…”
Here I even dropped in that god awful “If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” quote that floats around social media. “But then she sees Petruchio talking about money with her father, and she’s dejected again, she realizes that they’re all the same, he’s just in it for the money.”
“Wait, that happens?” my daughter asks, grabbing her text.
No, it apparently doesn’t. I checked the text and could not find the scene I’m talking about. I asked my resources and people confirm, no such scene.
So now I’m fascinated by where I got that idea. It’s not like I’ve seen many versions of Shrew. I assumed it must be in the Taylor/Burton movie, because that’s the most well known and the most likely candidate, since I would have seen that one back in high school and formed such a memory. But again, it doesn’t seem to be in there.
It’s a scene easily inserted at the end of Act II, after they’ve met and before Petruchio goes off to arrange the wedding. Doesn’t even need any words. Just show Baptista’s people loading up Petruchio’s horse with a big bag of gold or something, and let Kate see it. But I can’t find video evidence of such a scene. (Kind of reminds me of all the kids who think that there’s a wedding scene in Romeo and Juliet. No, there’s not. There’s a wedding scene in the Romeo+Juliet movie, though.)
h I’ve heard it argued that the Capulets were much better off than the Montagues). I don’t think modern audiences want to do the extra brain work of keeping track of who is on Romeo’s side and who is on Juliet’s. “Can’t you dress them all a certain way so I can tell by looking at them?”
