Category: Shakespeare Plays

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?

Browse the entire text of Shakespeare’s plays right here on Shakespeare Geek.

Review : Heuristic Shakespeare with Sir Ian McKellen

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

This review is all kinds of late, given that the app was released back in April for Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. But an app this complex takes time to review properly, and.I wanted to do it justice. I really, really wanted to like this app. I just don’t, and it makes me sad.

I’ve imagined an app like Heuristic Shakespeare forever. A true multimedia creation that allows you to explore Shakespeare’s work in the way that works for you. Do you want to read, or watch video? Do you want it paraphrased and explained to you, or do you want the original text? How about both? How about actors like Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen reading the text to you? I think that alone is part of the genius of this app. They’re not acting it, this is not a performance. They’re reading it like an audio book – but, this being an iPad, there’s still video. So it’s like the greatest Shakespeare talent of our generation is your own personal tutor, reading alongside you.

The problem that there is just oh so much packed into the app, that the interface is a mess. Half the time I find myself just pressing random buttons, never sure what comes up next. Sometimes I’ve got the text, sometimes I’ve got a character map telling me (with little thumbnail faces) which characters appear in which scenes. Oh, wait, now it’s a modern English translation. Hold on, now I’ve got essays and videos *about* the play.

I love that all of this stuff is in there. Imagine it, you’re on a particular scene you’ve always liked. First you have Sir Ian reading it to you. All the hard words are highlighted and footnoted so you an always pause and make sure you understand what’s being said. Do you understand what’s happening in the scene? Flip to the modern translation and get a quick refresher. How has this scene been performed? Click somewhere else and you get a historic list of famous performances, complete with images. If you’re into the academic side (maybe you’re doing your homework), there’s also a mode where you can learn all about character development and themes and all that fun stuff your teacher requires that sucks the life out of just sitting back and enjoying the show 🙂

I have a perfect example of my frustration. I’ve mentioned several times that our greatest Shakespeareans can read the text along with you, in video, right? I lost that. I cannot find it, and I want it. I can get audio, but my video has disappeared. I don’t know if it’s a bug in the app where it’s legitimately no longer showing me an option that it’s supposed to, or if I’m doing something wrong, or what. And I think my regular readers probably know that I’m not exactly a newbie at this stuff. If I can’t figure it out, something’s wrong.

[UPDATE – I found it!  The videos only appear when the app is in portrait mode.  I was reading in landscape.  Very happy to have found my videos again.  Of course, my iPad is in a keyboard case so it’s much more convenient to keep it in landscape but I guess I’ll live.]


This app needs to exist. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to the ideal Shakespeare browser. If I recall it’s on the expensive side for a mobile app — did they want $5.99 for it? But if you told me that’s the “player” price and that I can add content for additional plays at a lower amount, it’s a no brainer.I just hope that they rethink large parts of the interface. I don’t know how, exactly, but it needs something. This is an app that even has a built in “What level of detail would you like?” feature so that it can be enjoyed by amateurs and scholars alike, so you’d think that a great amount of effort went into the design of the interface. Unfortunately I think it all went into trying to cram in as many trees as possible, and they lost track of the forest.

 

We Are The Music Makers, and We Are The Dreamers of Dreams

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

You’ve likely heard by now that Gene Wilder has passed away. He was 83.  As has become tradition here on the blog, we like to look back at those icons of stage and screen who made life better with the help of Shakespeare.

Mr. Wilder’s most famous role must surely be that of the original, the one and only Willy Wonka.  Here’s our good friend @Bardfilm’s video take on all the Shakespeare references in this masterpiece from our childhood:

Did you know that Wilder’s first performance in front of a paying audience was in a production of Romeo and Juliet when he was 15?  He played Balthasar.  (That’s ok, I didn’t know that either until I read his wikipedia page :))

But wait! There’s more.  Gene Wilder was actually born Jerome Silberman. Where and why did he get Gene Wilder?  “Jerry Silberman as Macbeth didn’t have the right ring to it,” he thought when he joined the Actor’s Studio, choosing Wilder from Thornton Wilder and Gene from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. He later said that he couldn’t imagine Gene Wilder playing Macbeth either :).  Our loss – I can’t find any record of him ever trying.

Though it has nothing to do with Shakespeare, I love the trivia that Gene Wilder basically rewrote the part that made him famous, Willy Wonka, including such specifics as the entrance where his cane sticks in the cobblestones and he does his little somersault entrance. He also entirely redesigned the costume.  So shines a good deed in a weary world…

Those who know a little more about Wilder’s personal story know that he never fully got over the death of his wife Gilda Radner from ovarian cancer.  At last they’re reunited.

Good night, sweet prince. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Review : A Midsummer Night’s Choice by Choice of Games, LLC

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Everybody remembers “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, right?  Always told in the second person, you read a few pages, then it said “If you choose to open the door, turn to page 74. If you choose to jump out the window, turn to page 123.”  I loved these things as a kid. Not only would I read through all the different combinations (and really, there weren’t that many as no matter what you picked you eventually ended back up in the same spot), I’d hack them backwards by opening to random pages and then trying to figure out what decisions I would have had to make in the story to get to that page.

It  was an easy jump for these stories to make it to the digital medium, and Shakespeare’s always a great source.  Back in 2012, Ryan North pulled off an ultra-successful Kickstarter with To Be or Not To Be : That is the Adventure.  Truthfully I think I’ve got that one kicking around someplace, I’m pretty sure I’ve never reviewed it and I probably should.

But! This is not about that. This post is about an entire company dedicated to the medium called Choice of Games, and their latest offering, A Midsummer Night’s Choice (or, Frolic in the Forest). These folks have actually got a content management system designed for creating these kinds of stories, and their library (user generated as well as their own stuff) is gigantic – I lost count at 50+ titles.

What I find cool, as a programmer, is that these “books” are really small interactive apps that can be read as part of the web site, but also treated like apps for your mobile device.  This is a game changer, because now you can bring things like variables and character attributes into it, and make all of the choices that much more complex.  In other words, whether or not the king has you executed for speaking your mind in chapter 7 is going to be directly related to whether the king is 90% angry with you, or only 10%, based on your previous choices in the story.  (That example is totally made up.) In the iPad version (the one that I played), you see all the key status bars while you’re reading the story, and several times I’d make a decision, watch one of them go in the wrong direction, then silently curse that I’d made the wrong move.  What’s also cool is that there doesn’t appear to be a back button, so no cheating – you play the hand you’re dealt.

The story itself, an original concept by professor Kreg Segall, consists of over 190,000 words that tell a mashed-up novelization of a number of Shakespeare stories.  To quote from the site:

When your father, the Duke, tries to force you to marry, you’ll leave civilization behind as you flee in disguise, cross-dressed, into the enchanted forest. Mistaken identities, inexplicable bears, and tiny but fearsome fairies await! (Seriously, they wear little walnut shells for helmets, and ride armored baby bunnies into battle.)

Will you fall into the mysterious Faerie Queene’s clutches? Will you (or your identical doppelganger) find true love? Or will your father’s spies find you first?

I haven’t finished it yet – the thing is *huge* – but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would. It doesn’t play like an old fashioned text adventure game that’s light on story and description and really just wants to walk you through the action. It also doesn’t feel like one of those old fashioned ones I read as a kid that comes across like a 50 piece jigsaw puzzle, where you may think that your 10 choices result in 1000 different paths through the story, but really they all converge (typically in an awkward an unbelievable manner) down to a dozen endings.   As I work my way through this one I honestly can’t tell how I’m affecting the story because it just continues to flow smoothly as if my decision was the one the author had in mind all along.

One of the absolute best things, to me, is that for the most part the decisions are not of the “turn left or right” variety, but get at more of the character psychology, instead asking questions like, “You realize that your friend is looking at you like he wants to be more than friends, how do you feel about that?” and then you’ll have choices like, “I’d be open to exploring that relationship,” or “Absolutely not.” If this engine is complex enough to factor in evolving character relationships and still work through the plot in a believable manner, I’ll be quite impressed.

As I mentioned, the various status bars are a neat touch – but I’m not fully sure what to do with all of them.  I have a charisma score of 23%, ok, now what? Is that good or bad? How is that changing the story?  Which of my decisions is changing that?  One UI feature I’d like to see is that when something you do changes a status bar, it should flash to let you know that.  Since I couldn’t figure out how my choices were changing those, I basically started to ignore them.

However, some of them detail your relationship with the other characters, and those are interesting and easy to follow.  The story starts and your father is angry with you.  Depending on your decisions you can make it better or worse.  I made it worse :).

I’m very impressed, a bit surprised that I hadn’t heard of these folks before, and hopeful that they’re doing well for themselves.  Wired magazine isn’t writing up efforts like these that just continue to plug along at their craft, churning out a good quality product on a regular basis.  It’s hard to even describe it well enough to market it. Is it a book, or an app? Is it a game?  Educational? Sure, it’s all of those things.

There’s a few UI things that I’d change.  As noted, I think the status bars should flash or something. I think there should be a back button so I can return to previous parts of the story to see how my decision would change things (although, full disclaimer, I know that I’d use this to reverse engineer how all my options stack up against the changing status bars and then optimize my path :)).  Although the text of the story is put on the right half of a landscape-mode iPad, it still uses vertical scroll, which meant that sometimes (often) I’d have to scroll just a tiny bit to get to the Next button.  That was a little annoying and disrupted the “page flipping” flow.  In fact, knowing that iPad offers a “page flip” layout, I’m wondering if that wouldn’t be better than the vertical scrolling.

How’s the story? It’s compelling enough.  It’s got plenty of Shakespeare elements, and is self-referential enough to have fun with it. It’s only a matter of time before you’re cross dressing and lost in the forest, for example.

What I wasn’t thrilled with was how much it tries to force a love story.  The site claims that you can play as gay, straight or bi — which basically means answering questions about what gender you want to play as, what gender your friends are, and how you feel about them.  I made it pretty clear that I was interested in playing it “straight” :), but found myself having to answer questions repeatedly about whether I wanted to do anything to encourage this other guy’s advances.  If you want to play the game that way I suppose go ahead (note – I did clarify with the publisher that this is not erotica and there are no choices that will get you sex scenes), I just wasn’t interested in that. I was here for the Shakespeare.

I’m going to keep playing through to the end, because I’m genuinely interested to see how much Shakespeare they’ve thrown into the soup, and how the story works out.

You can try the game for free, so take it for a spin and see what you think!

What is Hamilton’s Tragic Flaw?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

You don’t need to have seen the megahit musical Hamilton to have at least a pretty good idea of the plot.  The soundtrack is practically the script.  Plus, nobody can stop talking and writing about it from every conceivable angle.  I suppose if you don’t count yourself familiar with the play, this post has some spoilers, so be warned.

I’ve been wondering about how it stands up as a tragedy.  We know from the very beginning “See this guy, our hero?  Yeah, he dies.”  Just like Romeo and Juliet.  I don’t mean that like, “We’re all supposed to know the real story, like Julius Caesar,” I mean, “He says it right in the prologue, like Romeo and Juliet.”  In the opening number, Aaron Burr says “I’m the damned fool that shot him.”

So if we’re going to treat it like a tragedy, the next question is what Hamilton’s tragic flaw might be?  I think we could discuss this all day.  His honesty? His failure to play the political games (something that, from the beginning, people more experienced have warned will get him killed)?  His workaholism? (Is that a word?)  His fear that he was going to “run out of time”?

If I dust off my high school memories of A.C. Bradley, isn’t there something about the tragic flaw directly leading to a decision that sets events in motion that ultimately lead to the death of the tragic hero?

Can we pinpoint the event in Hamilton?  I wonder if it’s his decision to go off with Maria Reynolds (which sets about the Reynolds Pamphlet, his marriage troubles, his son’s demise, etc…) but (a) I’m not sure what “tragic flaw” of his led to that decision, and (b) I’m not sure what it has to do with Aaron Burr.

Working backwards, I think Burr is ultimately pushed over the edge by Hamilton’s endorsement of Jefferson, a man who he acknowledges he’s in complete disagreement with politically.  So then is he more of a reverse Brutus character?  Focused solely on what’s right for the people and the big picture, and missing the machinations of those forces surrounding him? Rather than “I generally like you but I’ve become convinced you’re bad for the people so you’ve got to go” we’ve got “I don’t particularly like you but I think you’d be a better choice than the other guy”?

Mostly I just wanted something to talk about, and Hamilton’s more interesting than Pokemon Go :).  If you’ve got any other Shakespeare comparisons you want to make, feel free in the comments!

Review : Commonwealth Shakespeare’s King Lear on Boston Common 2015 (Part 1)

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I once drove several hours to see a production of King Lear. It wasn’t worth the trip. It might have been before I started this blog because I can’t find where I wrote it down, but the thing I remember the most was the big moment, the storm on the heath, and Lear … bargaining with the storm.  Timid.  Instead of “Come at me, give me everything you’ve got” I got a Lear that was more “I never did anything to you, please don’t hurt me.”

This weekend I saw Commonwealth Shakespeare’s production of King Lear on Boston Common. This is their 20th year, and I’ve been to 12 of them.  This is, without doubt, the greatest thing I’ve seen them do.  (To be fair, we’re talking about Lear here.  Shakespeare’s masterpiece. It’s not like a Comedy of Errors or a Two Gents, no matter how good, is even going to be in the same conversation.)

The staging is interesting this year, showing just a backdrop of curtains (arrases?) that leave enough space for random exits and entrances, if that’s what they’re planning.  I think this is oddly basic, but I like it. In the past there’s almost always been two levels to the stage, as well as a great deal of scenery (such as a crashed airplane for As You Like It, or neon signs for Two Gentlemen of Verona).

The play starts with an interpretive dance between Lear and his daughters.  Right away I’m struck by something I did not expect — I cannot tell which daughter is which. I am fully expecting Cordelia to stand out from her sisters like black and white, but as they start I realize that any of them could be Cordelia. Soon the dance splits, however, and Lear clearly spends more enjoyable time with one of the girls while the other two plot and scheme to work together. They have a scarf that they are dancing with, and use it to get between Lear and Cordelia, dragging him away from her, wrapping him up, and so on.  Then it gets crazy dark as they pull the scarf up over his eyes and a mob comes out to torment him, before finally dragging him offstage.  Wow.

I can’t begin to describe the play in detail, because my post will be longer than the script. Instead, let’s talk about characters.

Fool.  When I first tried to read and understand King Lear, I didn’t really get the Fool.  Were his jokes supposed to be funny? Or profound? Does he love the king, or mock him? Or rather, since the answer is obviously “both”, is the line between the two? He clearly tries to show him, repeatedly, the folly of giving away his kingdom.  But to what end? It’s too late to do anything about it. If he’s just taunting the poor man, that’s hardly what I’d call love.

I liked this Fool a lot. From the minute he dances in and jumps up on the table, I knew I liked him. The way he just keeps hammering Lear over the head with variations of “Who’s the bigger idiot? I’m not the one who gave away my kingdom” despite Lear’s half-hearted warnings for him to stop really made me appreciate the scene more than I ever had. What exactly is that relationship? Is Lear even listening to what he’s saying? When he says “Careful sirrah, the whip” (or whatever the line is), it’s not delivered like an actual threat, more like a joke between them, like never in a million years would that be a possibility.

As the play progresses he has less and less to do, until he literally just stops showing up. Unlike some productions, there is no death for the Fool added in.  He just stops appearing. But two scenes really make his presence felt.  First when they come upon Kent in the stocks. Kent asks him why Lear is going around with so few followers, and we learn that his 100 knights, that magical number that is so important to him to retain his pride, have been deserting him.  All except poor Fool, who will be faithful quite literally for the rest of their lives.

The second is the storm.  Oh, the storm.  Massive wind machines appear, the dry ice / smoke starts to swirl, and here comes the rain.  It is a full on tempest right there on stage. We can feel ourselves getting colder in our seats.  Act 3, Scene 1, the storm is in full swing as a minor character forces his way on stage against the wind.  Kent, from above in a scaffolding, calls down to him – yells, to be heard over the storm, “WHERE IS THE KING?” Then, when told that he is out in the storm, “BUT WHO IS WITH HIM?” and we learn that dear Fool is the only one left to follow him.

I tell you, it’s the scenes like those that are the ones that get me all misty (and not just because of the dry ice machine!).  Kent is no fool, in a number of meanings of the word. He’s not stupid. He’s disguised himself and gotten into Lear’s ranks so that he can continue on his one mission – protect the king. All the smart characters are taking shelter from the storm. Not Kent.  Kent’s about to run right out into the middle of it. How could he do any different?

So let’s talk about Kent.  I didn’t really get him at first because in the opening scene he’s wearing glasses and a fake beard that may have interfered with his ability to deliver his lines. Or maybe it’s just that he was putting on an accent early, so that he could spent the rest of the play without it. Either way, I didn’t fully understand much of his delivery, but he certainly got his point across. He was right up in Lear’s face, letting him know exactly how stupid he was being. When Lear draws a sword and threatens to cut Kent down, Kent doesn’t back down in the slightest – instead he bares his neck and points at it, calling Lear’s bluff.

What was wonderful about his performance, though, was that in Lear’s presence he was often left having no idea what to do.  He had a plan – be near the king. Check. But when the king will not come out of the storm, how can Kent force him? When Lear ultimately carries in Cordelia’s dead body and will not let her go, what is Kent to do? Often he is left doing what appears to be cowering, stuck in this “Should I go to him? But what would I do once I got there? I have no idea what to do next” limbo that, once I recognized it, fit his character perfectly. When it comes to his final line, though, there is no hesitation in his voice. He is not merely calm and resolute in his response to Albany, he is … I’m trying to find the word. At peace? He knows exactly what comes next, and the way he delivers his last line is almost pitying, like, “Oh you silly man, don’t you see what happens next? I follow my master.”   (Reminds me of the Lord of the Rings line,  “Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo!” If it had been Kent mourning over Lear’s body, this is exactly what he would have said. And you know what? If Fool was on stage at the same time I bet he would have said the same thing.)

I’m going to have to split this post into parts because it’s getting too long.  Before we go let’s talk about Edmund.

When we talk about villains sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in seeing them as the star of the show.  Consider Iago, after all. Othello is practically The Iago Show. He is so charismatic in everything he does and says that half the time the audience is left waiting impatiently for when he’ll come back.

You can kind of imagine Edmund like this. He goes from Gloucester’s bastard son to the romantic interest of both Goneril and Regan, so he’s got something going for him. He manipulates everyone around him.

But the play is not about him.  This is Lear’s play.  Edmund is what Edmund’s supposed to be – a bastard, in multiple senses of the word. His own father gives him a note detailing the enemy’s plans and says, “Whatever you do, don’t show this to Cornwall.” So of course he runs to Cornwall and says “Look what I have!’  Bastard. I didn’t spend any time at all admiring the personality that Edmund manages to convey.  There are none of those “Ooooo, that’s so evil it’s just brilliant” moments you get with Iago.  You just spend all your time with Edmund thinking, “I hope that son of a b*tch gets what’s coming to him.” Perfect.

Wait, before I go!  Goneril.  Oh dear god in heaven did I want to see her die on stage. She played her role so perfectly that, had I come with rotten tomatoes, they would have been flying in her direction. Which is exactly how it was supposed to be. Even just standing there she could put an expression on her face that made you want to wipe it off with a length of barbed wire.  Great job.

Ok, to be continued.  Otherwise I’m never going to get this posted!