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 : Shakespeare and Modern Culture

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

When I heard about a book called “Shakespeare And Modern Culture” I thought, “Cool, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I do here – the whole  ‘Shakespeare is everywhere’ thing, video game commercials, Simpsons episodes, etc….” Then I saw it was written by Marjorie Garber, of “Shakespeare After All”, and I thought, “Uh oh.”  I still can’t finish that one (a weakness I expect is my own, and not the author’s).

Turns out I’m right on both fronts.  This is a real book that treats the subject seriously, considering not just examples of Shakespeare in modern culture (though it gives plenty), but looking at how opinions of Shakespeare have evolved over 400 years and how its integration with has changed.  There’s one play per chapter, and while not all of the are covered, the big ones are all there.  This is an excellent way to organize, as it gives the reader a chance to jump to their favorite and see how it’s been handled for the last few centuries.

I started with the Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, then skipped around past Merchant, Henry V (with lots of Obama references!) and Hamlet.  How have attitudes toward The Tempest changed?  Do we as a society identify more with Caliban, or Ariel?  Is it really about slavery and colonization?  Or what about Romeo?  When and why did his name become synonymous not with someone who would die for true love, but more of a lothario, love-em-and-leave-em sort of individual?  Where did the curse of Macbeth come from?  What is it about Henry V that makes those particular speeches so darned quotable?

Far from a simple sampler of Shakespearean performance and critique over the last few centuries, this book keeps it all in perspective of the big picture.  The question is constantly asked, Why?  What is it about Shakespeare’s work that enables us to ask any question, and then find what appears to be evidence to support our case?  Is it even a relevant question any more to ask what Shakespeare intended, or does each generation simply use the work as they need?  How is it possible that everything else in the world has changed over 400 years, and yet we’re still going back to what Shakespeare gave us?

I still contend that Garber’s work is not quite as “approachable” as I’d like, and this time I have a good example.  I once said that I could flip through Shakespeare After All and find a word on any random page that the average reader would have to go look up in a dictionary.  Well, this book did it for me with the word ‘aubade’.  I’d like to think I’m fairly well educated, and I’ve been around for a couple decades now, and never before this book had I seen that word (which turns out to mean “a poem or song about lovers separating at dawn”).  I need a glossary more when Garber talks about Shakespeare than I do with Shakespeare!

In the end, Garber’s premise is fascinating and her research is top notch.  She seems to get genuinely peeved when sources get their history wrong, which I find amusing.  Her biggest problem with Shakespeare In Love is the idea that it was Romeo and Juliet that was Shakespeare’s breakout hit that put him on the map.  And she completely dismisses the idea that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s “farewell” play.  This is an author who clearly takes her subject seriously both because it is her profession, and because she has a true love of the source material.

This book isn’t for everybody.  It’s not a light read.  It’s hard enough to read Hamlet, it’s hard enough to read Joyce’s Ulysses – so where does that put the chapter dedicated to Stephen Daedalus’ interpretation of Hamlet?  It’s confusing just *talking* about it, unless this is the kind of thing you live and breathe.  But for those of us that do live and breathe it (or at least we had more time in the day to do so?)  It’s quite the treasure.

Movie Review : Get Over It

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(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. 

Breakfast With Geeklet

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

The story you’re about to hear is 100% true.

We’re on vacation, up in a hotel in the mountains.  We’re having the breakfast buffet, and as is typical, the kids have placemats and crayons to occupy them.  My oldest, at 6, shows her picture and says, “What do you think, Daddy?”

“Looks like a shoe with windows,” I say.  “Is it the old woman who lives in the shoe?”

“No,” she says, with the head tilt and eye roll that all 6yr olds master on their 6th birthday.  “It’s Miranda on the island.  See, that’s her Daddy next to her, and this is the boat that’s going to crash on the rocks.  She’s calling to them, saying that they’ll be safe on the island.  See the people?”

“….”

She flips the paper back over, colors some more, and flips it back so I can see it. “What’s the name of the monster, again?”

“Caliban?”

“Right, Caliban.  That’s him, there.”  Caliban has been drawn in red, and looks rather devilish. Again the flip, the coloring, the flip again.  Now Ariel is up in the sky, like an angel of some sort.  “What else can I draw?” she asked.

“Books,” I told her.  “You need the magic books.” “Right!” she says, and returns to drawing.  “Finished!” I look at the final picture (which I have, and plan to scan when I get home).  The books are in a tree.  “Prospero keeps his books in a tree?” I ask.

“That is the entrance to his secret hiding place,” she says, again with the head tilt and eye roll.

It may never actually happen, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that art class: “What did you draw, Hailey?”
“I drew a flower!”
“And how about you, Aidan?”
“I drew a dinosaur!”
“Katherine?  What did you draw?”
“I drew the opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Act I, Scene 2.”

Tempest On The Cape

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

http://www.shakespeareonthecape.org So!  I packed up the family, took the day off work Friday and headed down Cape Cod for a “Kiddie Shakes” production of The Tempest.  All my regular readers will know how exciting this was for me – The Tempest being the way I introduced my kids to Shakespeare, telling it to them as a bedtime story for as long as they can remember.  So the idea of that being their first performance (even better, a special kids’ version of the show), was too good to pass up.

Took us a little while to find it.  With only the location “Mashpee Commons” in mind, I’m heading into this thinking “Boston Common” – some sort of big grassy lawn where we can spread a blanket, maybe set up some chairs.  When I turned into the area called Mashpee Commons and found what could best be termed an outdoor shopping mall, I was just a little confused.  Eventually security told us “It’s between the movie theatre and the Banana Republic”, and darn it all, that’s exactly where it was.  No grassy area, just a brick courtyard sort of a thingie where they’d set up, god, maybe 30 or so plastic lawn chairs.  There were no signs at all saying what was going on, just a handful of props strewn about the ground.

You know what? I LOVED IT.  Out came the cast from behind a hastily hung screen in the corner, not even 10 of them.  They were all young – I’d be surprised if any of them had hit their mid 30’s.  The cast was mostly female, so Prospero and Antonio were both played by women (as well as Trinculo, who also played the narrator, but it seems to me that Trinculo is often cast as a woman).  The story then became everything that I love about trying to explain Shakespeare to people.  First, Trinculo (whose real name was Tessa) would narrate, in a sort of Dr. Seuss rhyming style.  But then, this is the best part, they switched back over to legitimate performance of the actual text!  Sure they cut bits here and there (more on that later), but the important thing is that they didn’t paraphrase.  They didn’t give new lines to anybody to make it easier.  That’s what the narrator was there for.   So you’ve got one person talking to the audience saying, “Here’s what’s about to happen (e.g. Stefano and Trinculo, with Caliban, plot to take over the island), and then you get that scene.  My wife came away saying “Now that one I really liked, I understood every word.”

Since the whole thing ran 45 minutes they certainly cut a bunch, and particularly toward the end it seemed to wrap up very quickly.  For my taste I could have watched them do the whole play this way – it’s not like it’s that long of a play to begin with.    Gonzalo was completely eliminated, which I was a little sad about, I like him.  They left in his first speech (about an acre of dry land), giving it to a random sailor who never appeared again.  But that was it – nobody tried to kill him as he slept next to the king, and he was not around to be reunited with his friend Prospero.  I happened to be around for the later show (while my kids got ice cream and watched a juggler), and Gonzalo was even edited out of the grown up version.

The show had clearly been organized to showcase Ariel and Caliban, since they ended up with the most stage time.  All the other humans (including Prospero) seemed more at the whim of the narrator who could cut them off and say “…and then this happens” and that was the end of that.  Caliban, on the other hand, really threw himself into the role, cackling like a fiend and leaping through his scenes all hunched over like some frog-like henchman from a monster movie.

Ariel, in contrast was…hmmm, what’s a good adjective for Ariel?  Ariel (played by Ben, whom I’d spoken to online to tell I was coming to the show) was really the center of attention, and I mean that in a variety of ways.  He seemed to tower over the rest of the cast.  And whenever he was on stage he came with special effects, whether noise makers (a drum and a thunder machine, in particular), a chorus of fairies to sing with him (they were quite good), or just a bunch of sheets that served as everything from ocean to stage-within-the-stage (for Prospero’s wedding gift to the children) to Ariel’s Fury costume.

They did a lot with what they had.  (By the way, is it always that hard to fit “suffer a sea-change” into the rhythm of the song?  Never seems to fit right, both when I’ve heard it and when I’ve tried to sing it myself.)

How was the performance?  Given the setting it was darned near “Shakespeare in the wild”.  Clearly an act of love for what they were doing.  Shoppers were walking all around, and at least once somebody walked through the set.  But they persevered.   I was in awe, the entire time.  Maybe I’m a special case – here’s a bunch of people acting out my children’s bedtime stories, something I could never hope to do.  None of them seemed like “seasoned professionals” (although perhaps they all hope to be some day :)), and nobody passed the hat.  I was surprised at that last, I was all set to contribute.  Perhaps it came out later, during the adult performance?

Only one time did I flinch at a directorial choice, and that’s when the narrator introduced the monster “Cackle-a-ban”, and I was like, “ummm…what?”  Then the actors came out and referred to him as Caliban, and I thought “Perhaps that was a mistake.”  No – in narration, they named him Cackleaban, but in the play he remained Caliban.  I don’t understand that.

The cast hung out after the show, letting the kids play with the props and asking questions about the story.  As always my kids froze under pressure of being asked a direct question, but hey, I’m working on them :).  We hung out waiting for Ben, which must have come across like we were some sort of fan club – “Hey Ben, there’s a guy and his wife and kids out here asking for you!”  I felt awkward not just jumping in and hanging out with the whole cast, but I haven’t quite gotten used to just walking up to people and saying “Hi, I’m Duane from ShakespeareGeek.com” unless I’ve had some sort of connection with them.  Makes me feel like a newspaper reporter looking for a story or something.  Perhaps I’ll have to get used to that however, as Ben came out of the dressing area (out of costume) and said, “You must be Duane from Shakespeare Geek?” and the rest of the cast said, “Oh!  You’re the one he’s been telling us about!”  So, Ben, my apologies to the rest of the gang if I seemed at all rude.

In all, it was the time of my life.  I’d spend my entire summer going to shows like that if I could.  It fired on all cylinders for me – a show that my family knew and could understand, performed in a small enough venue that we could comfortably watch and enjoy it, keeping “original” text (yes yes, I know), by a cast small and friendly enough to hang out and talk to us after.  So glad I went!  Highly recommended.  Even if you can’t get to this particular show, go find your local group that does something similar and go put some butts in the seats for them.

Oh,When I Shall *Die*! Now I Get It!

~ duane ~ 13 Comments

Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars continues to be the most serendipitous book I’ve ever read.  By that I mean that I’m never quite sure when I’ll turn the page into a new chapter and he’ll be talking about something I was just talking about two days ago. In this case it’s the “When I shall die” line (as opposed to “When he shall die”) that we talked about last month.  Certainly it’s supposed to be “Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die, cut him out in little stars….” rather than the version Luhrman gives us, “When I shall die, cut him out in little stars….” After all, if he’s not dead, why are you cutting him up?  Oddly, though, my googling showed that most Shakespeare versions do in fact have it as I, not he. Rosenbaum gets to this near the end of his book, speaking of a trip to Bermuda. He even points out that most editors do indeed go with the “he” version (which is apparently Fourth Quarto) because the “I” version makes no sense. And what Rosenbaum offers (not his own hypothesis, but rather one he heard, though I do not have the book handy to quote the original author) immediately makes sense to me, I’m just not sure if I love or hate it.  He goes back to the more bawdy version of “die”, namely “orgasm”.  He says that Juliet, a mere 13 yrs old and not married, is to put it bluntly thinking about wedding sex, and how good it’s going to be.  You have to admit, if you make that little word translation, it still fits.  Now you’ve got an anxious young girl, in love but also certainly in lust, waiting for that big moment when … ummm….hmm, how can we say this and keep it clean?  Shall we say, when she gets to consummate her marriage?  It’s going to be so good, she tells herself, that all she’ll see are stars, and her Romeo.  (I’m not sure when all the rest of the world comes into it, though?) I love it because it works, pretty much.  It’s somewhat crude, it’s the sort of thing you don’t talk about when you talk about the story like it’s the greatest love story ever told, but sex is certainly a part of that type of love, and it’s certainly believable that a virginal bride-to-be is contemplating what it will be like.  (Now that I’ve seen that interpretation, other parts begin to fall into place –  “I have bought the mansion of a love, but not possessed it, and though I am sold, not yet enjoyed”???) I hate it because it destroys what I consider to be one of the most romantic lines in the entire play.  It’s an opportunity for Juliet to explain how much Romeo means to her.  Normally it’s the guy spouting all the poetry and the “You’re my world” stuff.  Sometimes it’s nice to hear it back the other way.  What would Juliet do without Romeo?  She would repaint the heavens in his image, and the rest of world would say, “Wow, yeah, we like that better.  Who is that guy?”  🙂   Thoughts?  Nobody mentioned the sex interpretation the first time we discussed that line, so I’m curious if it is a popular interpretation.