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.

Welcome John Hudson of The Dark Lady Players!

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http://www.darkladyplayers.com

If you don’t recognize the name, John Hudson is known for having put forth Amelia Bassano Lanyer as the latest contender for the Authorship Question (also known as the “Shakespeare was a black Jewish woman?!” theory).

When I first posted about the theory I wondered aloud if it was a joke.  I also wondered why the discussion is always about As You Like It, since it seems that you’d want to go right to Shylock if you’re going to argue that a Jewish person created him. So when I got email from Mr. Hudson, I apparently have no shame, I dove right in and asked both questions :).  Answers printed with his permission:

Q:  With all due respect, are you serious?  Or is this some larger satirical joke on the Authorship question as a whole that’s gone over my head?”  (paraphrased)

A: Actually I am serious–which is why in March last year I went to London to present this theory to Mark Rylance and the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, who treated it seriously and brought her in as candidate number 8  at the top of the ‘other candidates’ section of their website. I would also not be spending money putting on demonstration allegorical versions of the plays unless I was serious!

Q: Why have I not heard anyone ask about Merchant, or even Taming of the Shrew?  Why would Bassano have written such misogynistic, anti-Semitic works?

A: This theory holds that the plays are written as allegories—as was much of Elizabethan and Renaissance literature—so they have a meaning in some cases on the surface that is opposite to what they really mean underneath. Both MOV and Shrew are quite complex, so  it is easiest if I begin  referring you to my analysis of more straightforward plays like MND and AYLI (which we are currently rehearsing for production in late July). Once you see how those work it is easier to make analogies to the others. For instance I would show why the way that Adam disappears half-way through AYLI is a parallel to the way that Shylock disappears half way through MOV–and what happens to them is similar. (I would however refer you to the literary signatures she has left on the two Shrew plays, which have also recently been detected by Rene Weis in Shakespeare Unbound pg 177).

(I certainly plead ignorance regarding the depth of these arguments, but that answer to the Shylock question does seem similar to the “nonono, it’s not anti-Semitic, it’s showing us the dark side of anti-Semitism” case that we’ve spoken of.)

Hudson goes on to add, “The only person who has ever considered Amelia  Bassano was the Russian critic Gililov, who  identified the Shakespearean quality of her poetry (The Shakspeare Game pgs 305-312) then decided as a lower class woman she could not have written it, even though she was educated by a duchess and a countess from the age of 7. Once you have read the two documents will be happy to talk further, and yes please use it in your blog, I would like to get the public debate going!!”

[John did attach two PDF documents for me, but I don’t have a good way to attach them to this post.  Perhaps if he is reading he can provide links.]

Thank you to John Hudson for his response, and the boatload of reference material he provided.  I’ve got some reading to do.

The Psychiatric Times, on Hamlet

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http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/52396

I like finding crossover references like this (which, by the way, is dated 2005).  Most folks know, I’m sure, that it was Freud who came along and suggested Hamlet’s issues with mommy.  Here is a psychiatric view of that argument and more.  As a matter of fact the article opens by crediting Freud with “persuasively answering” the question of Hamlet’s delay.  However it then goes on to question Freud’s character-centric analysis, showing the positive side of examining interaction between characters rather than just individual motivation.  I’ve got to sit down and read the whole 5 pages.

Moons Of Uranus

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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.

Daddy, Can I Read Your Book?

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That’s what my 3yr old asked me this morning while I was getting ready to go to work.

“Sure,” I told her.

The thing is, the book was King Lear. More specifically, it was one of the comic versions of Shakespeare that I have.  I also have The Tempest as I’ve mentioned, Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet. In general I have refused to actually read them the story of King Lear, as we don’t do that degree of violence in my house (hence my emphasis on the non-violent Tempest).

But she does like to look at the pictures.  So there she sat, doing her morning business, flipping through the pages.  Like any 3yr old she was also carrying around what if she were a boy I would call “action figures” – small statues of her favorite Disney princesses, including Belle and Ariel.

“Her name is Cordelia,” my daughter tells me, pointing at the Belle figure.    Then she points to the cover of the book and asks, “Is that Cordelia with the red hair?”

I look at the cover and sure enough, Cordelia is in fact the one with the red hair.  “That is Cordelia,” I tell her.  “And those are her sisters, Regan and Goneril.”

I think I reached her limit, though, as I never heard the names of the evil sisters mentioned.  She did go off playing, speaking of Cordelia’s friends Jossa, Brak and Ryda, which I thought was rather unusual.  At first I thought she was getting in to the imaginary friends stage (her older sister’s imaginary friends were named Cartlyn, Neejin and Lonoze).  But then I wondered if maybe hearing all the weird names in Shakespeare that she hears nowhere else, she’s tuned to thinking that names can in fact be any stream of sound, and not just repetition of the same names she’s heard over and over again.

 

Lady Macbeth's Suicide Note

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Master of Verona has an intriguing article that asks whether part of the famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” scene is actually Lady Macbeth’s suicide note.  Pretty neat idea.  I love, as he says, the idea of “flouting the audience’s expectations…even more, when I can do so by returning to the text.”  So he doesn’t just throw out a “Hey, what if we did it this way?” he actually backs it up with textual evidence for why he thinks it’s a valid idea.

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