Romeo and Juliet remains popular due to its tragic love story, relatable characters, and universal themes of love, fate, and the clash between youth and age. Its enduring popularity is also attributed to its poetic language and captivating storytelling, as well as its numerous adaptations and cultural references. The play has been adapted countless times in film, theatre, and literature and continues to be studied and performed worldwide, making it one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works.
When you heard that the sequel to Gnomeo and Juliet was Sherlock Gnomes and that it would still be the original cast of characters, you probably had the same thought I did. Is there going to be any Shakespeare in this?
The short answer is, “Yes, actually.” But it’s in a way that most people will find funny, and Shakespeare geeks will groan and eye roll at.
Gnomeo has gone missing. Dr. Watson has gone looking for him. “Gnomeo! Gnomeo!” he cries. “Oh, don’t make me say it.” Heavy sigh. “Wherefore art thou Gnomeo?”
It’s at this point that my entire table (we have a local movie theatre where you sit at a table and have dinner) turns to look at my reaction. I throw my hands up in the air, roll my eyes and say, “Well, at least now I can justify getting a blog post out of it.”
So when I heard about a sequel back in 2016 I got all excited….briefly. The sequel? is called Sherlock Gnomes. Huh? How do you do that? Are Romeo and Juliet going to be characters in a Sherlock Holmes story? At the time I hoped for a storyline that involved Romeo and Juliet going looking for characters from Shakespeare’s other works.
Well, it opens this week, so now we get to find out. All the original characters are back along with their original voice actors (including Michael Caine and Maggie Smith). What I don’t see in the IMDB page are any other Shakespeare characters, so I don’t think I’m going to get my wish.
I just can’t get my head around the universe of the movie. It appears as if all the characters have packed up and moved across town and are off an entirely new and unrelated adventure. We’ve talked a lot about Shakespeare sequels over the years, but somehow I don’t think we ever broke out of that fundamental assumption that the sequel, you know, continues the original story in some way.
Not this time! The writers here have fired up the franchise machine, dipped into ye olde public domain bin, and pulled out Sherlock Holmes. Maybe if this one is a hit (yeah, right) they can tackle Frankenstein next? Or maybe Alice in Wonderland?
But seriously, who am I kidding? If there’s a chance there’s some Shakespeare in this I’m still going to see it.
The most popular post I’ve ever made is the one depicting Shakespeare’s works as a Venn Diagram (although technically that shape is an Euler Diagram). That post on Facebook has garnered over 2 million views at this point, and hundreds of comments. People have asked me if it is available as a poster (as far as I know it is not – I did not create the original image).
The problem is, I don’t like it. Most of the comments are of the form “Why do you have play X in this category but not that one?” and “You forgot to put Y in the Z category” and so on. The categories (Suicide, War, Romance, Supernatural) are, I think, too broad. Does Romeo and Juliet count as war between the two families? I would say no, but some people disagree. How about Much Ado About Nothing? It starts with the men coming home from war.
So here’s what I propose. Can we make a better one, or a set of better ones? Something that more people can agree on? If we can make something that’s generally agreeable to a large audience I’ll be happy to make it available as a poster / stickers / t-shirt / etc…
I’ve been working with Bardfilm on some new categories. The goal would be to find a set such that:
All plays are represented by at least one category.
Minimize the number of categories that have no entries.
No single category has too many entries.
What categories would you like to see? “Supernatural” made our list as well. I was thinking “Insanity” might be a good one. Bardfilm proposed “Fake Deaths” and “Cross-Dressing”. If we can’t agree across all the categories we can look at doing one for Comedy, one for Tragedy, one for History, but I think those would end up looking a little sparse, and I’d feel bad about leaving out Romance.
What other ideas have you got for us? Tell us the category you think should be on our diagram, and which plays would be in it.
For reasons too complicated to mention I was fast forwarding through King Lear with the kids last night, jumping to the ending. I knew it wouldn’t really capture their attention the way I hoped, and I’d have to explain 90% context, but I’m ok with that :).
Which gave me an idea, as I explained how Cordelia died. Shakespeare gives us lots of action off stage, for whatever reason. Sometimes modern directors will go ahead and add the scene to make things easier to follow – I’m thinking of Romeo and Juliet‘s wedding scene as an obvious example. Many people will swear that they’ve seen Romeo and Juliet’s wedding and refuse to believe that Shakespeare never wrote that scene, because it was in the 1996 movie.
What other scenes fit the bill? I’d love to see Lear’s last desperate act trying to protect his daughter. I can see the whole thing quite clearly (having just watched Olivier’s version doesn’t hurt). Cordelia and Lear are sitting happily in a cell. Enter guard with a rope, who roughly pulls her away despite Lear’s protests. He tries to protect her but is no match for the guard who hurls him back to the ground. The guard struggles with Cordelia and drops his sword so he can use both hands (having been ordered to hang her, not stab her). Behind his back Lear recovers the sword and does the scoundrel in, just as the messenger from Edmund (et al) arrives screaming for them to stop the execution.
What else? Petruchio and Kate’s wedding scene writes itself, that’s an easy one. Then you have Macduff beheading Macbeth, but I don’t think of that one as a really necessary scene, there’s just not much to it.
A coworker challenged me to participate in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writer’s Month. If you’re not familiar, this contest challenges writers to create a complete fifty thousand word novel in just thirty days. Technically November is past, but there’s no reason why you can’t attempt the challenge any month you like.
I’m not scared of word count. Most of the time you need me to cut words out. What I can’t do is stream of consciousness for that long. I can’t just start writing and assume that a novel will plop out at the end. I’m a computer programmer by trade, and you can’t just open up a text editor not knowing whether you’re going to end up with an ecommerce site or a mobile videogame.
What we do is start with a framework. Just like a building has a floor, four walls and a roof, the same logic is true of software projects. A video game has backgrounds, sprites, controls, a scoreboard. An ecommerce site has navigation, a shopping cart, buy buttons.
So naturally before I’d attempt a novel I’d ask whether there’s a framework I can start with. See where I’m going with this? Whether it’s The Lion King, Forbidden Planet or West Side Story, there’s clear precedent for taking the minimal plot elements of a Shakespeare play and then rebuilding your own story. I immediately thought of doing something along the lines of The Tempest, although I’ll have to make it a point to stay out of Forbidden Planet territory.
What I was wondering, though, is whether we can make a framework out of all the plays. Everybody does Hamlet or King Lear or Romeo and Juliet. Could you use, say, Coriolanus as your starting point? What would that look like?
Pick a play, and break it down to the minimal plot skeleton. Hamlet, Disney taught us, is any story where the uncle figure kills the king and the son has to take his rightful place on the throne. Romeo and Juliet has been reduced to “two groups of people don’t like each other, until one from each side falls in love.”
Pick a harder one. What’s the framework for A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
