A few years back I wrote about Decorating Your Life with Shakespeare.  I’ve never been the kind of outgoing personality that will walk up to somebody and make conversation (or even introduce myself).  But if I’m a walking billboard for Shakespeare, and people want to start the conversation by asking me something?  Then they’ll have a hard time shutting me up.

Saturday I’m at my son’s martial arts class waiting.  It’s one of the more informal classes, a glorified practice session. The head instructor isn’t even there, but his right hand man is.  And his right hand man has time to interact with the parents.  For my part, I bring my laptop and do stuff.  See earlier note about socializing. 🙂

“You got new stickers,” the instructor says to me.

“What?”

“Your laptop.  I noticed you’ve got a new Shakespeare sticker on your laptop.” My laptop has a Chandos picture and the “Some achieve greatness…” quote, a gift from my kids last year. That’s my personal laptop.

I laugh.  “Nope,” I say, reaching into my backpack to pull out a second laptop, that also has Shakespeare stickers on it.  That’s my business laptop, and it has silhouette characters of Shakespeare and Hamlet .

The other parents move to see, so I turn around and show them off, one in each hand, feeling especially geeky.

“Speaking of which,” my son says, “How did your Shakespeare costume do at work?”  Spoiler alert – I dressed as the Chandos Portrait for my work’s Halloween party. But you have to wait for tomorrow’s post to see pictures 🙂

This leads to the instructor asking if I have pictures, which I do, and of course now all the parents are interested.  Long story short, instructor ends up putting RSC’s “Hamlet Abridged” on the television (where they normally just run a slide show of advertisements).  I get into a conversation with one of the parents, who happens to be a high school English teacher.  She tells me about how she shows her kids the Leonardo diCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet as well as Zeffirelli, but she has a special love for Gnomeo and Juliet.  I introduce her to Sealed with a Kiss, a movie that most people outside of this blog will have never heard of.  I hope she manages to find a copy!

We only just have time to get into the, “So, how did you get into Shakespeare?” conversation, which has no short answer :), but maybe next time.

 

or, What Play Can You Just Not Even?

Our pal Bardfilm is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it anymore!

He is so over Romeo and Juliet, that he’s decided no more productions for him. It has been plumbed to its depths, we have wrung all possible angles and meaning from it, it has been set in every possible time and space in the continuum. He’s seen enough, he can’t see any more.  In fact, he wants to eradicate it completely. Sort of.

Here’s his proposal. We keep the text, and we can read it whenever (if ever) we want. But if we elected some crazy dictator who’d been horribly bullied in high school for being a theatre geek and takes out his emotional issues by banning Romeo and Juliet from ever being produced again … Bardfilm’s totally ok with that.

Which of the works brings out similar resentment for you?  You’re in charge, you get to declare a complete moratorium on one Shakespeare play never to be performed again.

What’s it going to be? Shall it be Merchant of Venice, so people can stop arguing with you whether Shakespeare was anti-Semitic? Comedy of Errors, so directors can stop worrying where they’re supposed to find two sets of identical twins?  Maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream so we can stop having kindergarten productions with five-year-old butterfly-looking fairies?

I’m totally going to take the easy road and pick Merry Wives of Windsor. I’ve literally never seen it, nor even read it (except during my brief “read them all” period in college).  But I also don’t know how much it “makes life better,” otherwise it probably would have hit my radar by now.  So, having never missed it, I figure I won’t miss it going forward.

 

For my day job we have a very large email marketing business.  It’s normal conversation to talk about what others are doing, so when I got the following subject line in an email I laughed and showed it to my coworkers:

Make someone ugly cry. Adobe can help.

What I wrong as a comment was, “I know what they meant, but that’s the worst subject line I’ve ever seen.”  It sounds like Adobe’s offering to help you chase ugly kids around the playground and make them cry.

A couple days after that post, a coworker calls me over and says, “You posted something the other day and I’ve been meaning to ask you about it…I don’t get it?  You wrote, I know what they mean … but I don’t.  I don’t know what they mean? Is it like the optical illusion with the old woman and the young woman and I can only see the old woman?”

So I told him, “Claire Danes in the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo+Juliet.”Turns out there’s actually several blogs and tumblrs dedicated to her cry face in particular, and she’s even been asked about it in interviews 🙂

There’s not much Shakespeare content in Neal Stephenson’s The Rise And Fall of D.O.D.O, much to my dismay. But there is a bit that’s new to me and worthy of discussion.  The story is a time travel one, and when our hero is transported back to Elizabethan England to hang out with an Irish prostitute, he wants to talk about Shakespeare. He notices that Romeo and Juliet is currently playing.

“It’s a shite play,” she responds, “Just a court sponsored rant against the Irish.”

She then cites her evidence:

• the “villain” is a Catholic friar, and “everybody knows” Catholic is code for Irish.
• his meddling is the cause of all suffering and the reason why the play is  tragedy and not a comedy
• the friar’s name is Lawrence, obviously named for St. Labhras, who was martyred by a poison of his own concoction.

Is this a well known conspiracy theory, or did Stephenson make it up?  He’s got other examples, less specific – the one about the “terrible drunk Irish character staggering about the stage wailing about how all the Irish are villains and bastards and knaves” or the “English king who went to conquer Ireland, and he said the Irish live like venom.”

So, did Shakespeare hate the Irish?