Most of the posts in this category are simply leftovers from a previous era before the site had categories. Over time I plan to reduce that number to zero and remove this category. Until then, here they are. I had to put something in the box.
Ask anybody to start naming Shakespeare’s “best” villains and you’re going to round up the usual suspects: Iago, Claudius, Richard III, etc…
How long until you think about Goneril and Regan? They don’t even get a full credit each on this list, they’re made to share. Which is weird when you think about it, because they spend much of the play fighting and ultimately kill each other. So it’s not like they’re working together (except in shunning their father). Does Cornwall, the guy that does the actual eye gouging, even rate? Nope. What’s a guy gotta do to get some evil credit around here?
The inclusion of Angelo is interesting. It’s not like they were trying to round out a list of 10 or something. It’s always weird to associate comedies with true villains (though I do realize that M4M is a bit of a problem to classify). I wouldn’t expect to see Don John on this list, so how does Angelo make it over, say, Cassius? Tybalt? Is there an “official” definition of villain that we’re supposed to use, like how the academy separates “lead” and “supporting” actors?
I am a Shakespeare magnet. It doesn’t take long for friends, coworkers and family to learn that I am the Shakespeare guy, which in turn means that they become more receptive to Shakespeare things, and want to share them with me. I love this. Because I know that my presence in this person’s life means that they are now more aware of Shakespeare, and that their lives are thus more likely to be made better because of it.
I was surprised the other day when my brother in law texted me about a Shakespeare documentary he’d seen. In the 15 years I’ve been married to his sister the only conversations we’ve ever really had are the Red Sox, Elvis, who is hosting Thanksgiving this year, and who did the other use to refinance the mortgage and were they any good?
It’s always fun to see what others “learn” about Shakespeare on the fly. Often it’s incomplete, or insubstantiated, or just plain wrong. Since this conversation was over text I have the actual transcript for this one:
B-I-L: I watched a special last night on Shakespeare’s grave. There is a theory that his skull was stolen from his gave. Common in those days. And he died from drinking contaminated water. Quick death within 30 days. Interesting show! Also explained was his grave stone is shorter than others next to him.
Me: Nobody knows how he died, some people say it was syphilis, or a tumor. It’s all theories.
No idea about the short gravestone thing. I know about the curse.
B-I-L: Hopefully you can watch special. Very interesting!
Me: Did they mention his pal Marlowe? He’s an interesting story — got stabbed in the eye during a bar fight over the tab. It’s generally agreed that he was better than Shakespeare, and if he hadn’t died so young, Shakespeare would never have gotten his big break.
B-I-L: I believe that is who he was drinking with when Shakespeare caught fever.
🙂 Well, no. Probably not him.
[ Now I’m wondering whether my “Marlowe was better than Shakespeare” comment, which I’ve decided to leave in unedited, is going to get me in trouble… 🙂 ]
It’s been an odd sort of year. Once upon a time I used to post multiple times a day. My average of several years was near 2posts/day at one point. Now it’s more like a few times a month. Life gets in the way. Social media has made it easier to simply like and retweet various stories quickly, instead of firing up a blog post to wrap them and send them back out into the world with my own “value add”. Every day I look at my backlogs of material to write about, books to review, stuff to giveaway, and wish that I could do nothing but Shakespeare full time.
Which makes this year especially troublesome for me because, as you may have noticed, it’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. So, as people tend to do because we like numbers with lots of zeroes in them, we’ve all been inundated with Shakespeare stories from every possible source and every possible angle for the last several months. Every day for months I’ve scanned my daily headlines, seen another project of massive scale and thought, “I wonder what I’ll do?”
Well, here we are, and I’ve taken the Cordelia option.
I thought about making some hipster jokes about how you my faithful Shakespeare geeks have been into Shakespeare since long before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. But that’s not fair, because at the end of the day if all this hoop-de-doo makes new fans of some people, then I’m all for it. I’m not denying the latecomers.
Instead I like to think of what the Catholic priest wishes he could say to the standing room only congregation on Easter Sunday each year: “Welcome! Where’ve you been?”
Shakespeare makes life better. That was true yesterday, it’s true today, and it will be true tomorrow and another 400 years from now.
Absolutely, celebrate the man and his works on his birthday. Just don’t stop.
Author Jean Hegland knows how to pitch a Shakespeare geek. She told me that her latest novel, Still Time, was “about a Shakespeare scholar struggling with dementia who is trying to come to terms with his life even as his estranged daughter (an aspiring video game designer named Miranda) is attempting to reconcile with him.
I told her that the Lear/Prospero crossover was going to get me all misty-eyed even thinking about it. The whole “video game designer” thing is just a bonus for my computer programmer life 🙂
I’m not going to lie. This is a difficult book to read. It opens, for heaven’s sake, with a wife explaining to her husband why she has to put him in a nursing home. It opens with that. There’s not going to be any “happily ever after” here when you start like that.
Look, I’ve always said that Shakespeare means different things to you depending on where you are in life. The entirety of human emotion is, at one point or another, played out on Shakespeare’s stage. When we say he wrote the recipe for what it means to be human, he didn’t leave out any chapters.
There will come a time in everyone’s life when they have to experience the closing act. Maybe it’s for your parents, or your grandparents, or yourself. It’s never a fun topic to think about because, as I said, we know how it ends, and it’s not going to be happy. But there is oh so much Shakespeare to help us through it.
That is exactly what this novel wants to do. It strikes such a personal chord that I counted half a dozen moments (at least!) that come straight out of my life. But you have to take the good with the bad. When he complains of no longer being able to organize his thoughts clearly in his head, how brilliant large-scale theories come to him so frequently but yet he can’t seem to pull them together coherently when he attempts to write them down, I know exactly what he means and fear that it will only get worse. When he realizes that he’s forgotten the ending to King Lear, it is heartbreaking as I simultaneously imagine what that must be like while I pray that I never learn.
Structurally speaking, this is not the kind of book I usually read. One of the reasons that I love Shakespeare is that I believe in dialogue-driven character development. I could read an entire novel of nothing but people talking to each other as long as I didn’t lose track of the pronouns. This is a novel about the thoughts of a man alone in a nursing home, and I admit to skimming at times, waiting for a visitor to show up so people could start speaking out loud. There is a plot – we do learn about his estranged daughter and what’s going on in her life, all mapped against musings of the theme of forgiveness and second chances in Shakespeare’s late plays. But when you put one character who speaks in snippets of Shakespeare into a conversation with a character who actively denies them, there had better be some depth in that other character. I didn’t see it. Maybe that’s yet another personal chord, giving me a glimpse into a future where I don’t understand what is important in my children’s lives and why what is important to me is not important to them.
That’s perhaps the most compelling thing I can say about this book – not only does everything that happens map back to Shakespeare, but it maps back to me. Chances are, you’re going to feel the same way. Whenever people want to whine about the relevance of Shakespeare today, this is what we try to explain. Everybody gets older, everybody has regrets, everybody wishes for the chance for reconciliation and forgiveness. Shakespeare knew that. Jean Hegland knows that.
At the time of this writing I have not finished the book. I am honestly afraid of how it ends. I know that Winter’s Tale and Tempest manage to pull off a happy ending, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Apparently “gender bending” Shakespeare is going to be Emma Rice’s thing. First she got us all talking about how Cymbeline should really be called Imogen, since she’s got most of the lines.
Now she wants to cast Helena as Helenus, a gay man.
Helena wasn’t exactly a role model for feminist ideals the way Shakespeare originally wrote her, what with that whole “use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me” thing. Now imagine just how homophobic this is going to make Demetrius look when there’s a man saying it? I suppose that they could also go with a more offensive stereotype and make some sort of sadomasochistic joke about it, too, just to throw that out there.
There’s also an obvious complication in that, for this to end up a happy ending, we need to decide whether this makes Demetrius gay as well? You can’t play him gay from the start because then he’d have no interest in marrying Hermia. Besies, since he’s the only one left under Oberon’s love potion, what exactly does that imply? (For more on this, check out Were The World Mine, which deals precisely with some of these issues.)
I don’t mind interesting new interpretation. I just wonder whether this lady is doing these things because she thinks they’re really good ideas, or if she’s just trying to see how many cages she can rattle.
Maybe next time she’ll set Merchant of Venice in Nazi Germany? That’d be a hoot, huh?
