Month: June 2007

For the umpteenth time today I saw that old cliche about how Shakespeare’s works were intended to be performed, not read. I don’t, quite frankly, care a whit was Shakespeare intended.  He’s long dead.  So, newsflash.  Every performance of Shakespeare does not imply that he intended it to be performed in that particular way. Do we think that he intended Oberon to speak in Klingon?  Or Lady Macbeth to drag Macbeth across the stage by his ear?  Or Hamlet to jump in a child’s wading pool, complete with goggles and swim fins?  Yes, I’ve seen productions that included all those things.  When you see a performance of Shakespeare you are separating yourself from the original (what Shakespeare did actually mean, to the best of our ability to figure it out) by a few dozen other people’s opinions – the director, the actors, the costume designers, the set builders, the production company…  At any time, any of them could make a decision that would have Shakespeare spinning in his grave.  You could see ten productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, each substantially different from the rest, and have no closer clue about what Shakespeare intended for you to take away from it. That is unless, of course, you read the play.  Even then you’ll have no idea what Shakespeare meant, but at least you’ll be able to make up your own mind.  Then, go see it.

I’m always flattered when ShakespeareTeacher takes one of my posts and runs with it.  I’ve been away for a few days so I didn’t even notice at first that he’d spotted my “Amazing Anagram” note and had a virtual field day with it!  How in the world do you come up with such things???

This weekend I was away on vacation and I read something about Macbeth being attributed to Thomas Middleton instead of Shakespeare. I know about many of the plays in questionable authorship, but I didn’t know that Macbeth was one of them. When I got home and caught up on my newsfeeds I found another article suggesting that Shakespeare stole Macbeth from a Scottish monk named Andrew de Wyntoun.  The standard article follows, some historians show examples where the original looks similar to what Shakespeare wrote, and then a Shakespeare scholar presents the standard defense:  “Yes, we know that Shakespeare borrowed things, he admitted it freely. The point is that when he rewrote it, his version was much better than the original.”

http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2556 Neat! 

http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/game/start.html Here’s a fun one. Start with the premise that you’re Shakespeare and you’re trying to build a career for yourself as a playwright.  Each screen offers a simple set of choices (normally no more than 2) for you to pick from.  Sometimes it’s “Do you write about ancient romans, or oriental warlords?” but sometimes it’s more complex, such as when the Censor tells you to cut a scene from Richard II and you get to decide whether to do it or not.  I’m not really sure if it’s keeping score or not, or how long it lasts, since I’m at work and don’t really have time to play it through.  But it is fun.