This morning while I’m brushing my teeth I hear my wife greet our now 6yr old daughter, who has just woken up and come into the room like this: “Good morning! What were you doing, reading in bed?” My daughter seeks me out and I see that she is holding her Shakespeare book. This is one of those where the stories have been rewritten for kids to understand (not the Lamb, this is from a publisher called Usborne. Same idea.) Anyway, she is holding her finger over a page. She comes over to me, opens up the book and says, “Daddy, this is the play we’re going to see in a few weeks.” Sure enough, she is pointing to As You Like It. Absolutely right. Tonight I’ll make sure we read that whole story. Unlike some others where I had to make it up off the top of my head, she’s getting old enough now where she’ll be able to follow along with me. I can’t wait! [On a related note, I may have royally screwed up my timing this summer and caused a Shakespeare clash. Boston’s Shakespeare Day is on Saturday, August 2. I was going to take the kids to that, since they would never stay up for an evening show during the week. However, we’ve also booked a one-day only trip down to Cape Cod to see a special children’s version of The Tempest! So we will indeed be driving back up through Boston on the Saturday, but whether they are too exhausted to sit through a second play, I guess I won’t know until we’re there.]
Month: June 2008
Oh,When I Shall *Die*! Now I Get It!
Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars continues to be the most serendipitous book I’ve ever read. By that I mean that I’m never quite sure when I’ll turn the page into a new chapter and he’ll be talking about something I was just talking about two days ago. In this case it’s the “When I shall die” line (as opposed to “When he shall die”) that we talked about last month. Certainly it’s supposed to be “Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die, cut him out in little stars….” rather than the version Luhrman gives us, “When I shall die, cut him out in little stars….” After all, if he’s not dead, why are you cutting him up? Oddly, though, my googling showed that most Shakespeare versions do in fact have it as I, not he. Rosenbaum gets to this near the end of his book, speaking of a trip to Bermuda. He even points out that most editors do indeed go with the “he” version (which is apparently Fourth Quarto) because the “I” version makes no sense. And what Rosenbaum offers (not his own hypothesis, but rather one he heard, though I do not have the book handy to quote the original author) immediately makes sense to me, I’m just not sure if I love or hate it. He goes back to the more bawdy version of “die”, namely “orgasm”. He says that Juliet, a mere 13 yrs old and not married, is to put it bluntly thinking about wedding sex, and how good it’s going to be. You have to admit, if you make that little word translation, it still fits. Now you’ve got an anxious young girl, in love but also certainly in lust, waiting for that big moment when … ummm….hmm, how can we say this and keep it clean? Shall we say, when she gets to consummate her marriage? It’s going to be so good, she tells herself, that all she’ll see are stars, and her Romeo. (I’m not sure when all the rest of the world comes into it, though?) I love it because it works, pretty much. It’s somewhat crude, it’s the sort of thing you don’t talk about when you talk about the story like it’s the greatest love story ever told, but sex is certainly a part of that type of love, and it’s certainly believable that a virginal bride-to-be is contemplating what it will be like. (Now that I’ve seen that interpretation, other parts begin to fall into place – “I have bought the mansion of a love, but not possessed it, and though I am sold, not yet enjoyed”???) I hate it because it destroys what I consider to be one of the most romantic lines in the entire play. It’s an opportunity for Juliet to explain how much Romeo means to her. Normally it’s the guy spouting all the poetry and the “You’re my world” stuff. Sometimes it’s nice to hear it back the other way. What would Juliet do without Romeo? She would repaint the heavens in his image, and the rest of world would say, “Wow, yeah, we like that better. Who is that guy?” 🙂 Thoughts? Nobody mentioned the sex interpretation the first time we discussed that line, so I’m curious if it is a popular interpretation.
Zombie Shakespeare
http://blogs.orange.co.uk/celebrity/2008/06/back-from-the-d.html Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe are the twinkling trio of stars British people would most like to bring back to life, according to a new survey. Mr. Shakespeare appears to rank #6, falling behind Winston Churchill and Sir Bobby Moore (who?), but ahead of Henry VIII, Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury and Albert Einstein.
Haitian Macbeth?
http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/macbeth.mpeg Wow, now this is interesting. From the main page: The only surviving footage from Welles and Houseman’s first stage production, a version of Macbeth set in Haiti with an all-black cast. That’d be Orson Welles and John Houseman, for the curious. Some of the directorial choices are interesting, like killing Macbeth on the “untimely ripped” line (and apparently foregoing the entire “lay on macduff” speech), or the fact that the wyrd sisters are right there on the platform with Macduff the whole time.
Characters, Sorted By Number Of Lines
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/chardisplay.php?sortby=lines&searchterm=
UPDATE – OpenSource Shakespeare has actually removed the “sort by lines” feature and replaced it with “sort by speeches”. This is somewhat more accurate, as there is no set rule about line breaks in most of the text.
However, counting speeches isn’t remotely as fun. One character might have 10 small speeches, compared to 3 lengthy speeches from someone else.
The results are still what you’re thinking – Falstaff, Richard III and Henry V top the list, all of whom appear in multiple plays. The remainder of the top ten might as well be, “Title Characters” — Hamlet, Othello, Antony, Cleopatra. Even Timon (of Athens) gets in there.
The one spoiler? Iago, He’s got almost as many speeches as Othello!
Open Source Shakespeare is a great resource for doing things like this (not my idea, I just found it). Here, we have characters sorted by the number of lines. Obviously, it’s a little crude as Shakespeare himself shows up in the #1 spot with no plays listed, but right behind him are Falstaff and Henry V (both having appeared in numerous plays with major roles, it only makes sense), and then Hamlet (who, for only have a single play, has the most lines). Other interesting bits…
Othello and Iago have almost an identical number of lines.Anthony has more lines than Cleopatra – but he was in Julius Caesar, too.Behind Cleopatra, Rosalind from As You Like It has the most lines for a female.Romeo has substantially more lines than Juliet, though they both have quite a few. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, has barely 1/3rd the number of her husband’s lines. Tybalt barely registers with just 17 lines!