Month: November 2011

This question came up again this morning – why doesn’t Shakespeare ever write an actual wedding ceremony into any of the plays?

The simple answer (historians, fill in the details for me) is that he wasn’t allowed. Marriage was a holy sacrament, a big deal, and having actors depict one would have been considered sacrilege.  The Master of Revels wouldn’t let it happen.  Although, what the punishment would have been I don’t know – would it just get edited out, or would even attempting it have been a swift trip to the Tower?

Anyway, this post is not about that. I started to list in my head all the different ways that Shakespeare gives us “everything but” the actual ceremony.  I’m sure I’ll miss a few, but we have:

• The “eye witness testimony” in Taming of the Shrew where we get to hear, but not see, how Petruchio ruins his own wedding (made very confusing by the fact that most movie versions just go ahead and turn this first-hand account into an actual wedding scene).
• The “wedding that doesn’t happen”, in Much Ado About Nothing.  “Do you, Claudio…” “You’re a whore!”  “Eeeek! *faint*” *chaos* …
• The “rehearsal dinner” scene (well, that’s what we’d call it, but for Shakespeare we’ll call it the “scene before the wedding”) also from Much Ado, which ends literally with a bunch of people saying “We’re going to get married, but first, let’s dance!”
• The Reception.  Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course – a wedding reception scene so hysterical that while I was researching my book I actually found a bride who was trying to get her bridal party to act it out.
• The “does it still count if the marriage is performed by a non-human entity?” dodge.  Well how would you describe As You Like It, where the goddess Hymen comes down to bestow her blessings on the new couples?
• The “blink and you’ll miss it, oh look we’re married now” wedding.  I don’t think that Romeo and Juliet is the only example of this, but it’s the most obvious.  High school students for generations try to figure out where in the play that Romeo and Juliet get married, because for the life of them they can’t find that scene.  That’s because it happens between scenes, kids.  One scene, not married.  Next scene?  Married.

What am I missing?

Speaking of Shakespeare and weddings, everybody knows that I wrote a book on the subject, right?  Hear My Soul Speak : Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare brings together all the most romantic things Shakespeare ever wrote, explained and organized for all your wedding needs – the proposal, the vows, the best man’s / father of the bride’s toast, you name it.  Even if you just want something cool to sign in the guest book.  Available now for Kindle and all e-reader formats!

If you’re not a user of Twitter, there’s not going to be much here for you.  Just letting you know up front. 🙂

I’m sure I’m not the only Shakespeare geek on Twitter that runs periodic searches on Shakespeare terms, looking for people to help.  Often this is student who seem to tweet all day long while in class, complaining about their homework.

The problem is that there’s no good way to spot the Shakespeare homework.  If you just search “Shakespeare” you get, well, everything.  And if you search “English homework” you get plenty of hits, but no way of telling if it’s Shakespeare related.

So, following up on idea that came directly from Twitter, I’m proposing to all my followers out there that we start using and circulating the #shakeshw tag to represent Shakespeare homework questions. I recommend that tag because you want to leave as much room in the 140 characters as possible, and the words “shakespeare” and “homework” are too darned long.  “Bard” is shorter, I know, but I don’t expect that a lot of students will make that connection. 

I know that most of *us* aren’t going to be doing Shakespeare homework – what I mean here is, spread the word. All you teachers out there who want to encourage your students to use Twitter as a positive resource (and not just to have people tell them the answers), encourage them to use the tag.  When you do spot a question through any other search means, re-tweet it using this tag. Especially if you don’t know the answer to the question – somebody else that follows you might.

Everybody that’s interested in helping kids with their questions? Follow the tag.  None of us is on constantly – but I’d bet that if enough people watch for the tag, we can get some pretty darned good coverage.  When I pitched this idea on Twitter a few weeks ago, a whole bunch of people were lining up asking how they could help.  Well, here’s an effort in that direction, let’s see if we can make it work.

Who’s with me?

Just about a year ago I spotted the news that comic god Stan Lee was associated with a graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare entitled Romeo + Juliet : The War.  At the time I wrote, simply, “Want.”

Well, lucky lucky me tripped into a complete pre-release copy (digital only and heavily watermarked), and just read it cover to cover in one sitting :)!   Yayyy!   Love.

This telling takes place on “a planet you recognize…yet in many ways, you don’t.” It is a war-torn planet, populated by two super races: The Montagues, a race of cyborgs (half human, half machine) and the Capulets, a race of genetically engineered superhumans.  They were both bred and created for the same purpose – defeating a common enemy.  Once that task was complete, they turned on each other. As far as the “two households both alike in dignity” and the “ancient grudge” go, I buy it. 

(Let me just break in here on myself to mention that, in the introduction, it says “Respectfully based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”.  I like that.  None of this “We all know that original boring story blah blah we think our version is better” stuff.  Respect.  Carry on.)

The story they tell is a bit different from Shakespeare’s, as retellings often are (see our West Side Story discussion for more on this topic). This version, like many others, significantly plays up the violence.  Every Montague hates every Capulet, major characters included.  Romeo and Benvolio are both right in the mix and ready to draw Capulet blood at every opportunity.  There is no Lord Capulet moment where he says “It is not so hard for men as we to keep the peace.”

This is a common approach (heck, even Gnomeo and Juliet did it) but I think it takes much of the depth out of the story.  I much prefer an interpretation where the grudge is basically old and buried, and it is only recently “broken to new mutiny” by guys like Tybalt who refuse to let it go.  I think that’s important character development there.  Just making everybody bloodthirsty doesn’t really do it for me.

Anyway, soapbox off.  The rest of the story elements are there – the party, the meeting, the secret wedding, the over -hasty marriage to Paris, Friar Laurence’s plan.  I will say that it takes a very different turn right in the middle (during the Mercutio/Tybalt confrontation) which is definitely in line with their world building, even if it is not exactly what Shakespeare wrote.  For as much as I don’t love some of the liberties that storytellers take with my beloved source material, I do have respect for those that can stand confidently in *their* story and carry it through to the end. The ending is satisfying, based on how they get there.

I’m always torn when digging into a work like this, because my brain says, “Yay! Shakespeare content!” and then I start reading and three pages in my brain says, “Wait a minute, this ain’t Shakespeare.” I don’t really know what I want as a solution to that problem. Sometimes the retelling will sprinkle in direct quote. There’s not too much of that here.  The goal seems to be, “Retell what Shakespeare said, and say it in a way so that the reader knows what we’re doing, but not so that it looks like we just tried to flat-out translate the original into modern text line by line.”  Does that make sense?  Keep it close, but not too close.

Sometimes they try too hard. Every single time there’s an opportunity to say “Ha, the Montagues are clearly the good guys and Capulets the bad guys!” expect there to be somebody who is quick to point out that the Montagues are just as guilty. They really hammer home the whole “these two sides are exactly alike” thing. We get it. Don’t let us develop our own feelings for these characters or anything – tell us exactly how we have to feel.

As far as the visuals go, the artwork is just beautiful (and I think they know it).  On
numerous pages you’ll think that you’re looking at a scene out of
Terminator, The Matrix, or some other hugely successful science fiction
movie that jumps immediately into your brain. They have a very clear idea for the world they want to show, and pull it off brilliantly.  Frequently there’s a shot of nothing but the landscape, just to show how impressive it looks. Honestly if there wasn’t a gigantic watermark across my copy, there’s a handful of pages that would be gracing my laptop’s wallpaper right now.  (UPDATE – They have downloadable wallpaper on the website!) There are a bunch of places where it’s overly violent for my taste, and a number of fight scenes where it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but I think that has more to do with me looking at it primarily as a Shakespeare fan and not a comic fan.  I’d bet that the comic aficionados in the crowd wouldn’t mind it at all.

You know what? I said that it looks like a movie. I think that if somebody tried to tell this version of the story as a movie, it could be pretty awesome.

I can’t wait for this to come out for real. Although there is plenty of bloodshed (and a surprising scene of near nudity which I think was completely gratuitous) I would almost certainly let my kids read it.  Well, at least my oldest.  I’d probably call it borderline PG-13, as there’s a very definite “Romeo and Juliet, now married, are in bed together” moment that’s hard to talk my way around. Relatively speaking I’ll take the gratuitous almost-naked scene if we could leave out the almost-naked-and-in-bed-together scene.

Be on the lookout for this one!  Coming out officially in “late 2011”, but I don’t have word yet on when exactly it will be available. I find no listing in Amazon, not even for pre-order, but that doesn’t prove anything.

We don’t often discuss the authorship question here (at least, until there’s a major motion picture on the subject :)).  But author Sabrina Feldman contacted me directly and sent me preview copies of her new work, so I felt it polite to at least provide some info and links.  I have not been through the argument, nor do I consider myself informed enough to have a strong opinion.

From the website:

During
his lifetime and for many years afterwards, William Shakespeare was
credited with writing not only the Bard’s canonical works, but also a
series of ‘apocryphal’ Shakespeare plays. Sty­listic threads linking
these lesser works suggest they shared a common author or co-author who
wrote in a coarse, breezy style, and created very funny clown scenes. He
was also prone to pilfering lines from other dramatists, consistent
with Robert Greene’s 1592 attack on William Shakespeare as an “upstart
crow.” The anomalous existence of two bodies of work exhibiting distinct
poetic voices printed under one man’s name suggests a fascinating
possibility. Could William Shakespeare have written the apocryphal plays
while serving as a front man for the ‘poet
in purple robes,’ a hidden court poet who was much admired by a
literary coterie in the 1590s? And could the ‘poet in purple robes’ have
been the great poet and statesman Thomas Sackville (1536—1608), a
previously overlooked authorship candidate who is an excellent fit to
the Shakespearean glass slipper? Both of these scenarios are well
supported by literary and historical records, many of which have not
been previously considered in the context of the Shakespeare authorship
debate.

For more information, please visit http://www.apocryphalshakespeare.com/

I believe that Sabrina is following the blog, by the way, so if you have comments or questions about her work please feel free to post them, she might respond!

Ok, so, ready for the followup from this story about meeting my 2nd grader’s teacher?

It appears that I get to put my money where my mouth is.  My daughter came home last week with a report that I am to email her teacher and let her know when I can come in, and how much time I need.  Apparently I get up to an hour to talk on the subject of Shakespeare.  Details to be worked out.

So….HELP!? I know I’ve got folks in the audience that have done this (or similar), and I’m looking for tips.  I know that I can easily (easily!) speak for an hour on my favorite subject, to any age group.  What I want to do, though, is to get some structure onto it so that it’s a repeatable experience. I want to go in knowing what I hope to talk about, and why, and they see how it goes.

Here’s what I figure so far, from my own experience with my kids, and going into their classrooms:

1) At least some time on biographic stuff.  Who was Shakespeare, when did he live, and so on. They need context, and I think the whole “400 years ago” thing is important for setting the stage.

2) If there’s a play to focus on, it’ll be Midsummer.  While I have my own fondness for The Tempest, I’ve been convinced that Midsummer remains the best introduction to kids who have likely never experienced this stuff before.

3) I very desperately want an excuse to get them out of their seats and reciting/acting some stuff.  They won’t get it (nor will they sit still!) listening to me talk for an hour, no matter how fascinating I am. 😉

I would love to walk in with scripts all prepared (rewritten and toned down to their level, of course), push back the desks, assign roles and start walking through the play.  I’d love that like you wouldn’t believe.  Like, I’ve dreamed about doing that since I first had kids. But if this is a one shot deal and I’ve got an hour, I don’t think we’ll get very far.  We’d be lucky to get through one walk through.

Option 2 is for me to play narrator and describe 3/4 of the play, stopping periodically to have a couple of the kids act out a particular scene.  This right now for me is the most likely, if I can find the balance of which scenes to act out.

Another option is to do more of a “medley” of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, and let the kids take turns reciting from a whole variety of scenes – the balcony scene, the Yorick scene, and so on.  I fear that might be too confusing because they wouldn’t get to settle in on the plot and character of a single story.

What have you got for me?

(It’s worth mentioning that later in the year I may be called upon to do this same thing with my 4th grader’s class, in which case I would have a bit more options due to their more advanced reading/listening/comprehension skills).

P.S. – 2nd grader in this case means 7 years old, roughly.  4th grader is 9 years old.  I often forget that my audience extends outside the US, and I was asked to clarify over the weekend.