Shakespeare makes life better.
Twelfth Night opens with Duke Orsino’s now famous line, “If music be the food of love, play on…”
In Act 1 Scene 2, when Viola decides to dress as a boy to enter into Orsino’s service, she tells the Captain that she will be of value to the Duke because, “I can sing and speak to him in many sorts of music.”
Have I just always missed the glaring significance of that line? Am I the one in the audience that’s not immediately saying, “Oooooo! I bet they end up together!!!!”
Twelfth Night opens with a shipwreck, but if you blink you’ll miss it. There’s no actual stage direction that says “And now a shipwreck happens,” unlike The Tempest which starts in exactly this way.
Instead, the first cue about what’s happened comes as Viola, the Captain and sailors enter (Act 1 Scene 2) and Viola asks, “What country is this?” and fears that her brother has drowned:
[Enter VIOLA, a Captain, and Sailors]
Viola. What country, friends, is this?
Captain. This is Illyria, lady.
Viola. And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors?
The Captain goes on to describe what he saw during the wreck, and gives Viola hope that her brother might indeed have survived (spoiler alert – he did!) But, still, that leaves Viola alone in a country unknown to her. The Captain tells her the story of the Lady Olivia and Duke Orsino. Viola wonders if she might become a servant for Olivia, but she is not seeing any visitors. So instead Viola decides that go into the service of Orsino, with the help of the Captain:
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke:
Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him:
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing
And speak to him in many sorts of music
That will allow me very worth his service.
She never says “help me dress like a boy”, of course, but it can be inferred from the clues (“conceal me what I am”, “present me as an eunuch to him”).
But why is this her plan? Surely there must be easier ways to survive in Illyria. There are a few theories:
Rosalind. Alas, what danger will it be to us,
Maids as we are, to travel forth so far!
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.Celia. I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,
And with a kind of umber smirch my face;
The like do you; so shall we pass along,
And never stir assailants.Rosalind. Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar spear in my hand; and- in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will-
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
Viola. O that I served that lady
And might not be delivered to the world,
Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,
What my estate is!
How does Lady Macbeth die? It’s easy to miss when and how Lady Macbeth dies because, like so many other major characters, she dies off stage, and a lesser character reports her death.
Lady Macbeth, a pivotal character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is a fascinating blend of ambition, manipulation, and eventual descent into madness. From the moment she learns of the prophecy foretelling Macbeth’s rise to the throne, she becomes the driving force behind his bloody path to power. Her unwavering determination and skillful manipulation push her husband towards regicide, yet her conscience unravels as guilt consumes her. Lady Macbeth’s haunting soliloquies and sleepwalking scenes vividly depict her mental and emotional breakdown. Through her character, Shakespeare explores the corrupting nature of unchecked ambition, revealing the devastating consequences it can inflict upon both the individual and those around them.
In this case, the news comes in Act 5 Scene 5, when Macbeth hears a scream and sends Seyton to investigate. Seyton returns and famously says, “The queen, my lord, is dead.”
Macbeth does not ask how she died. Before the play ends, however, Malcolm gives more information about the circumstances in Act 5 Scene 8:
…Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life;
Malcolm here appears to be confirming a rumor that Lady Macbeth killed herself. It is well established in other scenes that she has been slowly losing her mind. Shakespeare’s audience would have accepted that demons possessed her at this point, and no additional detail would have been necessary.
Lady Macbeth’s unrelenting guilt, stemming from her involvement in Duncan’s murder and the subsequent bloodshed, becomes an overwhelming burden. Haunted by her conscience, she descends into madness as the weight of her actions takes a toll on her mental well-being, ultimately leading to her tragic decision to end her own life.
Although her demise occurs off-stage and is reported by a lesser character, the circumstances surrounding Lady Macbeth’s death leave a lasting impact.
Check out my book, My Own Personal Shakespeare: Macbeth, now available on Amazon! Explore Macbeth at your own pace and on your own terms, and document your personal experience with the Scottish Play.
It’s not uncommon for Shakespeare’s characters to die offstage, no matter how significant the character is. Unfortunately, this can make it difficult to understand how that character died. There’s a world of difference between seeing someone drink poison and someone running on stage to announce, “She’s dead, she drank poison!”
So it is with King Lear‘s Cordelia. Her death, and the way Shakespeare chooses to present it, is easily one of the most tragic scenes ever put on stage.
Edmund has captured Lear and Cordelia, but Lear doesn’t even seem to mind because he’s so happy to be with the daughter that he thought had left him forever. As they are taken away to prison, he says:
Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.
Edmund is challenged to a duel by a mysterious opponent who turns out to be his brother Edgar. Edmund is defeated and tries to make amends for the wrongs he has committed before he dies. He tells his guards:
Edmund. I pant for life. Some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send
(Be brief in’t) to the castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.
Nay, send in time.
“My writ is on [their] lives” means that he has ordered their execution. Quickly, messengers are dispatched to the prison to stop the order.
What happens next? Does the messenger arrive in time? No, this is a tragedy; we know that’s not the case. Does a messenger return and say, “Too late!” No. That would be too easy. (This is exactly how the end of Romeo and Juliet plays out, with that glimmer of hope that Romeo will reach Juliet in time…)
King Lear enters, carrying the lifeless body of his daughter, and the audience sees for themselves that it is too late.
Lear. Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
If the question is how exactly did Cordelia die, her father answers it while weeping over her body, conversing with her as if she is still with him:
Lear. A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav’d her; now she’s gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!
What is’t thou say’st, Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low- an excellent thing in woman.
I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.
That last line provides the detail – they were in the process of hanging Cordelia when he attempted to rescue her.
When I first heard that Strange Magic, Lucasfilm’s new animated effort was “inspired by Midsummer Night’s Dream” I wanted to be excited. I really did. I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, however.
Good thing. Whoever started throwing around Shakespeare’s name in the marketing for Strange Magic seems to have had about a high school student’s knowledge of the subject, at best. A C student.
The way I explained “inspired by Shakespeare” to my kids went a little something like this:
There are basically three different ways that a movie can use Shakespeare. I’m not talking about actual movie versions of Shakespeare plays, I mean original movies that say they’ve got something to do with Shakespeare. First are the movies that come right out and talk about Shakespeare and use his words. Like Gnomeo and Juliet. Then there’s movies that don’t use any of his words, but try to tell a modern version of one of his stories. (10 Things I Hate About You is the classic example here, though my kids don’t know that movie.) Then there’s movies that just take a single idea that came from Shakespeare and throw the rest away, thinking that just because they’ve got a boy and a girl whose parents don’t like each other they can call it Romeo and Juliet, or just because a king gets killed by his evil brother you can call it Hamlet with lions.
Strange Magic sits firmly in this final group. There’s a love potion and there’s fairies, therefore we can claim it’s got something to do with Shakespeare. No humans. No war between a king and queen of the fairies. There’s an “imp” who I guess we’ll call Puck who runs around throwing the potion on people for fun, but entirely minor characters in a single montage, that has nothing to do with the story. There is no parallel at all for Helena/Hermia/Demetrius/Lysander that I could figure out.
In fact, as I also pointed out to my kids, this story has more in common with a completely different Shakespeare story, and I bet the creators didn’t even realize it. The king of the fairies has two daughters – Marianne and Dawn. (Trivia for you – on the television show Gilligan’s Island, the character of Marianne was played by Dawn Wells). Marianne, for reasons that are obvious in the first two minutes, has sworn off love for good. Dawn, the younger sister, is boy crazy. The king basically won’t let Dawn get married until Marianne does.
Ok, show of hands, sound familiar to anybody? That’s right, it’s Taming of the Shrew.
But, again, that’s as far as it goes. The actual story is all over the place, and honestly a pretty shameful product from a name like Lucasfilm. More than once I felt it was the kind of thing that seemed like it was written in about a half a day, and felt like one of my middle daughter’s straight-to-video Barbie movies. There’s a good forest and a scary dark forest, and along the border between the two is the only place that the primroses grow. And primroses are used to make love potion, of course. But only the Sugar Plum Fairy can make love potion. But the evil Bog King, ruler of the dark forest, has captured her and ordered that all the primroses be cut down (the latter, by the way, is a plot point that has absolutely zero bearing on the plot as the hero finds a primrose petal as soon as he goes looking for one). So of course the meek little best friend of the younger sister, who is secretly in love with her, gets convinced by the other bad guy, who wants to marry the older sister in order to raise an army (something else that’s never really explained), that he (the shy one) should go get a love potion, and then it all just gets weird.
Oh, and it’s a musical. Of cover songs. Like a big Glee episode. When someone gets hit with the love potion they apparently just start singing “Sugar pie, honey bunch” over and over again.
Skip Strange Magic. I can’t really find anything worth recommending. It looks nice, I’ll give it that. But even that is weird, as none of the characters have that “I wish I could get that in a stuffed animal or action figure” appeal. The fairies look so human that every time they sprout wings you think “Where did THOSE come from?” and the goblins are so shapeless and generic that there’s even a joke in the script that they can’t tell their own gender apart.