Month: April 2020

Guest Post : Shakespeare’s Travels

~ duane ~ Leave a comment
Scotland – the famous setting for Macbeth

Should you ever decide to embark on a tour of the locations of Shakespeare’s plays you’d find yourself with a long itinerary. The bard’s quill pen roamed the world, from Egypt and Syria to Scotland – this blog has even provided a handy map. Some places, such as England and Italy, were, of course, frequently visited by his imagination. Others, such as Austria (Measure for Measure) and Cyprus (Othello) he only visited once.

Shakespeare shaped these foreign lands to suit his stories. Greece (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, The Two Noble Kinsmen, etc.), Wales (Cymbeline, Richard II, Henry IV P1) and Turkey (The Comedy of Errors, Troilus & Cressida, etc.) were made the settings for comedy, tragedy, romance, and history. The world truly was his stage to dress – in fact, most of his plays are set abroad, the Globe Theatre, therefore, becoming an actual microcosm of our globe.

Some locations are famously linked with his plays. Who, after all, would not know that Hamlet is set in Denmark? Other links are, perhaps, a little more obscure. Lebanon featuring in Pericles, for example, or the former Yugoslavia (specifically, the area known as Illyria) in Twelfth Night.

Dubrovnik, once the centre of the Republic of Ragusa in the ancient region of Illyria

Are visitors to Spain’s Basque Country aware that they’re following in the footsteps of the characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost? The location of the French court in All’s Well That Ends Well is a little unclear, but it isn’t hard to imagine Helena and Bertram amidst the grand buildings of Carcassonne. I’m also a fan of the vague Mediterranean setting of The Tempest, which allows me to imagine Prospero roaming Malta, or Menorca, or perhaps Sardinia.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, famous even in Shakespeare’s day

How did Shakespeare know about these far-flung places? As the No Sweat Shakespeare blog once mentioned, even travel between Stratford-Upon-Avon and London was no mean feat. Shakespeare, therefore, didn’t have direct experience of these locations – it was 40 years after Shakespeare’s death when The Grand Tour made foreign travel popular amongst the English elite. Instead he took inspiration from historical texts and other stories (including Italian novellas) – Egypt, for example, has always been well-known to the western world and descriptions of its ancient sites would not have been hard to come by.

“The world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open” – the world isn’t currently our oyster to open, but with Shakespeare’s stages on shores near and distant, perhaps we can, for now, take a little peek and plan for the day when we follow the footsteps of his far-flung characters.

Olly loves to travel and has visited over 80 countries and all 7 continents. He also likes to explore the world through the medium of literature and enjoys matching famous locations with the places he’s been to. Olly runs travel planning blog APlanToGo.com, on which you can download free, highly detailed itineraries for destinations across the globe.

Another Party Heard From [ A Geeklet Story ]

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

So we’re all sitting down to dinner when the following conversation leaves me quite speechless. My middle child, E, has a smudge of some sort on her forehead.

Oldest, K: (to E) You look like you just got back from church with your ashes.

Son, B: I was going to quote Shakespeare, but I decided not to.

We pay no attention to this and generally agree that yes, E has a smudge on her forehead.

B, excusing himself from the table to get something: God gave you one face and you make yourself another.

Me: …

B: ???

Me: Where did you get THAT?

B: I know Shakespeare.

K & E : Is that not Shakespeare?

Me: No, it totally is, I just didn’t think any of you would have known that quote. In all these years I can’t remember it ever coming up. Now who wants to guess which play?

E: Comedy of Errors.

Me: You have 37 more guesses.

K: Let’s think this through. Macbeth.

Me: Also nope.

Mrs. Geek: Hamlet.

Me: When in doubt always guess Hamlet.

K: Is that right?

Me: Yup, it’s from Hamlet. When Hamlet is yelling at Ophelia.

B: Right before he smothers her with a pillow.

Me: Oh, so close.

Review : The Shakespeare Deck by Robert Myles

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I’m no actor, I think I’ve made that abundantly clear over the years. So when I first saw Robert Myles’ “The Shakespeare Deck,” described as an “actor’s toolkit”, I thought that’s not for me. Then Rob wrote to me directly and asked if I wanted a copy. I may not act but I am a fan of the text, and any tools for the toolbox that help dig deeper into the text, I’m all for. So now I happily have a copy 🙂

He’s got a great video explaining exactly what it is so I won’t try to copy him:

But I can tell you my own experience. It’s a very nice product, well made with sturdy, glossy cards. If anything I find the cards just a bit too slippery, it’s a little tricky holding the whole deck in your hand to shuffle through them, they want to go scattering on you if you’re not careful.

Each card is multi purpose. They are colored coded, numbered, “short coded” (my term not his), and double sided. That’s a lot of information packed into 45 cards. I’ve pulled one at random to use as an example:

Here we have a green card, which means it is from the “Rhetoric” section of the deck. Other sections include Forensic Linguistics, Working the Text, and Engaging the Audience. The D in the lower right corner tells us this is a Definition card, focused on explaining the technique used and its purpose. Some cards might have an E, for an exercise that actors can attempt to reinforce the idea. The 11 in the other corner reminds us where in the deck this card belongs so we can keep them in a particular order for developing round-robin or circuit training practice.

And here’s the other side – an example (in this case, two) of reframing. This the part I like. If I didn’t particularly get the first part, I understand the example.

Grabbing another card I find the orange Believe Your Eyes card, which tells me to “look for opportunities in the text to play a physical action that contrasts with the text,” referencing Richard III and Lady Anne (though not the actual text) as an example.

A random yellow card shows me “Antithesis”, offering up several text examples:

  • “What he has lost, noble Macbeth has won.”
  • “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

I just realized that, although I grabbed those at random, all three represent juxtaposition or opposites in one form or another. “move me to stir / move me to stand”, “physical action that contrasts the text”, “what he has lost Macbeth has won.” Shakespeare played with that idea a lot.

I think I like the green cards best, mostly because they map directly to examples from the text while also teaching me something new. I may have already known about simile and exaggeration, but “topos” and “kairos” were new to me!

Definitely a neat product, quite densely packed with information about the text. Hopefully it’s the kind of thing that my kids can use as well when they go through their own Shakespeare courses.

Does the name Rob Myles ring any bells yet? Right now he’s having his moment in the spotlight as the director of The Show Must Go Online, entirely virtual performances of Shakespeare’s complete works. Check it out if you haven’t yet, highly recommended! Getting more impressive every week!

Thanks Rob for the deck and for everything you’re bringing to the Shakespeare Universe.

It’s A Puzzle (A Shakespeare Dreams Story)

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Every once in a while I dream in Shakespeare. That ever happen to anybody else? I always think it’s very cool.

This time there was a production of Hamlet. I can’t tell if I was in it, or directing it, or watching it. But the stage was littered with giant jigsaw puzzle pieces (it helps, of course, that in these quarantine times our house like so many others is busy doing puzzles). As he soliloquized he would pick up a piece, contemplate it, and then find where in the giant puzzle – because the stage itself was a giant puzzle – it fit.

I didn’t get to see the end but upon waking I thought that a great ending would be him reaching the end of the play without finishing the puzzle. But then the scene closes with Fortinbras, or maybe Horatio, picking up a puzzle piece and contemplating it.

This is Not The Worst

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Hi Everybody.

I’m still here. Everybody in my world is still healthy. I’ve felt guilty about leaving the blog untouched for so long. But, as I said recently on Twitter, everything going on in the world has just felt so overwhelming that unless I had something important to say, everything just felt too trivial to bother. There’s actually lots of Shakespeare going on right now, but everything’s happening so fast and furious that by the time I got a useful blog post up it would already be old news.

If Shakespeare can survive, so can we.

Unfortunately, not everything is super here. Amazon has temporarily shut down its merchandise centers, which means no more t-shirts for awhile. This means that income stream dries up, right at the time when we all need whatever we can get. Though my wife and I are both lucky to still have our jobs, both of us have been impacted economically by everything that’s going on.

So you’ll notice a few small changes around here. The merchandise links are still up – only now they point to Redbubble. Redbubble’s not as big as Amazon, which means the volume isn’t there to help keep the prices down. But on the upside, Redbubble offers all kinds of merchandise that Amazon does not, including phone cases, stickers, and tote bags. I put up a new design, Have Patience and Endure, to mark the occasion.

Additionally, you may see that Google ads have come back. I’ve experimented with those over the years, as every blog did, and came to the same conclusion that most do – it’s just not worth it. But if there’s a number greater than zero to be had in there, well, I’ve got to give it a shot. I will try to keep them to a minimum. I’m sure that most folks these days are running ad blockers anyway. But I like being honest with my readers. When we get “back to normal” I’ll take them off again, believe me.

On a more positive note, I made a thing that I hope people will like and share. I call it Blank Verse and it’s pretty much Shakespeare Mad Libs. I made it a long time ago but for various technical reasons, I brought it back down again. I’ve rewritten it to be pure Javascript so it’s easier to host here. Right now it’s just version 1 so it doesn’t have many features, but I wanted to do *something* for people to enjoy and share. Please let me know what you think! I hope you like it.

Ok, that’s my brain dump of an update for now. I have stuff to talk about, products to review, links to share. I just have to get back into the mindset of making all that happen.

Take care, and be safe. Have patience and endure.