Can you pick the Pokemon names out of this list of Shakespeare characters?
I thought this quiz would be a lot easier than it was. I assumed the difference between Shakespeare names and Pokemon monsters would be obvious enough. I was wrong – I got 4/10. Then I looked at the comments on the quiz itself and people are all, “10/10, big deal.” But I realized that it’s because they’re memorizing the Pokemon characters, just like we’d do for the Shakespeare characters. Admittedly I’ve got little knowledge of the lesser plays like Pericles and Cymbeline, which is where many of the questions come from, just so you know.
I thought it would be easier to just invent my own, so I mashed up both lists 🙂
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been to see free Shakespeare under the stars courtesy Commonwealth Shakespeare. I’ve been telling people 13 years, I’m pretty sure that’s right.
This year we’ve got Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is one of those “Really?” kind of choices because no one other than existing Shakespeare geeks is going to know anything about it. But I suppose by that logic they’d just rotate through Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet every year, so they’ve got to dip into the other works regularly. (This company has also recently done Two Gentlemen of Verona and All’s Well That Ends Well, so they’re not afraid to explore the canon. Both of which I saw, by the way.) At least I can add this one to my list, having never seen a production. Technically I saw half of one once, but that’s a story for another day (actually it’s a story from years ago that I no doubt posted when it happened).
Anyway, here’s how I’ve tried to explain LLL to people when they inevitably say, “ooo, I’ve never heard of that one” …
The play opens with the king and three of his followers deciding to swear off women for the next three years. They’re going to do nothing but study, no women in sight. So, of course, four attractive single ladies immediately show up on the scene and you can imagine that antics that follow. Each of the guys falls in love with one of the girls and goes about trying to woo her, without letting his fellows know that he is breaking the oath that they all took. Love notes are written and secretly passed, the messenger gives the wrong note to the wrong girl, and silliness follows. It all gets straightened out at we end with the promise of a wedding, as all the comedies do.
It’s not one of Shakespeare’s greatest, which is probably obvious given that nobody’s heard of it. If it’s famous for anything it is for the complicated word games all throughout it where Shakespeare was showing off exactly what he could do, including an appearance by the word “honorificabilitudinitatibus.” So it can be hard to follow, and productions will rely on over the top physical comedy to keep the audience interested and laughing.
Kenneth Branagh made a movie version, but it didn’t do so well. I couldn’t tell you whether that’s because it wasn’t a good version, or it just reinforces the fact that nobody recognizes this play. I didn’t see it.
A coworker saw the play before I did. I asked him, “And were you able to follow it?”
“Mostly,” he said, “But my wife and I weren’t paying all that much attention, we were just having a picnic with our wine and dinner and enjoying the evening.”
Another coworker didn’t even realize that’s how it works. She thought this was a closed, ticketed event. “Oh no,” I tell her, “This is Boston Common. People will be walking around right through the crowd. People on their bikes, walking dogs … people will just stop and take in the show for a little while.”
I asked for more details about the show from the coworker who’d seen it. “I was surprised by just how … bawdy? it was. *Lot* of penis jokes in this one. Is Shakespeare always like that?”
I didn’t recall this one being especially over the top, so I said, “He can be. But it’s also the kind of thing the director will play up to get a laugh out of the audience.”
“Even my wife said, ‘I thought this was family friendly, there are kids here!'”
I later learn that one of my other coworkers was in acting classes with Remo Airaldi, one of the clowns in the group who will be playing Don Adriano de Armada. That should be interesting!
So, that’s what I had to work with going in to the show. My wife and I decided to skip the picnic this year and just get dinner beforehand, so we grabbed some lawn chairs and found a nice spot house right, under a shady tree, and hunted Pokemon while waiting for the show to begin.
I thought the scenery was excellent this year. Most years they go with some sort of “decorated scaffold” sort of thing where it’s obvious that there’s a center exit, and some sort of upper level. I don’t even know what they were trying to go for here – is it a castle? a forest? A wall? All the above? It looks a bit like the Emerald City. But I like it!
The play opens with a dumb show that gets the point across quite nicely – three gentlemen sit studying a growing pile of books, while random people dance in and out, constantly swapping the book or adding more. Every time a pretty girl goes by, the men are distracted from their studies. Pretty soon the random people are wandering in with food and pillows and it’s a blur – we’re studying too much and not eating or sleeping enough, which is pretty spot on.
It’s obvious that Biron (or Berowne, if you prefer) is going to get all the stage time, while Dumain an Longaville are basically just sycophantic yes men who literally trip over themselves to do whatever the king wants. That’s not their fault, though – that’s all Shakespeare gave them to work with. But Biron carries the opening scenes nicely. He makes a good lead.
Enter the princesses, and I have a question. I don’t usually get into racial issues and color blind casting, but it bothered me, so why not bring it up? It just so happens that the actor playing Biron is black. Fine. But when the four ladies enter, wouldn’t you know it, one of them is black as well and of course she’s Rosaline, who is matched with Biron, and I’m left thinking, “Really??” I thought these days we’re beyond that simplistic “gotta match the black guy up with a black girl” logic? I want to give them the benefit of the doubt here, though. After thinking more about it, each of the princesses is a physical match to the gentleman each is paired with, which is certainly not a coincidence. So to have both Rosaline and Biron be African American makes sense. I just wonder if I’m the only one in the audience that found it strangely racist, and whether that was the reaction the director thought he was going to get. He’s literally saying “judge these books by their covers and match the girls up with what guys you think are appropriate, based entirely on their physical appearance.”
It gets weird later during the masquerade where, if you don’t know, the ladies all pretend to be each other to play a prank on the young men. So now we’ve got the one black actress pretending to be one of the others, and now we’re supposed to do the color blind thing and ignore that. Maybe it’s making a mountain out of a mole hill, but I call it like I see it, and it was distracting, what can I say.
I wanted to laugh myself silly at Don Adriano. Sometimes I did, but not much. I wish I could say otherwise. Everything was delivered in a heavy lisp where you could see the spittle spraying in the lights. He reminded me of Hank Asaria’s character in The Birdcage, if you remember that one. At some points I thought his servant Moth was more interesting – but maybe more exciting is the better word. Don Adriano just lolled around the stage moaning, while Moth was always bouncing around the edges, ready to run off and do something exciting.
A quick word about the bawdiness? I get what my coworker meant. I didn’t think it was bad – I’ve seen worse. There’s a particular dialogue in The Comedy of Errors that has more sex jokes than I think this whole play has. But there were a couple of instances where, unless I’m drastically misreading the move, a male character has a moment to describe the woman he loves, and halfway through his speech he grabs a pillow or book to hold in front of his crotch, like a middle school student called up to complete a math problem on the whiteboard in front of the class right after the pretty girl that sits next to him dropped her pencil. If you get my drift. When I saw that move twice I was rolling my eyes. Shakespeare gave you so little to work with?
Anyway, back to the good stuff. I thought all the character casting was excellent (racial worries aside). Rosaline was excellent. I wanted to make some Beatrice/Benedick references, but this Rosaline would have sent Beatrice home whimpering. She brought some serious attitude and it did work. The Princess was equally good, verbally sparring with Ferdinand. Even Boyet was spot on.
All in all I just didn’t love it, compared to many of the other shows I’ve seen here. I think the material has a lot to do with that. The only real laughs came from the physical setup — Biron’s reveal when he discovers Ferdinand, Longaville and Dumain have all broken the oath is perhaps the funniest moment in the entire play. I laughed a little at Holofernes – a little. Which is a shame, because Fred Sullivan, Jr has always been the comic star of Commonwealth Shakespeare and having seen his Jaques, Malvolio and Nick Bottom, I hate to see his delivery reduced to just yelling and repeating himself. Oh, and occasionally whacking people with a ruler. Funny gimmick, got old fast. I didn’t even really laugh at the Nine Worthies. I spent too much time thinking, “Well, this is like a light version of Midsummer.” And then *bam* right in the middle the scene just stops, we learn that the princess’ father has died, and it switches over to a funeral as all the characters don black robes and the whole mood just goes right out the window. I realize that this is how Shakespeare wrote it, but I don’t get the point of sending the audience home depressed. There’s one funny line to wrap up, where Biron says something about waiting a year and how “that’s too long for a play”. People laughed at that. But that was it, time to go home.
Going into an evening like this, and coming out of it, I can say the same thing: Shakespeare makes life better. This evening is one of the highlights of my year, and it doesn’t matter whether they performed LLL or Merry Wives of Windsor or Two Noble Kinsmen. The fact they perform it is what matters. Every year they give it their all and I appreciate the hell out of it. It’s free for heaven’s sake. Do like my coworker did, go have a picnic and drink some wine with your significant other, and if you want to laugh at the dirty jokes, go for it, that’s what they’re there for. Shakespeare as backdrop makes for a lovely evening.
You don’t need to have seen the megahit musical Hamilton to have at least a pretty good idea of the plot. The soundtrack is practically the script. Plus, nobody can stop talking and writing about it from every conceivable angle. I suppose if you don’t count yourself familiar with the play, this post has some spoilers, so be warned.
I’ve been wondering about how it stands up as a tragedy. We know from the very beginning “See this guy, our hero? Yeah, he dies.” Just like Romeo and Juliet. I don’t mean that like, “We’re all supposed to know the real story, like Julius Caesar,” I mean, “He says it right in the prologue, like Romeo and Juliet.” In the opening number, Aaron Burr says “I’m the damned fool that shot him.”
So if we’re going to treat it like a tragedy, the next question is what Hamilton’s tragic flaw might be? I think we could discuss this all day. His honesty? His failure to play the political games (something that, from the beginning, people more experienced have warned will get him killed)? His workaholism? (Is that a word?) His fear that he was going to “run out of time”?
If I dust off my high school memories of A.C. Bradley, isn’t there something about the tragic flaw directly leading to a decision that sets events in motion that ultimately lead to the death of the tragic hero?
Can we pinpoint the event in Hamilton? I wonder if it’s his decision to go off with Maria Reynolds (which sets about the Reynolds Pamphlet, his marriage troubles, his son’s demise, etc…) but (a) I’m not sure what “tragic flaw” of his led to that decision, and (b) I’m not sure what it has to do with Aaron Burr.
Working backwards, I think Burr is ultimately pushed over the edge by Hamilton’s endorsement of Jefferson, a man who he acknowledges he’s in complete disagreement with politically. So then is he more of a reverse Brutus character? Focused solely on what’s right for the people and the big picture, and missing the machinations of those forces surrounding him? Rather than “I generally like you but I’ve become convinced you’re bad for the people so you’ve got to go” we’ve got “I don’t particularly like you but I think you’d be a better choice than the other guy”?
Mostly I just wanted something to talk about, and Hamilton’s more interesting than Pokemon Go :). If you’ve got any other Shakespeare comparisons you want to make, feel free in the comments!
Here’s a funny family story that does not involve my geeklets, but I thought you folks would like it.
My older (and only) brother, who lives across the country and who I see about once a year, posted a picture on Facebook of a broken tablet device and the caption, “This is why you don’t let people use your stuff.”
And of course his local friends commented the usual – “that sucks”, “omg how did that happen?”, “can it be fixed”, etc.
And then our mom commented. Our mom lives closer out here by me, so she too sees my brother once or so a year, and basically lives for our Facebook updates. The smallest “Sun is up, going to be a great day today!” comment from one of us is always guaranteed to get some sort of, “Have a great day, love you! xxxooo” from mom. (Which is exactly what moms are supposed to use Facebook for, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.)
What she wrote to my brother was, “It’s just like my mother, your Nana who you don’t even probably remember, used to say – neither a borrower or a lender be.”
So there ya go. My mom, who is in her 70’s, quoting *her* mom, who *died* in the 1970s, quoting Shakespeare. She’s right, I don’t remember Nana, but I have to imagine I would have had a lot to talk about with her.
My daughter even read that post and told me over dinner, “It’s going to be ok, Daddy. But at graduation if you see my teacher you are *not* to go near him.”
So yesterday she comes home from school and says, “Well, I’m up to Act 5 Scene 4!”
“How’d that happen? You reading it on your own now? When did you find time to read that much?”
And then I get the rest of the story.
Seems that the school had a lockdown drill today. I’m not sure the protocol precisely, but it involves the entire class being huddled into a small space like sardines. I know this because apparently a handful of girls could not stop giggling over it, and a handful of teenage boys saw it as a golden opportunity to grab some teenage girl bottom.
And their teacher lost his mind. Unable to express to them the seriousness of the situation, once the drill was over and they were back in their seats, he apparently raged beyond anything that they had seen before (he’s a yeller anyway), throwing out insults and curse words with reckless abandon. Just like you see in the tv shows, they were assigned a mandatory essay, due Friday, on the history of school shooting – anybody that doesn’t complete it does not get to participate in the end of year class activities, including a harbor cruise.
He then cancelled whatever fun activity they had scheduled for the remainder of the day and told them to sit quietly in their seats and read. What did they read? You guessed it – Romeo and Juliet.
I could do little but roll my eyes at that. So is it a punishment at that point? Or was taking it away in the first place the punishment? My daughter was all, “Fine, I wanted to read it anyway!”
In the teacher’s defense, I think he was right to be upset and expect that Romeo and Juliet was merely the closest book and held no special significance. I talked to my daughter about that this morning. “Somewhere in your lifetime,” I told her, “His job description went from hey try to keep these kids interested long enough to teach them Romeo and Juliet, to Hey you might be called upon to die today to protect these children, and never make it home to see your own.” So for those children to not respect the gravity of what is a very real situation, when he himself has to imagine his own potential death, yeah, I can see why he was pissed off. (For the record my daughter claims to be innocent of any wrongdoing, and that a specific handful of girls started it – but unfortunately it only takes one to make enough noise for the gunman to find all of you, my darling.)
I may not be happy with the way the Shakespeare situation turned out, but I’m definitely on his side here.
