I promised to speak more about this after I did a video conference with Bardfilm’s students.  It’s a topic that we cover frequently, but it’s important to revisit it from time to time so that we’re all on the same page.

Why should you read Shakespeare?  (* Let’s not argue “read” versus “see”, that’s not what this is about.  I mean why should people expose themselves to Shakespeare.  Moving on..)

When you are in school someone will tell you to read Shakespeare.  If you’re unlucky enough not to get a better answer you may spot a trap — he’s famous because we all study him, but we all study him because he’s famous.  You make us read him because he’s important. Why is he important? He must be, everybody reads him.  Those aren’t answers.

You may go into theatre, in which case you will likely seek out Shakespeare on your own on the path to perfecting your craft.

Or you may go the scholarly route and choose to study the body of his works down to the last punctuation point, coming at it from history or spectral analysis or statistics or any possible angle.  And that’s fine too. Over the years I’ve met many people from programmers to physicists who have brought Shakespeare with them into their profession.

I’m not talking about any of those people.  I’m talking about that other 99% of the world who, once they leave the academic world of being told what to read and why to read it, will have to decide whether to voluntarily expose themselves to more of Mr. Shakespeare.

Why should they?  Take that literally.  Assume that you’ve just been introduced to someone at a party, and you make a Shakespeare reference.  The person says, “Oh, I’ve never read Hamlet.”

“Oh, you have to!” you say.

“Why should I?” says she.

What’s your answer?

I know what we *feel*.  I want to communicate that, logically. I want to find the vocabulary to have this discussion, because I think there are a hundred chances a day to have it if only we knew how to do it.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world. In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!

I once wrote, “All Shakespeare is cover songs.”  That post is sadly overlooked, I really which it had gotten more traffic.

My analogy has grown, however, and I’d like to bring it back up for discussion.

When you perform Shakespeare (and by that I mean using the text, not writing your own adaptation), you have no choice but to interpret it through your own creative vision.  Shakespeare had his, you have yours.  This is the essence of a cover song.  You both start with the same instructions (recipe?) but then within those constraints you can go in whatever direction you can imagine.

Adaptation is different. Adaptation is more akin to sampling, where you look at an original and think, “I like a piece of this. I will use a piece of this to make my creation more powerful.”  Sometimes you take the underlying beat of the entire song and just put a shallow new layer on top of it (the Vanilla Ice / Queen controversy comes to mind).  Sometimes, though, you find a piece of one original work that comes and boosts your own work, producing an entirely new thing.  Consider Primitive Radio Gods’  Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand, which everybody knows for the B.B. King sample.

In the second case everybody said, “Wow, that’s a great song!”  In the first everybody said, “Dude, you completely ripped that off.”  Big difference.  You have to bring enough of your own stuff to the party, and you have to acknowledge the contributions from the original, or you’re going to get busted trying to ride somebody else’s coattails.

Covers and samples are entirely different things with different points to make.  It drives me nuts when people make lists that combine the two, putting She’s the Man next to Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Please stop.  Each can be artwork in its own way, but they are two very different things.

A little while back I saw a conversation on Reddit started by someone who’d directed Julius Caesar.  He’d chosen to cast a … what’s a good word … corpulent gentleman as Cassius.  His motivation was probably 90% practical (i.e. the big guy was the only choice) but he’d convinced himself that the casting really drew attention to Caesar’s famous “yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look” line, making people think that well duh obviously Caesar doesn’t really mean he wants to be surrounded by obese dudes.  You can have a “lean and hungry” look that has nothing to do with whether you are undernourished.

I’m into a book right now that looks to be painting Gertrude as an alcoholic (at the very least, she enjoys her wine a little too much).  That’s not the first time I’ve seen that, by a long shot.  I wonder if somebody’s ever played a tea-totalling Gertrude who won’t touch the stuff?  What if we took the whole wine thing right out of Hamlet and had the final bottle of Gatorade poisoned instead?

I’ve been thinking about typecasting in Shakespeare.  Some roles seem like they have to be cast a certain way.  Does Cassius have to be a beanpole?  Does Gertrude have to demonstrate her fondness for wine before we get to the final scene?  Does Hamlet have to dress all in black? Does Don John have to hold the cape up to his face and twirl that handlebar mustache?

Ok, I’ve never seen that last one, but it’s what I always think of when I see that play.  “There’s to be a WEDDING?!  I must RUIN it, because I am so very EVIL!!!  Grab the girl, tie her to the railroad tracks!”

Does anybody know what I’m talking about?  What character interpretation has become such a go-to move that you’re left wishing somebody would stand the idea on its head just to shake it up a bit?