I’m probably the last guy on the block to post links of Shakespeare productions to stream, and I have no excuses. But it’s Shakespeare’s birthday and tradition dictates that we fill the day with content.
I like this list because it’s got a little of everything – some stuff on Amazon Prime, some on YouTube, some BBC and others. It’s no fun when you click through to a list and all you find is stuff on services you’re not subscribed to.
It’s also a good list because it doesn’t just serve up half a dozen different Hamlets. 12 suggestions, and I’d say no repeats but technically Henry V shows up twice as one of the suggestions is actually a trilogy.
I’m hoping that I get a chance to see some of these while they’re still up. In theory I’ve love to say I have all the time in the world to spend my days binge watching Shakespeare, but that’s simply not been the case. I can’t make the family sit through hours of productions, and I can’t disappear from them for hours. The closest I’ve gotten to Shakespeare is getting most of the way through The Crown with my wife. Get it? It’s a Queen Elizabeth joke. Help me, I’m losing my mind.
I’ve never seen the Netflix show Sex Education. Have no desire to. The most I know about it is that the trailer used to uncomfortably autoplay whenever the kids were around, and eventually my son got so intrigued by it that he got grounded for binge watching it when he wasn’t allowed to.
But then I heard that Season 2 ends with some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing (and, honestly, doesn’t every high school drama eventually involve some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing?) and I thought, I’ll probably have to end up watching that.
Luckily I don’t! The whole Romeo and Juliet thing is available on YouTube. Ready?
It’s pretty awful and I’m glad I didn’t put up with two seasons of a show I wasn’t interested in just to get to this.
It’s like a weird a Darren Nichols (Slings & Arrows) production staged by middle school students who learned what sex is from watching ABC Shondaland dramas. Everybody’s just kind of bumping and grinding on each other like that’s how babies are made.
People say text things, but there’s hardly any Shakespeare content. Benvolio talks to Romeo’s parents. Romeo and Juliet meet. I think Mercutio got some lines? He’s the one that talks about idle brains, right?
I like to be open minded, though. Somebody who has watched the whole show tell me, would it have been better if I had any sort of context for the characters? Romeo is reluctant to be there. The show does get interrupted and there is a “hold my hand” moment that must have been some sort of big deal. And then a dude comes in and shuts down the whole show. From my Shakespeare only seat those things were all negatives, but maybe for someone who saw this as “Sex Education with Shakespeare” rather than the other way around, those things were a highlight to some lengthy story arc?
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.
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.
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.
