How To Get A Complete Stranger Fired With Shakespeare

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Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I’ve often spoken of how, once people meet and get to know me, Shakespeare is in their lives forever.  Months or years later, regardless of how often I might see them, I’ve now got that connection. So I’ll get Facebook messages or texts with links to something Shakespeare and a note, “Saw this and thought of you!”

So there’s this friend of mine who I worked with for five years, who actually went off to pursue his dream project and started a school (you don’t hear that too often).  He texts me yesterday to let me know that one of his humanities professors has a Shakespeare book (well, chapters in a collection) coming out.

Given the guy’s name I went googling.  I saw his bio for the school, but I also saw an Amazon author page.  Click.  Blah blah blah, thirty year veteran of stage and screen, award winning script writer … seems like this could be the guy.

He’s also got a couple dozen ebooks, the first of which is described as “an erotic fantasy, two souls in one body.”

Well that’s different, I think. But hey, it’s not my business.  What people do on their own time doesn’t bother me. I figure they did their due diligence, they know what their employees are up to, they made the same call.

“I think I found his author page on Amazon,” I text my friend.  “Little surprised to see the erotic fantasy pop up, I have to say.”

“HOLY SH*T!” comes the response.

Apparently not 🙂

“Maybe I have the wrong guy,” I reply.  “Australian fellow?”

My friend confirms, with great relief, that I’ve got the wrong guy.   But for a minute there I thought Shakespeare was about to get some dude fired who I never even met!

 

Shakespeare Storm Quiz

~ duane ~ 3 Comments
Storm still.

If I scheduled it properly and my software behaved, you should be reading this while I’m sitting up in New England under about a foot of snow.

How often does Shakespeare make a storm of some sort a major plot point?

  • The Tempest, duh.
  • Twelfth Night needs to deposit Viola in Illyria to get started, so a shipwreck seems as good a reason as any. But does the description of how they went down count as a storm, or was it just bad luck at sea?
  • Poor Antonio’s ships in The Merchant of Venice.  Or am I misremembering that? Do we get much of an explanation about how all of his ships go down? I think I’ve always just assumed a storm but not sure my evidence.
  • Macbeth opens with thunder and lightning.  And then there’s Macduff’s description of the night before he arrives at Macbeth’s castle, where it all hits the fan.
  • King Lear on the heath.  I didn’t realize the power of stage directions until I went back and looked and saw how many scenes say, “Storm still.”  That is a huge storm.

What did I miss?

 

Unseen Scenes

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

For reasons too complicated to mention I was fast forwarding through King Lear with the kids last night, jumping to the ending.  I knew it wouldn’t really capture their attention the way I hoped, and I’d have to explain 90% context, but I’m ok with that :).

Which gave me an idea, as I explained how Cordelia died.  Shakespeare gives us lots of action off stage, for whatever reason.  Sometimes modern directors will go ahead and add the scene to make things easier to follow – I’m thinking of Romeo and Juliet‘s wedding scene as an obvious example.  Many people will swear that they’ve seen Romeo and Juliet’s wedding and refuse to believe that Shakespeare never wrote that scene, because it was in the 1996 movie.

What other scenes fit the bill?  I’d love to see Lear’s last desperate act trying to protect his daughter.  I can see the whole thing quite clearly (having just watched Olivier’s version doesn’t hurt).  Cordelia and Lear are sitting happily in a cell.  Enter guard with a rope, who roughly pulls her away despite Lear’s protests. He tries to protect her but is no match for the guard who hurls him back to the ground. The guard struggles with Cordelia and drops his sword so he can use both hands (having been ordered to hang her, not stab her).  Behind his back Lear recovers the sword and does the scoundrel in, just as the messenger from Edmund (et al) arrives screaming for them to stop the execution.

What else?  Petruchio and Kate’s wedding scene writes itself, that’s an easy one.  Then you have Macduff beheading Macbeth, but I don’t think of that one as a really necessary scene, there’s just not much to it.

Which ones am I missing?

 

 

Not So Great Shakespearean Deaths (The Game)

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

When I put the Great Shakespearean Deaths Card Game on my Shakespeare Gift Guide this year, I jokingly put it in the “Stuff I Want” category.  Well god bless my mom who saw that post and thought, “Hurray, my son published his Christmas list!” and immediately bought it for me.

Apparently it’s quite a popular choice this year, as a quick Twitter poll showed at least half a dozen people who could now include it in their stash as well.

The problem is, it’s not a good game.  You have no idea how disappointed I am to say that, but it’s only reasonable, as I’m disappointed in the game.

Each card represents a character death, explaining that death briefly, offering last words where the character had some. It also rates the death on a number of scales – gore, piteousness, fairness, speed of death, and a few others.  So far so good, a chance for people unfamiliar with any deaths other than Romeo, Juliet and Hamlet to learn about the lesser known characters like Enobarbus or “the fly” from Titus Andronicus (seriously? seriously).

If I understood the directions correctly – they’re written in a weird, pidgin-Shakespearean – everybody gets a face-down hand of cards, and can only play their top card at any time. When it’s your turn, you look at your top card, then pick a scale, presumably based on which one is best for that card. Whoever has the high score for that scale (normally you, since you’d pick your best scoring chance), you get the other players cards. If there’s a tie, those stay in the middle and you play again.  It’s basically “War”, the card game.  There’s no real strategy involved. Got a ten? Pick that one.

Has anybody else played it? Did I misunderstand anything?

My kids were bored almost immediately and clearly played only so I wouldn’t be sad that my Christmas gift was boring.  I meanwhile started thinking of ways to make it more interesting.  Here’s a few that we came up with:

  • Pick the category before you look at your top card.  That makes it entirely random, but at least you don’t just keep giving your cards to whoever had a ten for Gore and Brutality.
  • Play two-factor.  Choose two attributes (by dice roll if that’s easier), and you have to maximize your score across both.  So your ten coupled with a two isn’t going to beat somebody else’s six and seven.
  • Everybody gets to look at their cards, but at each turn roll a die to randomly determine which attribute will be played. That way you at least have to decide which card to play.
  • Everybody gets a hand of six cards. Your goal is to maximize your score by playing one card per attribute. For your turn you play it like Go Fish in reverse, offering up a card to see if anybody wants to trade.  For example say you’ve already got Richard III as a 10 in Last Words.  But you’re also carrying Hamlet, and you really need somebody with a better Speed of Death score.  So you’d say, “Does anybody need Hamlet?” without specifying his numbers – people have to learn who the good cards are.  If more than one person wants him, they can make their case – “I’ll trade you a Young Macduff” – and you decide who to trade with.  When everybody’s happy with their hand and either doesn’t want to trade or can’t find someone to trade with, total up your scores.
  • Play by poker rules.  Deal out five cards, try to match up the plays – “I’ve got a full house, three of Hamlet and a pair of Richard III.”

Those are just some ideas, some literally off the top of my head as I write this post.  There aren’t enough cards to play some of the games I thought of.  You’ll quickly be surprised with who is – and isn’t – in the deck, as well as how they’re graded.  This is covered in the rules, and there’s even a blank card to add your own.  A nice idea, but I would have preferred that they just make all the deaths.  It’s been popularized in posters and infographics, it’s not really a hard data point to get.  If there’s too many you could start lumping them together (like “Macduff’s Family”).

 

As You Can Take It Or Leave It

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Whenever we discuss Shakespeare’s best or greatest play, some folks will make the case for As You Like It.  Just yesterday on Facebook, in response to yesterday’s “The One Play” thread, one reader suggested that it is “at least as good as Hamlet.”

I don’t get it.

I don’t think it’s a bad play, necessarily.  But that’s not saying much, I’m not sure I’d say that any of them are bad.  But there are some that, if I never saw again, I think I’d probably be ok.  I’m not a Love’s Labour’s Lost fan, or All’s Well That Ends Well or Two Gentlemen of Verona.  There are other potential candidates, like Merry Wives of Windsor, that I’ve simply never seen live.

But other than general agreement that Rosalind is one of Shakespeare’s strongest female leads?  As You Like It is right in that “It’s fine, I guess” category for me.  There’s no real conflict or drama, the plot is ridiculously convoluted, the ending entirely unbelievable.  The only real laugh out loud moments for me come during the exchanges between Jaques and Orlando.

Give me Twelfth Night any day if you want a strong female lead dressed up like a boy.  That one’s not afraid to play with some dark edges, like what they do to poor Malvolio.  His ending certainly isn’t happy.  Does anybody know WTF we’re supposed to take from a character whose last line is, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”? That’s the kind of thing somebody says before coming back with an automatic weapon.

So let’s have the alternate argument?  We’ll call it the Battle for Cross-Dressing Shakespeare.  I suppose we can go ahead and throw in Portia from if you really want to go down that path, but I don’t really think of her as the “female lead” in the same way as a Rosalind or Viola.  But, your call.