Is Romeo and Juliet an Anti-Irish Rant?

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

There’s not much Shakespeare content in Neal Stephenson’s The Rise And Fall of D.O.D.O, much to my dismay. But there is a bit that’s new to me and worthy of discussion.  The story is a time travel one, and when our hero is transported back to Elizabethan England to hang out with an Irish prostitute, he wants to talk about Shakespeare. He notices that Romeo and Juliet is currently playing.

“It’s a shite play,” she responds, “Just a court sponsored rant against the Irish.”

She then cites her evidence:

  • the “villain” is a Catholic friar, and “everybody knows” Catholic is code for Irish.
  • his meddling is the cause of all suffering and the reason why the play is  tragedy and not a comedy
  • the friar’s name is Lawrence, obviously named for St. Labhras, who was martyred by a poison of his own concoction.

Is this a well known conspiracy theory, or did Stephenson make it up?  He’s got other examples, less specific – the one about the “terrible drunk Irish character staggering about the stage wailing about how all the Irish are villains and bastards and knaves” or the “English king who went to conquer Ireland, and he said the Irish live like venom.”

So, did Shakespeare hate the Irish?

 

Cressida and Desdemona Don’t Get Along

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

You may recall that the moons of Uranus are named (for the most part) after Shakespeare characters.  Looks like 27 of them at last count with 3 (by my count) not being from Shakespeare.  Ariel doesn’t technically count because Ariel and Umbriel were intended to be a reference to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (the idea being that those two, along with Titania and Oberon, were the fairies attending Uranus, the god of the sky).

Well, apparently there might be fewer of them very soon.  Popular Mechanics reports that Desdemona and Cressida are going to crash into each other in about a million years.  That’s totally “soon” on an astronomical level 😉

I guess it has to do with the irregular orbits, particular Cressida’s.  It’s bringing her closer to Desdemona, and the great thing about space is that without anything to get in the way, it’s easy to plot the math and physics out over a few million years and predict with pretty good accuracy what’s going to happen.

Something I discovered in writing this up, though, is that nothing is ever new under the sun (ha!) in the astronomical community.  This new article cites a new paper uploaded to arVix.  But the Wikipedia page also references the “Cressida and Desdemona will crash into each other” note. “Wow,” I thought, “Those Wikipedia editors are really up on their links.”  Not really – they’re referencing a 1997 paper.

Given that Cressida and Desdemona were discovered in 1986 (along with 8 others) as part of the Voyager 2 flyby, I can totally imagine the scientists looking at the Voyager 2 data and saying, “Oh cool, Uranus has like 10 more moons than we thought it did.” <pause>  “Those two are totally going to crash into each other eventually.”

Tupac on Shakespeare

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

No, he’s not back, he’s still dead.  Maybe he’s got a new album coming out, you can never tell.

I’m talking about Tupac Shakur’s interview in the LA Times back in 1995, where he drops a bunch of Shakespeare stuff.  I probably heard about this and never paid close attention – I never really knew anything about his work when he was alive, so I have no opinion on the man.  I think I basically assumed that he was just being subjected to the “modern Shakespeare” treatment as idol worship after his death.

Here’s the actual snip from the article.  Man’s more articulate than I thought (though maybe articulate isn’t the right word):

Q: You studied at the Baltimore School of Performing Arts. Does your theater background influence your songwriting?

A: It influences all my work. I really like stuff like “Les Miserables” and “Gospel at Colonus.” And I love Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories, man. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That’s some serious ghetto [expletive]. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

And look how Shakespeare busts it up with Macbeth. He creates a tale about this king’s wife who convinces a happy man to chase after her and kill her husband so he can take over the country. After he commits the murder, the dude starts having delusions just like in a Scarface song. I mean the king’s wife just screws this guy’s whole life up for nothing. Now that’s what I call a b—-.

I just realized that I don’t think he completely understands Macbeth (kill whose husband, exactly?) but I appreciate the effort.

So, here’s a question for those of you who know Tupac’s work better than I.  Does he have any overt literary / Shakespeare references that we should be looking at?  I’m figuring that if they were there and obvious I probably would have run across them by now, but you never know.  I’m open to learning more!

 

Review : Will #10 (Series Finale)

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit, now that we know it’s cancelled, I’m disappointed.  I thought there was a lot wrong with it, but seeing Shakespeare and his fellows on tv every week was kind of exciting.  I know more people are sitting down to watch Game of Thrones every week but I enjoyed having a show of my own to anticipate.

This will be something of a live blog as I watch.  I DVR’d it last night but it’s live to me 🙂  Total spoilers will abound, so beware.

Weird that last week’s episode ends with Will running through town, but now he’s walking. Step it up, man! You’re girlfriend’s getting choked out.

I don’t love how Walsingham became an important character with just two episodes left. You can’t just drop a name like that and expect it to mean anything without a chance to learn about the character.

Suddenly Topcliffe’s enforcer (Justice Young?) is a real human, with a conscience? Again, would have been nice to learn more about this character. Holy…?! Just as I write that he kills the jailer as a cover story for letting Will escape with Alice.  Yikes.

It’s weird to watch this and have context for the real story.  The real Topcliffe did eventually get Southwell, and does live until old age.  So I am not expecting him to get any sort of comeuppance in this episode.  But I still want to see how it plays out.

Bizarre that Will can carry a nearly dead Alice around the streets and literally nobody turns their head to look at him.

Will ends up at Amelia Bassano’s house (makes sense) so her personal physician can take care of Alice (with leeches, of course).  This makes everything all better, and soon Will takes her home.

So, to be clear — in the time Topcliffe had her, he never bothered to get her name? He doesn’t immediately head to her house?  Not a great interrogator, it seems.

Now the whole Burbage family knows about Alice and Will, and worse, that he’s a Catholic. So this is what the whole series has been about, even calling back the “Topcliffe was looking for a man with a cut on his hand” from the first episode.  I just don’t feel like it’s built properly to these kinds of reveals. Nobody’s really explained how Richard III is going to be so screamingly obvious to everyone in the theatre (the groundlings are not known for their post graduate degrees, you know) that it’s a scathing satire of Topcliffe.

Watching Will explain to Richard that he’s in love with Alice is oddly reminiscent of Chandler trying to explain to Ross that he loves Monica.  They go from best friends to “that’s my sister!” *punch* But then five minutes later they’re besties again.

Wait, Marlowe’s still in this?  We don’t have time for Marlowe.  Now there’s going to be no resolution to his story at all, I’m afraid.

Hunsdon? They have to convince Hunsdon? Who is Hunsdon?  Is he the one that they did Midsummer for?  I feel like I’ve lost a lot of these characters’ significance.  (Yes, Lord Hunsdon is Henry Carey, who was with Amelia Bassano, and a real character from history.)

I also just realized that the “Tommy” that Marlowe keeps hanging around with is Thomas Walsingham, son of Sir Francis.  The real Marlowe definitely did have a relationship with the real Thomas Walsingham. Now that makes sense, how Marlowe was able to call upon him so quickly last week.

Marlowe finally tells the story of who the old guy was in the bed a few weeks ago – Barrett Emerson.  Unfortunately this appears to be a fictional character.  There’s some theory that perhaps he’s modeled on Lord Strange, but that’s all I can find.

Marlowe gets lots of screen time in this episode but now it just feels wasted, knowing that we’ll never get to really explore anything with it.

…ok, wait, are you kidding?  Next up is a scene of Southwell and his followers self-flagellating (i.e. whipping themselves) while chanting in Latin.  That looks like something straight out of a Dan Brown DaVinci Code novel, and is a ridiculous plot twist.  Was their intent to make Southwell look like a nut? He’s been turned into the villain the last few episodes, but now he looks crazy.

Here we go, time for the play. I’m actually surprised that it took me this long to see this whole plot device as a Hamlet thing, the whole “catch the conscience of the king” and what not.  I’ve been looking too closely at the source material and not the bigger picture.  Shame on me.

The play is good. I like how Richard steps up to play the lead, I wish we could have seen him in some more of the good stuff.  The ending, I won’t spoil. I’ll just say that I approve of how it all goes down. A bit anti-climactic, just kind of “Will the plan work?  Ok, yup it worked with no complications at all.”

 

Well I guess that’s it.  Alice and Will get something of a Shakespeare in Love ending, which is really kind of a cop-out.  Maybe if there’d been a season 2 they would have done something with it, but now we’ll never know.  Marlowe never comes of anything, other than to offer an Elizabethan “Swive you, Shakespeare”.  Nothing ever comes of Moll and Richard.  Topcliffe is last seen playing with his torture instruments as if he’s going to do something to himself, with no payoff.  Marlow asks Shakespeare what he’s going to do next, and I’m dying for him to drop a hint about a big play – remember earlier in the season when he mentioned Falstaff? And how he was going to write the greatest plays man has ever known?  Instead he just shakes his head and says nothing.  That might be the most painful part of the whole thing. If he’d described his idea for Hamlet or something it would have been perfect.

I hope it’s generally looked upon as “Shakespeare on prime time can work.”  Probably not, but we can always hope.

 

Alas, Poor Will. We Knew Him, Horatio

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know that I was expecting any different, but it doesn’t look good for a season 2 of Will on TNT. What, not enough sex and violence for everybody?

I don’t really understand the expectation on new series, reading this article.  On the one hand, “it was the lowest-rated premiere for the network… ever.”  That can’t be good. I also find it hard to believe.  But later that the series was “performing better than most dramas on television… it’s performing at levels that many networks would call a hit.”

What qualifies as a good show for a network like TNT?  Do they pull HBO numbers, or NBC numbers? I’m not even sure in today’s market where the bigger audiences are.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we see a second season. Because that would mean that there’s enough people out there who aren’t Shakespeare geeks, who found the story of Will Shakespeare interesting enough that they want more. I’m ok with that.