Category: Shakespeare Plays

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the most influential playwrights in history, and his plays have been performed and studied for centuries. From the timeless tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the hilarious antics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s plays continue to captivate audiences around the world. Whether you’re a fan of tragedy, comedy, or romance, there’s a Shakespeare play for everyone. So why not revisit these timeless classics and discover the magic of Shakespeare for yourself?

Browse the entire text of Shakespeare’s plays right here on Shakespeare Geek.

What is Hamilton’s Tragic Flaw?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

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!

Geeklet Studies Romeo and Juliet : Oh, Come On

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We’ve all heard the tragedy of my daughter’s class not getting to finish Romeo and Juliet. They’re forever stuck in Act 3, with Juliet just having discovered that Romeo is banished.  Never was a story of more woe, than that of my daughter and her eighth grade English class.

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.

 

Geeklet Studies Romeo & Juliet : The Tragic End

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

In sooth, I know exactly why I am so sad.

On Wednesday, April 6, my daughter told me, “We start Romeo and Juliet next week.”

It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for since she was five years old.

I’ve been keeping you all updated as best I can, from the stories I’ve gotten.  For just about two months I’ve heard about them studying Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets, writing their own sonnets, watching the movies, reading the modern translation, watching the movies, acting it out, watching the movies…

And then yesterday she tells me that the end of the year is upon them and they will not have time to finish the play.

I can’t even really get my head around how that happens.  They are right in the middle – Juliet has just been told that Romeo is banished.  And that is where they will stop.  Just like that, the teacher collected their books and put them back on the shelf. Done.  Interested students don’t even get to keep them for an extra week to read ahead.  He’s moved on to whatever else is left for the rest of the year, which apparently means grading papers.

I was lying awake in bed at 3am last night imagining all the different responses I might have to this.  Is it his fault? Is it just a curriculum thing where the 8th grade in this town says to squeeze in Shakespeare at the end of the year if you have time?    Nope — there are three “teams” of 8th grade students, and the other two finished it.  So, it’s just him.

Oh. Ok, then….ummm….did he just go into such a deep exploration of the text that they fell behind?  So that my kids’ understanding of the first half of the play exceeds the other classes?

Well, no.  I came home one day and my daughter told me they’d watched Gnomeo and Juliet.  You gotta be kidding me.  You couldn’t have squeezed in another act instead of watching that children’s movie that they’d all no doubt seen already since it came out six years ago?

I am very sad about this.  My daughter has been looking forward to it.  She’s at least one student – and probably not the only one – who went to school each morning thinking, “I hope we do Shakespeare today.”  I’m especially sad for any others who did not grow up in a house surrounded by Shakespeare, for whom this was their first experience, who came away thinking, “This is awesome, I want more of this.”  I can’t help those children. That’s his job.  And whether there’s one more of them out there or twenty of them, he’s failed them.

Next week is middle school graduation and there’s at least some possibility that I’ll get to speak with the man. I have no idea what I’ll say.

Who Are The Icons of Shakespeare?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Who are the most visually defining characters in Shakespeare?  What I mean by that is, if you take away the words, and just present the person, what is the visual representation that makes people say, “Yup! I recognize that. That’s ________.”

The easy one, of course, is Hamlet.  Put a young looking guy in an all black, Elizabethan-looking outfit and have him holding a skull. Done.

But … what else? Or, rather, who else?

Juliet in the balcony is pretty iconic – but can she be, without the balcony? I suppose if you always pair Juliet with Romeo you can have two young Elizabethans, one holding a vial of poison, one holding a dagger.

Three witches around a cauldron scream “Macbeth!” to me, but they don’t actually show Macbeth the character. You could have Macduff holding Macbeth’s head, but that identifies the former, not the latter.

How about hunchback Richard III?

I’d love to put big fat Falstaff on the list.  I think that if we made a poster of Shakespeare characters and people knew that, and then started trying to recognize them, that you could spot Falstaff easily.  But what if Falstaff was the only character? Is there some way to portray his jolly old self that makes you immediately recognize him?

Look! I’m a Helicopter!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned, one or two thousand times, that my daughter is finally learning Shakespeare in class.  Last week she had her first test.  Beforehand we went through the obligatory joking, me telling her to find some other place to live if she doesn’t ace it, her saying, “I know, I know…”  That sort of thing.

She has the test.  Texts me when she gets home from school, “That was the easiest thing ever.”

Gets her grade back on Friday – a 92%.  She is *livid*.  The school actually posts scores online ahead of time, before you ever get to see the exam, so she doesn’t know why she got a 92 or what she got wrong.  It’s Friday night, she and I are at the dress rehearsal for her dance recital, and she is standing there in full makeup and costume grilling me over the answers to the questions she can remember (e.g. whether “feathers heavier than lead” counts as an oxymoron) and basically planning all possible outcomes for what might have happened.  Stupid error on her part?  Fine. Stupid, but fine, her fault.  Question that she flat out gets wrong because she did not know the answer? Again, fine. Wouldn’t be happy about it, but wrong is wrong, and that’s how we learn what right is.

What she’s preparing for is the technicality, the matter of interpretation / opinion, the answer where it’s technically right but arguably not exactly what the teacher wanted.  She’s bracing herself for this outcome, and what she will do if that’s the case.  I suggested that she bite her thumb at the teacher.  She thought that was a great idea.  I said no, that’s not a great idea, don’t do that. As we followed the stage managers out onto dress rehearsal, she told me that if necessary she’s going to need me to bring the full force of the blog down upon him, to right any wrongs that may occur.

Well we got the test back.

Wrong answer #1:  “Which of the following things does Lord Capulet call Tybalt?” followed multiple choice answers like “saucy boy” and some others that I’m sure I would not have remembered.  She picked one.  Answer was actually “all of the above”.  Oh well.

Wrong answer #2: What city does the play take place in?  She wrote verona.  As in, without a capital V.  Got partial credit.  That’s just one of those “What are ya gonna do?” moments. It’s technically wrong.  I’d like to see how many kids didn’t actually write down Verona at all, for comparison, to see how important it is.  I wonder if she’d capitalized it but spelled it wrong (Varona?) whether it would have been a partial answer or not.

Wrong answer #3:  Here’s where it gets interesting.  The question was, who brings the invitation list to Romeo to read it?  She answered, “A Capulet servant who can’t read.”  The answer the teacher wanted?  “Clown.” (Which is ironic because when they read the play in class, that’s the role she played.)

Again, I can see why he wanted that answer.  But my daughter doesn’t understand why hers is wrong. The First Folio (I checked) does say “Enter Clown”, even though his actual lines are prefaced with “Ser” as in “Servant”.  My daughter asked me why he’s even called a clown, he doesn’t do anything funny.  I tried to explain the role of the clown as a specific thing, he’s not just some random clown wandering through the streets, how many of the plays have somebody in that exact role, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought about bringing up terms like “commedia dell’arte” but I thought I’d lose her, plus my understanding of that area isn’t strong.

All in all, not the worst showing.  2 out of 3 mistakes were just silly, and 1 falls into that bucket of “there’s lots of ways to answer this question and I didn’t pick the one the teacher wanted”.  The most important lesson, from where I sit, is that she takes her understanding of Shakespeare very seriously and wants to confirm at every opportunity that she does, in fact, know what she’s talking about.  I’m ok with that.