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.

Geeklet Studies Romeo and Juliet : Oh, Come On

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

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.

More Capulet-ish, Really

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I have been waiting a long time to have conversations about the text with my daughter, and I couldn’t be more excited now that it’s happening. Every day she brings me a question that makes me say, “I don’t know, I’ll research it.”

Today’s question?

Rosaline is a Capulet, isn’t she? She’s invited to the party, and on the list she is referenced as “my fair niece”.

So why, then, is it ok for Romeo to be head over heels madly in love with her, but when he finds out that Juliet is a Capulet, he says, “My life is my foe’s debt”?

The best answer that I could give my daughter – who was the messenger for other kids in her class – was that we’re talking about really extended families here, and “cousin” or “niece” didn’t necessarily mean like we mean it, you are the child of my mother’s brother or something.  Instead it meant something more along the lines of “kinsmen,” as in, “We are related by some combination, but you are not my child or my sibling. Therefore if you are of my generation I will call you cousin, if you are younger than me I will call you niece or nephew.”  By extension, Romeo’s problem with Juliet isn’t so much that she’s a Capulet at all, but that she’s the daughter of the head of the family (just like he is son of the head of the Montague family).

Which then led to the question (man, sometimes these kids are quick!), “Then what the heck is Tybalt?  He’s a cousin, right?  Why is Rosaline no big deal, but Tybalt is right in the middle of everything?”

Good question!  My best answer was that he was very close to the Lord and Lady Capulet, and grew up with Juliet, almost as if they were brother and sister.  Which is later explained after Tybalt’s death, so I think that there’s some textual evidence to back that up.

How’d I do?  Is there an easier or more accurate way to explain that?