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.

Now Let’s Do Teen Movies

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Ok, so, fine, somebody managed to make a list of Shakespeare adaptations I’ve never seen.  We get back into the comfort zone with this list of Teen Shakespeare Adaptations, supposedly “ranked”, which really just means the arbitrary personal opinion of whoever made the list, based on which ones they’ve actually seen rather than just spotted a YouTube trailer.

All the standards are here – 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s The Man, Get Over It, etc…  They include Romeo+Juliet which always makes me on my soapbox about, “What did you mean by adaptation? Because some of these are original text and some of them are just storyline similar.”

Who knew that Nicholas Cage’s 1983 “Valley Girl” was a Shakespeare adaptation? I remember staying up late to watch that one on Cinemax back when cable television was new.  Now I may have to go back and watch it again since I never made the connection.  The wikipedia page tells me there’s at least some similarly beyond the “star-crossed lovers” bit, as Cage’s “R”andy meets “Julie” when he crashes a party at her house. Does that mean that “T”ommy is supposed to be the Tybalt character? Because somebody may need to read the play again, as he’s Juliet’s cousin, not her boyfriend.

Oh, and I also recall there being a reasonable amount of gratuitous nudity, which I now realize must have been an homage to Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

Weird (But Mostly Well-Known) Shakespeare Productions

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I’ve seen most of these “weird” Shakespeare productions … except one. You know that Forbidden Planet is going to be on the list, and Klingon Hamlet (though I did not realize video productions exist). But Popeye doing Romeo and Juliet is a new one on me! I probably saw this as a kid forty years ago and never thought about it again. I’m pretty sure, though, that in the 10+ years I’ve been doing the blog, this hasn’t come up:

For something of more historical value, don’t miss the 1909 silent Midsummer Night’s Dream they’ve included.  I’ve got other posts up today looking at films of that era, so it was cool to see another one come up over here as well. Seems like they always had budget for costumes!

Sword Fights Galore!

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Sitting on my DVD shelf is the old 1936 Romeo and Juliet starring Norma Shearer.  I keep telling myself to watch it, but this the year 2016 and “watch the DVD” in this house means, “rip it on the computer, put it on the video server, and watch it at will on television.”  But of the four computers floating randomly around my house at any time – two modern Macbooks and two Chromebooks – none of them have a DVD drive. 🙁

So I was looking on YouTube for clips to post, and I discovered a channel called Sword Fights Galore! which is nothing but clips of sword fights from classic movies.  Awesome!

So, check it out – 1936 Romeo and Juliet, just the sword fights:

We start with Benvolio vs. Tybalt in the “Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues and thee” opening:

Then we jump right to Mercutio vs Tybalt.  “Come, you rat catcher! Will you walk?”

Doesn’t end well for Mercutio.  Enter Romeo the avenger! I love Tybalt’s death scene.

Poor Paris was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One of these days I’ll get the DVD into my online collection and get to watch the whole thing.  Of course now I’ve spoiled it for myself by watching all the good parts 😉

Silent Hamlet

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What did Hamlet look like in 1910?  I’m not talking about the Sarah Bernhardt version (1900), although it’s awesome that we have that.

No, I’m talking about this Italian production, which at first confused the heck out of me until I realized that it is just a collection of scenes, and not the whole play:

How many scenes do you recognize? I see Hamlet enter, reading. I see crazy Ophelia with her flowers. The special effects for the ghost scenes are lovely!  Wonderful to get an example of how they were experimenting with the medium over a century ago. There’s not even any sound, but they’re making ghosts.  Awesome.

The YouTube description calls this an Italian production, so I was surprised to see a card that reads “Der Wahnsinn Der Ophelia,” which I’m gonna go ahead and guess is actually German. Google translate happily tells me it means, “The madness of Ophelia.”

I could sit and watch this all night.  They actually add a scene where Ophelia discovers the dead body of her father!  How cool is that, that even without any text to work with, they’re still open to the interpretation of adding new scenes?

I tried to get more details on who these people are, but would you believe that IMDB lists two different 1910 Hamlets?

Data Mining Shakespeare with Wolfram

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I love finding stuff like this, it really bring out my inner geek.

The people over at Wolfram, who are perhaps best known these days as the acolytes in charge of the Wolfram Alpha search and research engine, have unleashed a tool to do word analysis on Shakespeare’s plays.  The sample make it pretty plain – they point to the MIT version of the text, then count words, then graph words. You’ve seen graphs like this often, I’m sure — how often are the words “love and death” used in Romeo and Juliet? What about darkness in Macbeth? Or blood?

The best part is that they didn’t just unleash a raw textual analyzer and say have at it like we’re all still college students looking for a thesis topic.  They’re crowd sourcing it.  They ask, “Could you think of data mining analysis or visualizations to apply to Shakespeare’s works?”


I bet we could! Who’s got ideas?