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 Overload

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

My oldest daughter has gone a bit Shakespeare insane lately, and I’m ok with it.

1) She’s currently writing a time-travelling young adult novel that features the characters from Midsummer Night’s Dream coming to life (out of the imagination of Mr. William Shakespeare) and growing up as regular everyday high school kids with no knowledge of their “true” selves until they’re called upon to save Shakespeare’s daughter Susannah.

2) She brought home a *shudder* Modern English translation of Midsummer from school.  I held it up with two fingers like a bit of rotten banana peel and demanded to know who’d brought such a thing into my house.  She told me that she had so many questions she didn’t want to keep pestering me.  I said, “Yeah but I have like 5 versions of this play over on the bookshelf you could have used one of those.”

3) She has taken to quizzing both her fellow students and teachers alike on Shakespeare. What is she asking them?  “What’s the name of the witch in The Tempest?” and “What’s Lady Macbeth’s real name?” I suggested that maybe she should let them crawl before she asks them to sprint. We toned it down to “What’s the name of the girl Romeo likes before he meets Juliet?” and “Is Mercutio a Montague or a Capulet?”  and yes that second one is a trick question.

4) She found out that in 8th grade they read Romeo and Juliet.  She’s in 6th grade now.  She’s already anticipating just how well she’s going to do in that class!

This year’s Shakespeare posting marathon is sponsored by “Shakespeare is Universal.” Help us prove that Shakespeare makes life better. Buy a t-shirt and support cancer research.

Parsing Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare make an outstanding dataset for projects like this, which looked at how often various “couples” in Shakespeare spend talking to each other.

There’s a number of reasons, of course, why the actual “results” are only somewhat interesting. The amount of lines exchanged between two characters is not really an indicator of their compatibility or the strength of their relationship, as is demonstrated by the finding that Romeo and Juliet don’t spend all that much time together. You could alter your hypothesis, for example, and maybe look at the average number of lines per scene? Obviously characters that only have 3 scenes together are going to have less lines than those that have 5 or more.
I’m also disappointed that they didn’t do every play. Why, in such a finite dataset as this, don’t you do a complete analysis? Where is Much Ado About Nothing?  I’d like to see them release the source code. It could be fun to play with.
The project also reminds me of the Bechdel Movie Test, which measures how frequently women communicate with each other about a subject other than men. How cool would it be for scriptwriters to upload their draft into a test like this to see how they do?

New “Enemy of Man” (Macbeth) Trailer

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Shortlist has a look at the trailer for the upcoming Macbeth adaptation “Enemy of Man”, starring Sean Bean in the title role (that title being “Macbeth”, not “Man” nor “Enemy”. :))

I don’t like Sean Bean with short hair. Doesn’t seem right.

I really wanted to see this trailer based on something else that Shortlist said a few months ago, when they referred to this one as “cutting back on the dialogue and cranking up the action.” Because that’s why we go to see Shakespeare, for the action.  Maybe they’ll do Hemingway next.

If you’re as curious as I was I’ll save you the trouble – the only text you get is a voiceover of the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech.  That’s nothing.  They could work that into a high school musical if they wanted. Doesn’t tell us anything about how far they stray from the plot or anything. Heck even Fellowes’ Romeo and Juliet gave us a better indication of why we wouldn’t want to see it.

Oh, and it’s got Ron “Rupert Grint” Weasley in it, swimming in his armor.  No idea what role he plays.  Wait, I can look that up….from the Kickstarter page, he plays Ross.

ROSS? That’s funny. Look at how much screen time he gets in the trailer.  I hope nobody is coming to this one just to see their Harry Potter crush.

I also learned on IMDB that people have been talking about this one since 2003 (at least!) and that Courtney Love was supposed to be in it at one point?  I may have to see it just to see what took them so long.

Real-time Tempest?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Does The Tempest take place in real-time?

There are several references to “three hours”  –

ALONSO

If thou be’st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wreck’d upon this shore; where I have lost–
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!–
My dear son Ferdinand.

And then, shortly after:

ALONSO

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Your eld’st acquaintance cannot be three hours:
Is she the goddess that hath sever’d us,
And brought us thus together?

Maybe that technically counts as one because it’s Alonso both times.  Earlier, though, Miranda had said this:

MIRANDA

Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoin’d to pile!
Pray, set it down and rest you: when this burns,
‘Twill weep for having wearied you. My father
Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself;
He’s safe for these three hours.

She’s clearly not talking about the same window of time there.  Not only does it happen earlier in the play (when Alonso’s three hours won’t have passed yet), but she’s talking about her father being out of their hair for at least the next three hours.

Just one of those interesting things you spot from time to time. If Romeo and Juliet is “two hours’ traffic of the stage,” and a full text Hamlet is four hours, how long would The Tempest have been?

Ancient History

~ duane ~ 1 Comment
It’s a little weird running a blog like this one for as long as I have. You eventually get to a point where you realize that you’ve been documenting your own life, and you come back to your own notes as reference points.  

What many new readers may not realize is that this blog existed in a different form, long since offline, before even June 2005 when Shakespeare Geek was born.

Yesterday I was looking for the story about the very first time I told The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story.  I remember how it went, how they knew Shakespeare as “the name of the song that Daddy’s phone plays” because I had David Gilmour’s Sonnet 18 as my ringtone.  She asked me who Shakespeare was, and I told her that he wrote the greatest stories anybody has ever written.

I found this post in my offline archives, from June 20, 2005:

I want my kids to learn Shakespeare, just like I want them to learn about computers.  But at 3years old, I have to pick and choose what Katherine is exposed to.  So if I’m going to pick the first play for her to learn, which should it be? 

The tragedies are all right out because she doesn’t get the concept of people dying yet. 

I think The Tempest is perfect.  One of the main characters after all is Miranda, a naive little girl.  Sure, maybe she’s a teenager in most interpretations of the play (and, I believe, according to Prospero’s math), but I don’t think that matters in fairy tale rules.  All the princesses always end up getting married to a prince and living happily ever after in those.  And that basically happens here, too.

So, it must have been after that :).  But check it out, from January 8, 2006! A story about finding some Shakespeare books at a dollar store.

“Before leaving I came up with Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear (!), and The Tempest. I’m particularly pleased by those last two, because I am not nearly as familiar with the plot points of King Lear as I would like (who is?), and I have in the past attempted to tell The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story, and having a mini freeform script of the play in a pocket reference like this will possibly help me succeed in that attempt.” 

In June I was thinking about it, and by January I’d done it.  My plan was in full swing, apparently, by August 2006 when we went to see Taming of the Shrew with some friends in Boston. The poor woman made the mistake of telling me that Shrew was better than Hamlet, because people like comedies, not dark depressing stuff.  No, wait – it gets worse:

“Know what else I hate?” this woman continues, perhaps not realizing or caring how much she has fallen in my eyes. “The Tempest.” 

“I’ve read The Tempest to my 3yr old as a bedtime fairy tale,” I tell her. 

“And did she understand it?” 

“She asked me for it. Repeatedly.”

I don’t know if they ever found her body. 🙂