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.

The Curious Case of Five Hamlets

~ duane ~ 8 Comments

So Saturday was the big day! I’d been training my girls on Hamlet, so that they could actually understand what was going on before seeing the play produced by the local high school (where they’ll be going in a few years, and hopefully performing).

My son has religious education practice, so he couldn’t join us. Which gave my wife this opportunity to a quick cheap shot:

Son: How come the girls don’t have to go?

Wife: The girls are going to see Hamlet.

Son: How come they get to have fun!

Wife: They’re not. They’re going to see Hamlet.

Ouch.  I’ll get you for that.

Anyway, the girls put on their Shakespeare is Universal shirts and we head to the show.

And, as always, I end up disappointed. In my brain I tell myself that I’m about to walk into a whole bunch of people of all ages who want to talk about Shakespeare, and education, and educating people about Shakespeare. I imagine people engaging my kids in conversation when they see their shirts.  I imagine seeing parents whose kids got to read Hamlet last week because of me.

None of this happens. One volunteer says, “I like your shirt” to one of my girls, and that is the entirety of discussion.  This is not a mingly crowd. This is a crowd made up entirely of parents whose kids are on stage.  I don’t know what I expected (well, that’s not true, see above) but I should have known better.

While waiting for the show to start, my girls read the program and begin asking me who “Juggler” and “Lady Nora” are.  I have no frickin idea who those people are, until we decide that they’ve given proper names to all of the Players.  Fine.

My older then notices that the character of Hamlet shows up twice in the list.  I figure that is understudy or something, but it’s not marked that way. We then realize that there are *5* Hamlets listed.  All girls.  Interesting. I assume that this is a case of the director needing to cast everybody who auditioned, or something.

The play begins, and out come … all the Hamlets?  This should be interesting.

They immediately launch into the “too too solid flesh” speech, entirely out of context.  They yell it, in sync with each other.  I guess this is supposed to give us our backstory, because it touches on the death of Hamlet’s father and the o’erhasty marriage of his mother to his uncle.  But honestly, what are you doing? If somebody came to this play actually trying to understand it for the very first time, why would you do that?  Both my girls asked me what was going on, and I just shrugged and said I’d explain later.  My expectations were all messed up now.

After the five Hamlets, then the play begins with the famous “Who’s there?” and the changing of the guard.  At least from that point on, I’m pretty sure they stuck to the script.

The five Hamlets come out at the same time.  Four hang back while one delivers lines.  They often switch. During the big speeches they interchange their lines, speak in sync, and other gimmicky things.  I’m still not sure what this is supposed to be.  I thought maybe it could be some sort of “facets of Hamlet’s personality” thing, but I don’t think that’s what the director was going for – they are all dressed identically, even during costume changes.  There is a certain progression of Hamlet’s insanity as his (her?) wardrobe unravels throughout the play, but that’s the only real development of this device I saw.

Followers on Twitter may have seen my rant about this, but THEY CUT YORICK.  We have a gravedigger’s scene, including all the gravedigger jokes, and at one point the gravedigger starts pulling skulls out of the grave in front of Hamlet and Horatio.  But, no Yorick speech.

I should mention that this performance is part of a “90 minute Shakespeare” festival.  So there’s to be cuts. Sometimes, big ones. I do not envy the director who has to decide what to cut. But I am curious whether any of you cut the Yorick speech.

Other bits that were cut include Hamlet coming across Claudius at prayer and deciding not to kill him. Also, Ophelia only got a single crazy scene (before Laertes returns home).  I think they just folded everything for her into the single scene, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what might have been cut.

What they didn’t cut? Fortinbras. All the Fortinbras scenes (including all the Cornelius and Voltimand scenes) remain.  I thought that an odd choice, if they were aggressively cutting for running time.  Take the ending, for example. Did we end on “The rest is silence”?  Nope.  Hamlet dies.  Then Fortinbras (who the audience has only seen once) enters, and Horatio actually shouts his final lines, stomping up and down the stage, and I’m like, “WTF is he doing?” Fortinbras then gets the final lines, although I should go back and check my text because I did not hear “Bid the soldiers shoot.”

Observations from my kids:

* I pointed out when “To be or not to be” was coming. My oldest held out her hand and said, “No skull?”  So she clearly was still getting the two speeches confused.  I’ve seen lots of people do that.  It doesn’t help that I have a t-shirt that shows the To Be speech drawn out in the shape of Yorick’s skull.

* My younger was mostly lost.  It didn’t help that they could barely hear what was going on, so if they didn’t have a very clear understanding of the characters and plot to follow along, I could see where it would be confusing.

* They both spotted the doubling. The actor playing the ghost showed up in some other role, which they spotted…and I’m pretty sure that dead Polonius played the priest at Ophelia’s funeral, which was really confusing.

* During Ophelia’s singing, my oldest leaned over to me and said, “I am so doing this.”  I asked, “You want to play Ophelia?”  She said, “Well, any role, but Shakespeare definitely.”

* My oldest told me that she saw at least one fellow student from her class, and wondered whether he’d been convinced to come see the play after reading my book.  I expect that the odds were more in favor of his sister being a Hamlet.

I only went to one performance of three, so I have no idea what the crowd was like at the other two. I’ve not yet received any actual feedback from the teachers who were using my text in their classes.  I’d like to think that I helped, but honestly between the way they cut this production and the fact that it was impossible to follow the text when you couldn’t hear it, I don’t know how much I helped.

The Artist Formerly Known as Prince Hamlet

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

Oh, it’s on now.

While working on my Hamlet guide for the kids I wanted to make sure I had my capitalization rules correct, so I asked on Twitter.  When speaking of Hamlet, do you capitalize the word “prince”?  I figure there’s multiple ways to say it:

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Hamlet, who happens to be Prince of Denmark
Prince Hamlet of Denmark

and so on.

What I got back for the most part said, “If he is the only prince, i.e. he has no siblings, then it is his title and titles are capitalized. So, always Prince.”

Until this morning when a professional copy editor checked in and said, “Nope, titles in general are not capitalized.  Prince Hamlet yes, but Hamlet prince of Denmark is just a description so no.”

Let the bloodshed begin.  Which is it?  Cite your references.

Hamlet’s Crazy Timeline

~ duane ~ 9 Comments

I’m working my way through a Hamlet summary for my daughter (their high school is performing Hamlet next week!) and I want to make sure I understand something.  Here’s the timeline of how Hamlet’s “antic disposition” goes down:

* Hamlet sees ghost.  Hatches plan to “put an antic disposition on.”

* Scene with Polonius where Ophelia runs in to tell her father that “she has been so affrighted” that Hamlet wandered into her room looking all crazy and what not. Polonius decides that he’s mad from love and runs to tell the king and queen.

* Scene with Claudius and Gertrude, who have already summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to snap Hamlet out o this mood he’s been in.

* Polonius enters, announcing that he has discovered the cause of Hamlet’s madness. The queen says well duh it’s obviously his father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.

* Polonius then reads the love letters that Hamlet has sent Ophelia.

So I’m trying to figure out how much time is going by here.  If we take Ophelia out of the picture we’re led to believe that significant time has passed, for Claudius and Gertrude to decide that something’s wrong with Hamlet and to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, right?  Everybody seems to agree that something’s wrong with Hamlet, and has been for awhile.

If that’s true … then how does the Ophelia story work into it? Why now all of a sudden is she so suddenly affrighted? Doesn’t she know that Hamlet is crazy? And, doesn’t Polonius also know that Hamlet is crazy?

Maybe Polonius has an epiphany here, maybe in whatever months have gone by Hamlet’s had nothing to do with Ophelia (as Polonius desired), but now he suddenly bursts in on her and Polonius says “Aha!  He’s clearly mad because he hasn’t been close to my daughter! I’ve cracked the case!”

But if *that* is true…then where did the love poems come from?  He doesn’t apparently give her anything when he barges into her room.  And if the letters were part of what Ophelia gave over to her father back at the beginning when she was initially asked, those would have been written at a time before Hamlet was supposedly nuts.  So that means that Hamlet’s been writing letters to Ophelia during these intervening months?

Is that it?  Ophelia is no longer speaking to Hamlet. Hamlet is writing letters to Ophelia, which she is not answering, and he’s getting more and more desperate.  Nobody notices the connection. But now he’s so desperate he’s getting physical, and Polonius finally connects the dots.

Do I have that right?

Review : Shakespeare At Play’s “Romeo and Juliet”

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

By very strange coincidence I received two independent requests for review recently for almost the exact same thing – interactive Shakespeare for my iPad. Here’s the thing, though – one is an interactive book, and one is an app. Other than this technicality they are nearly identical both in function as well as what they hope to accomplish. As such I cannot help but review them against each other. Here we look at the app.


Read the plays or see them performed?

It’s a question we’ve beaten into the ground over the years and my position has always been that it’s the “or” that causes trouble. You absolutely positively without doubt should do one and the other. The constraints of daily life are what decide which you have the better opportunity to accomplish.

Every time I have a new project I think to myself, book or app? The traditional book format reaches a wider audience with simpler requirements, but you sacrifice  your ability to really dig in and create a truly interactive experience.  An app is a more complex beast, taking longer to produce for what is ultimately a smaller audience, but you get to make it do exactly what you envisioned.
Today we have the Shakespeare At Play app for review.  Much like other offerings in this space, this product walks you through Shakespeare’s work by providing half a page of text and half a page of video.  Each scene gets an audio description, a textual description, and a textual description of the characters.
Before getting into the quality of the content, I want to mention a few other features. Under the global Menu option is a Shakespeare FAQ, whose purpose I did not truly understand. It’s just a text file, not even searchable. There is an integrated glossary, which is a nice touch.  As you read you’ll see some words in boldface.  Hold your finger on one, and you’ll get the definiton.
There is also a Download Manager. In my previous post I mentioned that without internet connectivity I was unable to stream the videos, thus giving a point to the more traditional book format. However, you can opt to download all the videos and take them with you. The thing is you need to plan to do that ahead of time, it’s still not going to work if your internet goes out :).
This is also a player app for multiple titles, and as such it has its own Library (unlike iBooks, where going to Library takes you out of each individual title).  As of this moment I think that their Library functionality needs work, it took me ages to figure out that I’m supposed to click on the unadorned price box under each title in order to complete the in-app purchase and actually get my book.
Lastly, what I think is perhaps the most useful feature of the entire app.  Running alongside the text is not what I’d call modern translation, but more like “director’s notes” telling you what’s going on, and why.  An example:

Presumably Gregory sees Tybalt approaches, which is confusing as it is Benvolio who arrives first. This could mean that Tybalt is seen by Samson and Gregory, but is positioned so as to surprise Benvolio.

This commentary runs throughout the play, and I thought it was an excellent addition.
Ok, with features out of the way let’s talk about the content.  In this particular case I’ve chosen Romeo and Juliet, since I did Macbeth in a previous review.  The company’s Hamlet is listed as “Coming Soon”.
Similar to the previous title I reviewed, each scene is a bare stage (that in this case blends almost completely into the page), tightly focused on the speaking characters. This puts an unfortunate focus on the quality of the acting, which is far from award winning.  It’s more like people just got in front of the character with the intent of demonstrating how the lines should go.  But that’s fine, it’s not like Sir Ian and Sir Patrick are just hanging out waiting for their phone call.  The value of these apps is in their interactivity, not their stagecraft.  I don’t mean to fault the enthusiasm of the actors who made this, I just don’t think that this nothing-but-character-closeups method of filming is the best way to present Shakespeare. 
Each video represents an entire scene, which you follow along by vertically scrolling the text in a separate frame. I would love it if these could be synced up in some way.  If you let the video run for a few minutes and then actually have a question, it’s going to take you awhile to find that spot in the text. Similarly if you’re reading ahead and want to jump the video to a certain place, you’ll have equal trouble.  
I’m at a complete loss as to what I’m supposed to do when I get to the end of a scene.  There’s no obvious way to move to the next one.  The unobvious way is to tap the current Act and Scene button at the top of the page, which brings down a menu and allows you to pick another scene.  I find this so unintuitive that I assume I’m just missing something.  Sure, it allows you to easily jump around the play.  But aren’t most reader/watchers going to most often want to simply say “next scene”?
What else….  the audio commentary I suppose is a nice idea, but the interface needs work. Unlike the video player which has the traditional pause buttons and progress bars, the audio offers none of that, just a play button. Every time you stop and start, it starts over.  Which I’d be fine with except for the fact that there’s no way to tell how long he’s going to talk!  Is this a 45 second commentary or a 12 minute one?  That makes a big difference.
I’d like to see many more features to bring an app like this on par with a book.  Highlighting passages and taking notes would be a big one.  That seems like an easy add.  As I mentioned I’d like the video and text to stay in sync, even going so far as to seamlessly jump between scenes so you could if you wanted just watch the whole book end to end.
Right now I think that the “director’s commentary” I spoke of is the best part of this app.  Perhaps they could marry this together with the video syncing and the audio commentary to produce something more like a modern DVD?  Where the user could opt to turn on the commentary track and then following through the play in text and video, while listening to the director’s notes?  That would be seriously cool.
Shakespeare at Play comes in both iPhone and iPad editions. The app itself is free, but in-app purchase is required for the plays you wish to study.

Shakespeare’s Storybook

~ duane ~ Leave a comment



So a few weeks ago I’m at one of those elementary school fairs you see from time to time, where they set up some inflatable jumpy houses for the kids and a few arts and crafts picnic tables, and a bunch of local vendors set up tents on the lawn and showcase their wares.  This one actually is for my niece, and until that morning I had no idea I was even going.

I spy a booth with books!  As I always do, I scan for Shakespeare and quickly spot Shakespeare’s Storybook by Patrick Ryan.  The shopkeeper tells me, “That one is actually a collection of the fairy tales that Shakespeare used as the source for some of his stories!”

I give her the raised eyebrow.  “According to whom?”

“….research?” she replies, likely having never been asked that question before.  She flips to the back of the book and shows me the bibliography.

Fair enough. I buy it and take it home.  Worst case I’ve got blog content, and something for the kids to read.

The book itself is simply structured, offering up a very high level summary of the play, followed by its connection to the fairy tale.  Some connections are more questionable than others.

First we have Romeo and Juliet connected to a story called Hill of Roses, about the star-crossed couple who use red and white roses to communicate their plans to meet secretly.  That is, until Julietta’s kinsman Tibbott causes the death of Romeus’ friend Quicksilver, and tragedy piles upon tragedy.

What I can’t fully figure out is whether these are supposed to be stories that already existed, that Ryan has compiled?  Or originals that he has rewritten?  Because when I search for “hill of roses” and “shakespeare” I get literally no hits … other than references to this book.

But then later in the book we get the comparison of King Lear to the “Cap-o-Rushes story”, a connection which is well documented, if tenuous.  The story itself has almost nothing to do with Lear, other than the opening about what disagreement might have caused the falling out between father and daughter in the first place.  Other than that the story is classic fairy tale and looks more like Cinderella than Shakespeare.

It’s a fun book, and I think the kids will enjoy it, but there’s not really any Shakespeare in it other than a couple of plot devices. We learn that As You Like It is really a cross between Snow White and Robin Hood.  Our Petruchio and Katherine have to deal with an evil water spirit, and our Portia is happy to live the single life.  So I’m finding it amusing to read about how closely each fairy tale mirrors Shakespeare’s story, and where I’ve seen elements of it elsewhere (such as the Cinderella one).

The really neat coincidence, and I mentioned this in a previous post, is that my son’s second grade teacher brought up the fairy tale connection to Shakespeare before I could suggest it.  So it looks like this book will fit in perfectly!  Either I can pick a story they know (like Snow White) and cross over, or I can pick some Shakespeare they are more likely to know (Romeo and Juliet / Gnomeo and Juliet) and come in that way. Should be fun!