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.

My Interview with “Hamlet Supercut” Creator Geoff Klock

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Last week a good part of the Shakespeare fan universe was knocked on its collective Bottoms (see what I did there :)?) by the discovery of what’s best called a Hamlet Supercut – a 15 minute retelling of Hamlet made up entirely of 200+ movie and television references.  If you’ve not yet seen it, you’re in for a treat.  Warning, there’s a bit of NSFW dialogue so you might want to grab the headphones (more on that later):

Amazing, right?  Everybody I showed said the same thing.  I got a number of “I thought I knew a few references to add but he already had them!” and even one professor who said, “I teach this stuff for a living and I only knew about 60-70% of those!”

When the creator Geoff Klock introduced himself on Twitter I jumped at the chance to interview him by email.  I sent him half a dozen questions, all set to the tune of Hamlet quotes (hey I gotta show off my geek skills somewhere!), and he sent me back his answers.  Enjoy.

1) “What’s Shakespeare to you, or you to Shakespeare?” Tell us about yourself and the context for this project. We’ve all got “high school teacher” but what grade? Is this for honors/AP? Where in the world are you? How did the idea for this project come up and how long has it taken you?

I am actually not a high school teacher, though I have a lot in common with one. I teach at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is open admissions. I teach the two term freshman writing course, and also film and Brit Lit 1, where I teach Hamlet. To get my students interested in Hamlet I started collecting clips quoting it. It got out of hand. At a show called Kevin Geeks Out in NYC I saw a guy do a mash up Christmas Carol. I thought “That’s what I will do with the clips!” It took years, but that feels misleading, since it only took a few minutes a day, and then a handful of days to put it all together. I was doing other stuff!

2) “Tell us about the method to your madness.” There’s obviously a ridiculous amount of overlapping between all the references where you have to decide which reference to use for which line, or whether to do a whole bunch of them strung together. Any method to how you decided which clip goes with which line?

I tried to go with the most entertaining / recognizable clip I could. Given a choice in one show between a line I already had (such as “To be or not to be”) and a more obscure one (such as “I’ll call
the king, father, Royal dane!”) I tried to go with the lesser known one. In some Platonic Ideal Universe I could build the whole play out of quotes, I imagined. Also I had to cut all references to Hamlet in music and each show only got one bite — a lot of folks want to know where the Star Trek “Conscience of King” episode is but for that generation of Trek I wanted Christopher Plummer as a Klingon. Cause, obviously.

3) “F-words, f-words, f-words.” I’ve already heard a few people comment that they’d love to show this to their students, but several of the quotes drop that big f-bomb that is know to set parents aroar. Any particular reason why you chose to leave those in (since they’re not Shakespeare’s text)? Did it even come up when you were making this?
If you are teaching high school you are doing the Lord’s work. I could not hack it at that job. And if you have that job you don’t want to lose it and I get that. But too often teachers present intelligence
to students as something antiseptic. We imply that to be smart they need to dress like J Crew ads, put away childish pleasures like Batman, and talk and write like goddamn news broadcasters. Then we are shocked that they do not want to learn. I have a doctorate from Oxford, I wear converse with suits, and the two things I love best in this fucking world are Hamlet and The X-Men, and my students know that. And honestly, while “fuck” may not be in the text, Hamlet says to Ophelia that he wants to lie in her lap. He clarifies that he means his head upon her lap, and then asks her if she thought he meant “country matters.” Are we to leave students, who are always a single click of their phones away from every manner of Hard Core Porn, with the impression that Shakespeare is above a pun on the word “cunt?” The Hamlet Mash Up demonstrates that intelligence can coexist with trash culture, and that both are kickass. Cf. any movie by Quentin Tarantino for a further lesson on this subject.


4) “I have entreated geeks along with me to watch the 15 minutes of this video.” You’ve already told me that you’ve got more than a dozen clips to add and that your goal is “all of them.” I told a friend that if this was two hours long I’d invite people over and serve popcorn. How long do you think you can make it, and still have it be a useful teaching tool?

More than 15 minutes and it can’t be on YouTube. If you are not on YouTube you are not getting to all the people you can. Plus there is a tradition of the “15 minute Shakespeare” I want to stay in. It’s too long as it is. If I could start over I would just do To Be Or Not To Be.

5) “Well spoken, with good accent.” Several of the clips appear to be foreign language versions of Hamlet productions. Isn’t that cheating? If you open up that door couldn’t you do an entire video of nothing but versions of Hamlet from around the world? That’s really a different thing, isn’t it?

Are there a lot of foreign movies quoting Hamlet? I don’t know that many. If there are too many the foreign language ones will be the first thing cut in a next edition.

6) “I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i’ the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Does this only work for Hamlet, or could you set your sites on other Shakespeare works? What would your second choice be? Do you think it’s possible to find enough cultural references to, say, Midsummer Night’s Dream that you could make a similar video?


I am not doing any more of these. This was hard enough and I am clearly missing 15 things at least. I will keep this one as up to date if I can, maybe releasing an update a year or something. I tried to do it with MacBeth but MacBeth is not as sound-bite-y as Hamlet as so the clips had to be longer, and it was a mess. You could do one of Romeo and Juliet maybe but the whole thing would be pop culture characters saying “A rose by any other name” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art
thou Romeo.”

Thanks very much Geoff!  I apologize for assuming you were a high school teacher, I don’t know where I got that. Maybe somebody else will pick up the gauntlet and make another one of these, just as you suggest!

Could It Be, Hmmm, I Don’t Know … SEYTON!?!?!

~ duane ~ 13 Comments

(Does a “Church Lady” impression date me pretty badly?)

Bardfilm wanted some academic discussion on Twitter today, and knowing that it’s very hard to learn anything permanent on Twitter (try Googling for it later!) I’m summarizing in a blog post, but you can check to see if the #SeytonSatan hashtag is still active.

Question: In Macbeth, would “Seyton” be pronounced like “Satan”?  And, if so, would that have suggested some sort of desired audience reaction?  When Macbeth calls, “Seyton!” would the audience have been all, “He’s calling SATAN?! Dude’s evil!”   (My paraphrase.  Bardfilm’s original question had more “you betcha”).

There’s much that’s been said on the topic but little of academic note.

On the subject of sounding it out, I linked in @BenCrystal, an expert in original pronunciation (OP), who responded, “I’d say them the same in OP, something like [‘sei-tun] with a really soft /t/.” This then led to a discussion about when exactly the Scots burr came into the language (after the arrival of King James) and whether Macbeth would have been played that way.

But what of the whole Satan thing?  Do we think that Shakespeare intended to put Satan in the mind of his audience?

My personal position on this is perhaps too grounded – what happens next?  The audience hears Macbeth call, “Satan!” and then this regular old soldier shows up and starts taking orders.  So either you just get this brief scare where the audience is left thinking, “Oh, phew, for a minute there I thought Macbeth was actually calling you know who!” and then we go about our business.  Or we get something more like, “Who’s this guy?  Is that Satan in the form of one of Macbeth’s soldiers?  Oooo, I bet he’s going to do something just off-the-charts evil.”

I just don’t know enough about the time period to know if this was a thing that Shakespeare would even attempt.  Did you get to mention Satan on stage like that?  Would Shakespeare have suggested that Macbeth was so evil as to invoke the big man himself?  And, worse, order him around like a lackey?

Lots of discussion material here.  Show of hands, who’s done the Scottish play and has an opinion from experience?

What Comics Can Take From Shakespeare

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I tagged this article by John Ostrander without knowing who he is.  I gathered from a quick skim that he is an author of comic books, who cites Shakespeare as one of his influences.  I like that.  I’m reminded of last week’s Ben Kingsley story where he said that he “Brings a little Shakespeare into everything he does.”  Which in turn reminds me of the great Martin Luther King’s quote about, and I will paraphrase this because I’ve got to get back to the topic at hand, “If you are called to sweep streets, then sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry.” Amen, Dr. King.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yeah, John Ostrander on what the comics can take from Shakespeare. The fact that he uses Measure for Measure as his primary example shows that there’s going to be some depth to his argument, he’s not just pulling high school memories of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet and doing little but name dropping our dear bard.  Mr. Ostrander’s apparently thought a lot about this.

A brief excerpt:

Explore all sides of the question. What did Shakespeare think on any given question? It’s hard to tell because he would give convincing arguments to both (or more) sides of a question.

He then uses the example of Claudio preparing for his possible death, first speaking with the Duke and accepting it, but then turning around and telling his sister Isabella how much he fears it.

Which attitude speaks Shakespeare’s true mind? 

Both. Both are true, to the moment, to the character, to the author, and for the reader or audience. It comes down to which is truer for us and that was Shakespeare’s intent or what I learned from it. Shakespeare had a many faceted mind and he used it in his work.

That’s just one of several points he makes (although, to be temper my original praise, his point about Hamlet seems a little thin.)

Oh, and before I wrote this I had to google Mr. Ostrander so that I didn’t get schooled by the comic geeks in the audience for not knowing him.  Turns out he’s not only done time with Marvel and DC, he’s contributed to the Star Wars universe as well.  Looks like his Shakespeare lessons have been serving him well!

Happy Shakespeare Mother’s Day!

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

In honor of our moms, this week we imagine what Mother’s Day cards might have been like from Shakespeare’s characters.  Shakespeare is a bit like Disney in not giving us very many mothers to work with, but we do our best.

Happy Mother’s Day!

“Dearest Mother, I can not begin to tell you how thankful I am that you did not pluck your nipple from my toothless gums and dash my brains out.” 

“Mom, I know you don’t always like to express just how much you care about me, but I know you do because you died of grief at the end of our play.  Offstage of course.  Love, Romeo.” 

“To The Woman Who Raised Me As If I Were Her Own Daughter,   I’m totally crushing on your son Bertram, could help me hook that up?” 

“What would I do for you, Mother?  I would spare Rome, even if you did embarrass me in front of Aufidius and his friends.” 

“For A Wonderful Mother-In-Law on Mother’s Day.  Sorry about the Tybalt thing Mrs. Capulet, I totally understand why you tried to have me executed.” 

“You Are The Queen, Your Husband’s Brother’s Wife, and Would It Were Not So You Are My Mother.  Happy Mother’s Day. “

Kinderbard

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I think that Daeshin Kim would be fun to hang out with.  We have a lot in common.  We both think that it’s never too young to expose our children to Shakespeare. We both think that music is a key component in doing that.  I sing lullabies, never met a pun I didn’t like, and post stories of my geeklets wisdom here on the blog.

And then Daeshin goes off and produces Kinderbard, and we’re in different leagues.  Clearly a labor of love for him and his family, Daeshin and his 5yr old daughter Sherman wrote and produced a collection of nursery rhymes – including Sherman singing them! – that they call “A Horse With Wings” (Imogen, from Cymbeline).  Each rhyme is sung from the perspective of a Shakespeare character, and attempts the dual task of teaching a lesson (or dealing with an issue) while providing some context about the character doing the singing.

Example?  Juliet’s song, “It’s just a name.”  If you know the story of Romeo and Juliet you’ll immediately recognize the idea behind Juliet’s “What’s in a name?” speech.  Here, sung by Sherman, it’s a song about dealing with teasing when your perhaps your own name is on the more unusual side.

Or maybe Cordelia’s “I don’t know what to say” song, encouraging shy children to speak up for themselves.

Of course there are the silly ones, too.  Two Gentlemen of Verona‘s contribution is the “Smelly Dog” song, and let me just tell you now, the dog doesn’t smell because it needs a bath, it smells because of what somebody’s been feeding it.  If you get what I mean.

And then there’s Falstaff’s dirty laundry song, where he comes face to face with something so disgusting I’m not going to blog about it (but it will no doubt have younger children in stitches).

Honestly there’s not a great deal of Shakespeare in this.  The coverage is impressive, with contributions from 16 different plays (not just “the big ones”).  Where possible they sneak in direct references (Yorick sings about giving piggyback rides, and As You Like It’s Jaques pretty much sings a simplified version of his entire ages of man speech), and there is some artwork with original quotes.  But I don’t think that a child is going to come away from any of the songs with any long term understanding of Shakespeare.  Although I’ve often said that at the youngest age, the most important thing is recognition of character and maybe plot.  So if the kids who work through Kinderbard learn about Ariel and Yorick and Cordelia and remember those names?  It’s a good start!

Disclaimer – Daeshin and I have discussed this, and he’s clear that his goal is “a songbook that happens to have Shakespeare as its source”, and that he is not primarily attempting to teach Shakespeare.  So I don’t feel as if I’m throwing him under the bus by going here.  This is, after all, a Shakespeare blog so I have to take the logical angle.  If I saw this on a shelf I’d want to know how much Shakespeare my kids are going to get out of it.

My kids are too old for the collection now, but I’d like to think that if it had existed when mine were still young enough that I was popping nursery rhyme CDs into the car stereo when we drove around town?  That I would have picked it up.  If nothing else Kinderbard shows what can happen when you’ve got the kid of passion for a project that Daeshin has demonstrated.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world.   In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!