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.

Prince of Cats! Hip Hop Shakespeare Comic

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Though not a huge comic fan myself, I’m always curious when a new comic / Shakespeare adaptation pops up.  I’ve seen my share of graphic novels and “Manga Shakespeare,” and the Kill Shakespeare series has certainly had its share of the spotlight lately.  Then there’s the classic, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books.

So here we have new entry Prince of Cats, a “hip hop” retelling of the obvious (Romeo and Juliet,  just in case it’s not obvious — Prince of Cats is something that Mercutio calls Tybalt).  I’m about as far from “street” as they come, so I’m not sure how much of an opinion I get on this sort of thing.  Mostly because I don’t know how much it takes itself seriously and how much is a play on the classic “blacksploitation” flicks of old.

As always I’m interested in the source material, and how much survives.  From the screenshots found in the article I see gems like these:

“Sheeeeit, where’s Tybalt?”

and

“Indeed, knave! Redeem thy kicks for thy skin.”

Interesting.  I’ll leave it up to other more “culturally sensitive” folks to tell me what I’m supposed to think of this project.  I didn’t want to ignore it just because I don’t know what to say about it.

One question, though — why is that one dude wearing his hat down over his face?  He looks like a character straight out of Fat Albert.

More on the Psychology of Romeo and Juliet

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

A couple weeks ago I stumble across a mention of The Romeo and Juliet Effect in a book about motivation and will power.

Today among the various Shakespeare feeds I scan I spotted this 2008 Psychology Today article entitled, “Romeo and Juliet’s Death Trip: Addictive Love and Teen Suicide.”  

There are no great insights to be found.  The author pretty much skims the story for various death references and ties them all back to suicide, including the claim that Romeo is suicidal over Rosaline at the opening of the play.  I think that’s a bit much.  That’s not suicidal, that’s emo.  Not the same thing.

The article’s at least entertaining, though, and I appreciate that.  I wonder how far his tongue was in his cheek while writing it?

Father Laurence tries cognitive behavior therapy:

I’ll give thee armour to keep off that word:
Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy (read “psychology”),
To comfort thee, though thou art banished. . . .
rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array.

But then (oy!!!) the good Father resorts to pharmacology: he gives Juliet a potion to make her appear dead.

The Romeo and Juliet Effect

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

So on my way to work this morning I’m listening to an audiobook in my car all about motivation, will power and stuff like that – how the brain works kind of stuff.  And in a chapter about how you can’t tell your brain “Stop thinking about X” I get to this:

This might explain what psychologists know as the well-known “Romeo and Juliet” effect, where love for another person only becomes stronger when it is forbidden.(*)

Ummm……huh?  I’m trying to decide if that’s psychobabble for “We are saying this *about* the characters of Romeo and Juliet”, in other words they fell that deeply in love precisely because they could not be together … or else if this is just a modern acknowledgment of a modern idea, and they’ve simply slapped a cliche onto it.

What do you think?  Am I reading too much into it, in the hopes of pulling a blog post out of it?  Or do you think that Romeo liked that girl at the party, and when he learned that she was a Capulet, only then did he think “I can’t live without her!”

Somehow I don’t think the text supports that.  Granted, I think that every 13yr old who thinks she is in love with the gangsta down the street and whose parents say she can’t see him anymore?  So she climbs out her bedroom window to go hang out with him?  That, I think, is the Romeo and Juliet effect.  And that’s not at all what Shakespeare was talking about.

(*) From memory, of course, so nobody pick on the book for any lapses in grammar – that’s my fault.

Messing With The Ending

~ duane ~ 7 Comments

Coriolanus bringing out the boy to end the play last night is certainly not the first example of a director taking some license with the ending.  Does Romeo die knowing that Juliet is alive?  Baz Luhrman thinks so.  And then there’s that old example that I always forget to attribute properly where Fortinbras, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot” is actually a command to execute Horatio, the last survivor.  And speaking of Coriolanus, plenty of people were upset at just how differently the movie ended compared to the play.    (Related, I actually saw a neat Hamlet once where the ghost of Polonius came to walk the ghost of Ophelia offstage.  Great way to get the actress’ dead body offstage.  But we’re talking about endings here, and not middles.)

So here’s my question – what productions have you seen (stage or screen) where the director kept to the script, but decided to throw in a twist you weren’t expecting?  Of course, “kept to the script” is subject to interpretation since the whole play is already edited to the director’s vision.  In general, though, I’m talking about visual and action that happens in between the text.  Whether Romeo knows is based entirely on whether Juliet opens her eyes, and he sees it.  Stuff like that.

Commonwealth Shakespeare 2012 Presents Coriolanus : Part 2

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

Ok, now that you’ve heard the story of how I got there, let’s talk about the show.  It should be noted that other than my introduction to the play via the recent Ralph Fiennes movie, I don’t have much detailed knowledge of the little things.

Taken to an extreme, it’s hard to explain Coriolanus to someone without sounding like a punchline — “This big bad war hero declares war on Rome and promises to burn it to the ground, until his mother comes and lays the guilt trip on him and makes him promise to play nice.”  Of course the interesting bits are in how we get there, and in why this can happen like it does.  The Fiennes’ movie (with Vanessa Redgrave as the mom) had some pretty deep and dark emotional baggage.  This one felt like it was playing more for the comedy angle.

The scenery is plain, wooden, with a burnt-out feeling to it.  At first I think it conjures up a little too much of a pastoral / foresty vibe rather than the industrial sort of thing I was expecting, but not to the point of distraction.  As is typical with all of the staging of their productions, they’ve got stairs to a landing stage left, and a higher balcony stage right.  There’s a main entrance through doors center stage, but that’s typically used for special stage directions – most actors entrances and exits come from the audience.

One of the downsides to seeing the same group perform a different play every year is that their characters begin to blend.  No more is this more true than with their comedian Fred Sullivan, who was so definitive as Nick Bottom that I’ve struggled to hear him portray anything differently since.  He was Brabantio, Parolles, and now Menenius.  I did not yet have an appreciation for how funny Menenius could be!  Fred’s got what I can best describe as a classic Abbott and Costello sense of timing, equally able to deliver the straight line, the zinger, or to burst into over the top ranting and raving.  Every year it’s a treat to watch (and hear) him.

Likewise, Volumnia is portrayed this year by the same woman who did The Countess last year in All’s Well That Ends Well.  I apologize for not having her name handy, I do not have a program with it (I know Fred’s name from years of paying attention to his characters).  I wasn’t sure what to do with Volumnia who is first seen playing guns with Coriolanus’ son, fingers cocked and pointed and shouting “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh” at the boy as he play stumbles to his death down the stairs.   She is a joyful lady at this point, who doesn’t appear to have a care in the world.  Her son, her wonderful son!  A war hero!  She can’t wait for him to come home, with his shield or on it (no, she doesn’t say that, but that’s the idea).  Her tone doesn’t change in the slightest when she talks about the pride she would have in her son if he died, something that Coriolanus’ wife never quite seems to comprehend.  This was not what I expected.  But, then again, this gave her a great deal of room to change as the play progresses, which I think worked well.

Coriolanus is little more than a boy who I might have seen play Lysander or perhaps Bertram.  When you first see him there’s no “Holy cow he looks like someone you don’t want to mess with,” it’s more like “Ok, they all look like they’re playing army guys and he’s the one playing a little harder and a little better than everybody else.”

And that really becomes the theme of it.  All of Coriolanus’ rants against not wanting to walk among the people really do come off whiny.  When he does finally walk among them he is, to put it quite frankly, a real dick about it.  At “A match, sir. There’s in all two worthy voices
begged. I have your alms: adieu,” he might as well have stuck in a sarcastic, “Oh, yippy for me, more voices! Yay!”

His tone is not reserved for just the people, either.  He talks to his mother that way.  At “Chide me no more….look, I am going” he begins a slow motion walk across the stage.

But then … I’m not sure I completely understand what they were going with in the end, which is why with live theatre I always wish that I had opportunity to watch it a few times.  Coriolanus quite frankly seems scared to be in the camp of Aufidius.  He keeps repeating to them “See?  See what I did?  See how I turn away the messengers?  That’s good, right? You trust me, right?  Menenius over here, I loved him like a father, but I turned him away as well, you saw that Aufidius, didn’t you? Your people saw me do that?”  I mean, the lines are what they are, and I’m sure that he wasn’t adding any (the above are my paraphrases of course), but I thought the idea was that Coriolanus had this aura about him that caused soldiers to flock to him, and here he is constantly needing to ask “You trust me, right? I proved to you that you can trust me?”

The penultimate scene is all about Volumnia, of course, and she knocks it out of the park.  It is a clear case of motherly manipulation over her son – he turns his back on her, tries to hide from her, and then finally flings himself at her feet in tears.  She, of course, comes home in triumph, to a parade with rose petals strewn in her path and the people all shouting her name as the saviour of Rome.

As for Coriolanus’ ending, I still love that whole line about “I fluttered your Volskis at Corioli.  Alone. I did it.  Boy.”  Even though I was not impressed with Coriolanus in any sort of “one man army / robotic war machine” sort of way as the Fiennes did it, this one still managed to make it clear that “I know and you know that I can destroy you, you’ve seen me do it, so you don’t get to call me boy without paying for it.”  Whether that’s true or not, of course, we learn very quickly.

On a somewhat related note (if I point back to my best lines from Coriolanus post), I did not enjoy the whole “common cry of curs” scene.  It was as if somebody said “Ok, this line right here?  Center of the play,  everything revolves around this moment.  So when it comes, make sure it explodes.”  It does, but only to the point where the rest of the crowd on stage seems to be saying “WTF, dude, why are you shouting?”  After delivering the big line so big that the people watching Dark Knight in the nearby movie theatre would have heard it, the followup “I banish you!” was far more pitiful.  Not dripping with disdain like he can’t wait to get out of this place, but more with a resolute “I have to do this, I have choice” resignation.  Wasn’t bad, necessarily, I just didn’t love it.

One last thing.  End of play, Coriolanus’ body has been carried off.  Enter his son, who wordlessly comes over, picks up what I think is his father’s weapon (I couldn’t see well), and then either holds it over his head, or salutes or something.  I really wish I could tell what he’d done, maybe somebody who saw the production can tell me.  But, regardless…..what?  Not really sure what that was all about.  We supposed to treat this as a circle of life / circle of violence message?  Wouldn’t that mean that Coriolanus’ wife now assumes the role of Volumnia, even though we’ve had an entire play to see how different their characters are?  Seemed an interesting choice.  A nice visual to end on, I’m just not completely sure why.