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.

Review : The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Score one for my mom, who has apparently been paying attention when I talk.  A few weeks ago she handed me Arliss Ryan’s The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare
, which she’d picked up at a yard sale for fifty cents.  “I saw Shakespeare and thought of you,” she told me.  I enjoy that this is the response to Shakespeare people in my life have, “Oh Duane would like this.”

I thank her for the gift, and based on the cover art I assume that it is a young adult piece of fiction that I can hand over to my daughters.  Nevertheless I decide to read it.  It does not go past me that a) I blogged about this as a new arrival in February of this year, and b) it’s still got it’s $15.00 price tag on it from Borders, and my mom found it for 50 cents.  So I do not have high hopes for a book that tumbled so quickly out of sight.

I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised.  First of all it
is not young adult.  It does not take long at all for Mistress Hathaway to meet young Master Shakespeare, and all sorts of things are being unbuttoned and unlaced very quickly.  My kids aren’t seeing this one anytime soon.  So forget the young adult thing, this is more of I guess what you’d call a “historical romance.”  (Although I am left wondering, since the book basically starts with them getting married when Anne was what, 28? Why is there a young teenage girl on the cover?)
Once I realized what I was reading, everything fell into place.  This is to be your classic “behind every great man is a woman” story.  Will Shakespeare, forced into a loveless marriage and unhappy with his life in Stratford, runs away to London to make a name for himself.  What does Anne Shakespeare do?  Why, follows him of course.  Leaving her children to the care of the Shakespeares, forever loyal Anne (who continually repeats her mantra that she married for life) packs some belongings, hitches up her skirt and heads off to London as well.

What happens next?  Why, she writes Shakespeare’s plays, of course. 🙂  I’m only half kidding.  Using the story that she is Shakespeare’s sister, not his wife (thus allowing both of them many freedoms a married couple would not have been allowed), she quickly gets a job copying scripts for him, which turns into a job (unknown to anyone else) helping him edit and, soon, write the plays.  How many?  I won’t spoil it.  In this book’s world, her contribution is … not small.

I am very pleased with the amount of detail that’s gone into the biographical portions.  All of the details of Shakespeare’s life that I would expect are accounted for – Greene’s Groatsworth, the back story behind the sonnets, Marlowe’s bar fight, the night time raid on the Globe, Hamnet’s death, etc… The author appears to have done some research.

The downside, however, is in the treatment of the plays. It looks pretty obvious to me that the author took her own opinion of the plays, and pasted that over her storyline.  Falstaff and Hamlet are their greatest creations (makes you wonder what role Bloom played in the research, doesn’t it?), while King Lear gets nary a mention, other than to say that it’s the saddest of the lot, and is part of a comedy sequence involving Shakespeare trying to figure out how to make it rain in his theatre.  Most of the later plays are dismissed as “not our best work.”  Coriolanus is singled out with “no one will be quoting that one in twenty years.”  And it is a fairly obvious modern woman who heaps her scorn upon Two Gentlemen of Verona, and not a historically accurate Anne Hathaway.  The author may hate that one, but the words she put into Anne’s mouth seemed pretty out of place for anybody that pays attention to more plays than just “the big ones.”

Oh, and the Dark Lady of the sonnets gets completely brushed off, which to me screamed simply that the author didn’t want to take a stand on that one (or, did not have the research to do so).  From her perspective, she knows that her husband has women on the side, so if he writes about one in particular in his sonnets, so what is it to her?  The only obvious thing here is that the sonnets are supposedly autobiographical. Take that how you please.

Another disappointing bit is that she seems to just plain get bored detailing how the plays came to be.  They start out strong, and there’s good back story for why the Henry plays were written, and in that order.  But it’s not long before the plot chugs along as quickly as “Oh, the new Scottish king likes witches, does he?  Here, let’s bang out Macbeth” or “I’m feeling a bit jealous today, oh look there’s a new Italian story on the market nobody’s done yet let me just run home and whip up Othello.”  But even then, later in the book the two Shakespeares will bemoan that they’ll only be remembered for “the great ones like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.”  Other than with Hamlet and Falstaff (and maybe a little Romeo and Juliet), there is very little time spent on “Wow, we wrote a masterpiece that will be spoken of for centuries to come.”  It’s all just “Shakespeare became a successful playwright by giving the audience what they wanted.”

It is an entertaining book, don’t get me wrong. I want my wife to read it. I think it’s written for a very specific audience.  Clearly a romance novel.  Anne, the ever loyal wife stuck in a loveless marriage, tries everything to make it work.  But darn it she’s still a woman, she still has needs, and she finds ways to fill those needs.

This is an good book not precisely for a Shakespeare fan, but for someone close to a Shakespeare fan.  You want your family and your friends to get the details of Shakespeare’s life? To share a little bit of your passion for the subject with them, without boring them to tears or talking over their heads?  That’s where a book like this comes in.  The details are basically right. I would much rather have somebody start with this book and explain to them where the story is not historically accurate, than for them to fall victim to any number of Authorship theories and have to start them over from scratch. This book knows that it is fiction.

Pick it up
and give it to a loved one, like my mom did, and like I’m going to do.

We Have Our Romeo

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Haley Steinfeld’s Juliet now has her Romeo – and his name is Douglas Booth. Looks like a Romeo. Got a bit of a young Leo DiCaprio thing going on. I don’t recognize any of his other credits.
For some reason, the article’s description of Romeo amused me:

“…the coveted role of Romeo, an accomplished swordsman and adept lover…”

Really? I never really thought about Romeo’s swordsmanship, and just always figured that his victory over Tybalt could just as easily have been a lucky shot, given the circumstances (a vengeance-crazed Romeo against a mostly-all-talk Tybalt?). Calling him an accomplished swordsman sounds more like a description of the Hamlet/Laertes duel to see who was better.
And “adept lover”? That makes him sound like something of a Don Juan character with a lot of notches on his belt, doesn’t it?
Who writes this stuff? And who felt obliged to add that kind of color to the story, as if people didn’t already know it? Doesn’t the whole “fall in love despite the bitter rivalry between their two families” thing pretty much sum it up for most of the planet?

Hamlet! A Game in Five Acts

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

I’m always on the lookout for Shakespeare games, particularly those that would help introduce my kids to Shakespeare. Well, not introduce, since I’ve done that – but, games that will allow them to learn more about Shakespeare without having to already have a high school education, you know?

Hamlet! A Game in Five Acts looks promising (although it does say 12+). If I understand the game correctly, you have an ending in mind, and you try to manipulate to play to achieve your ending. I already dig that. Plays with the whole “bloodbath ending” idea while still suggesting that most of the elements of the original will still be in there, somewhere.
So, for instance, you might get an ending card that says “Ophelia married to Hamlet. Horatio dead.” (I made that one up). You have to figure out how to make that happen. If Ophelia ends up dead, you can’t win. Each turn in the game is a Scene, and within each Scene your characters can perform Actions to make the play go their way. So for instance an action might be “Ophelia commits suicide”, *but* the requirement for that action is “Ophelia is insane.” So before you can play that action, you need to have played other actions that cause Ophelia to lose sanity points. “Hamlet rejects Ophelia. Ophelia loses 1 sanity point.” You get the idea.
Somebody buy this so I can learn more about it :). With that 12+ rating and a price tag of almost $20 I can’t bring myself to do it. My oldest daughter may be able to figure it out but with the 5yr old still not knowing how to read yet, I have to focus my game purchases on things that can be played on family night.
That is, of course, unless the author of the game happens to be listening and wants to send me a review copy? Hint hint hint! Anybody know this Mike Young fellow? 🙂 I’m sure there’s value in hearing about my 5/7/9yr olds successfully playing his game, no?

The 2005 Commonwealth Hamlet Continues to Haunt Me

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I have seen Commonwealth Shakespeare in Park on Boston Common for many years now. I have seen their Midsummer, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Much Ado, Macbeth, Shrew, and Othello. I want to say I may have even seen them do a Tempest, a long time ago. But there’s one that I missed.

It’s 2005. They’re doing Hamlet. To the best of my knowledge they’ve not done Lear, so I try to explain to those close to me that this is, like, *it*. The big one. The must see. My wife and I have arranged to meet up with friends for dinner at a nice nearby restaurant (Number 9 Park, if you know the area) for the last weekend of the performance. When the day arrives? Torrential rains are in the forecast. I am not missing Hamlet. We head into town, and the rain begins. We’re not even sure our friends will make it in. It is a few hours before showtime, and I am using my phone (which, 6 years ago, was no iPhone let me tell you!) to keep trying the CommShakes homepage to see whether the show has been cancelled, and I see no notice. I call the number, but only ever get an answering machine. It is *nasty* outside. Raining cats and dogs. There is no way there is a show tonight.

But…15 minutes before showtime? The rain stops. Sun comes out. Hurray! I rush over to where the show is to be – empty, of course, except for some stage hands tending to the flooded sets. “I’m here!” I say, “Start the show! The rain’s stopped!”

They looked at me like I was insane. Perhaps, at that moment, I was. My wife (our friends had bailed) led me away as carefully as she might have led a mental patient while I just repeated “But….it stopped raining. Hamlet. It’s not raining anymore…..”

Thus did I miss my chance to see Hamlet in the park. But hey, I’m not bitter! I’ve seen their Comedy of Errors, and that’s just as good, right? Right?? 🙂 I have never again waited until the last weekend to see a show. I’ve even gone so far (the Midsummer year) to see the show once myself first, and then see it again with friends.

My point in rehashing that story is to link to what’s become of their Hamlet, Jeffrey Donovan. He’s now the star of the television series “Burn Notice”, and is coming back into town for a staged reading of a play called “Burn This”, something I don’t really know anything about.

Check out these quotes from the article, which I’m sure was written just to taunt me…


“That was, to this day, one of the greatest experiences of my life,’’ Donovan says. “To not only be given one of the most cherished and difficult roles in Shakespeare’s canon, but to do it in front of my hometown, basically. . . . It gives me chills even now.’’

Maler says the production was one of the highlights of the company’s history: “Seeing the way the audiences of Boston, and particularly young audiences, would gravitate toward his performance was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.’’

Argh. Why can’t I get *that* on DVD? I get enough David Tennant. Where’s the CommShakes petition?

What Exactly is Romeo's Plan?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

While answering questions over at the new place, I found an angle on the big fight scene in Act 3. What, exactly, do you think is Romeo’s plan? I realize that he wants to prevent the fight – but more specifically, is he trying to keep Mercutio from hurting Tybalt? Tybalt from hurting Mercutio? Does he even think that far?
It’s probably unanswerable, but that’s never stopped us. I think it makes for an interesting take on the character, because if he thinks “I need to hold back Mercutio before he kills Tybalt,” well then he’s basically just sold out his best friend, hasn’t he? It could be, of course, that Romeo simply went for the logical person – Tybalt was trying to kill *him* (Romeo) after all, and if Romeo suddenly stepped in from of Tybalt’s sword, that would likely not have ended well.
While we’re on the subject, can we talk about exactly what Romeo’s mistake is, here? I’ve always sort of thought of the big moment as “Romeo grabbed Mercutio.” But why, is the question. Romeo appears to walk into that fateful encounter thinking “I no longer see the Capulets as my enemy, therefore the Capulets are no threat to me.” That’s a big lapse in character judgement. Tybalt has never been a threat because he’s a Capulet. He’s a threat because he’s a bad guy. This, ironically, is something that Mercutio knew all along. Mercutio didn’t hate Tybalt because Tybalt was a Capulet. Mercutio hated Tybalt because he *is* a good judge of character, and knew that Tybalt was trouble.