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.

Best Opening Line?

~ duane ~ 20 Comments

So I saw this Entertainment Weekly article about 2o Classic Opening Lines in Books.  For the curious, it stretches 20 pages for 20 lines, includes Harry Potter and does not include Orwell, Camus or Kafka. Of course there’s no Shakespeare, since it’s always up in the air whether someone counts his work among “books”.

So I thought we’d do our own.  What were Shakespeare’s best opening lines? I suppose Richard III’s “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York” might be the most infamous, given how frequently it is misquoted.

I like Romeo and Juliet’s “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Not just because it’s one of the greatest story introductions ever, but because it contains an important clue that most modern adapters seem to forget : both alike in dignity.  Everybody always wants to tell the story along racial or economic lines, putting a gigantic obstacle between the two young lovers and hitting the audience over the head with “Here’s why they can’t be together.”  I don’t think by “ancient grudge” Shakespeare meant reparations for slavery. Who else has ideas?

Romeo and Thisbe? Pyramus and Juliet?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments
Anybody that knows Midsummer Night’s Dream will recognize the parallels between the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, as portrayed by Bottom and his fellow mechanicals, and Romeo and Juliet.  Two lovers who can not be together because their families hate each other. A misunderstanding about the death of one leads to the real death of the other, which in turn leads to the real death of both of them.  The families realize the error of their ways and the wall that parted them comes down, happily ever after.  There’s even a prologue to explain the story ahead of time.

I’ve always assumed that there was some sort of connection, but never knew what it was.  Apparently neither did Mr. Asimov
(who I am now trying read for research into my wedding project), who speculates that either Shakespeare was working on the comedy version and decided to try his hand at telling a more serious version … or that he’d written the serious version and now wanted to poke some fun at himself.  Once Mr. Asimov has answered a question (in this case as being unanswerable) I no longer have motivation to waste time trying to answer it myself :).

But it does offer up a place for opinion.  What do you think the relationship is between the two plays, in Shakespeare’s mind?  Was he working on them both at the same time? Which came first, and fed the other? Or are they really independent and the overlap has more to do with the common source material he drew from, nothing more?

Personally I like to think that he did R&J first and then satirized himself in Dream. But I have no evidence to back that up one way or the other.

Alfa Romeo Giulietta

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

http://www.prestigeway.com.au/news/Uma_Thurman_to_star_in_Shakespeare_s_Romeo_and_Giulietta-1328 Took me a second to figure out what this was all about when I saw a headline that said “Uma Thurman to star in Romeo and Giulietta” (which is the fancy way of saying Juliet, for those not getting it).  New movie?  Foreign? Even weirder.  Seems that the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo is debuting a new model called the Giulietta! Uma Thurman is a major part of the new ad campaign, playing five different roles in the commercial.

The substance of the new Giulietta is further confirmed by the pay-off which counterbalances the Shakespeare quote: "Without heart we are only machines".

I’m sorry, where’d Shakespeare say that?

Calling Doctor Shakespeare! (Or maybe Dr. DeVere?)

~ duane ~ 7 Comments

Unfortunately the JAMA article linked in this Washington Post piece about Shakespeare’s medical knowledge is available only to AMA members, so I’m left linking a link of a link :(.

The article points to a piece from the “100 Years Ago” department that ponders how Shakespeare acquired his “extensive knowledge of medical matters.”  Deniers will, of course, tell you that this very sentence is prove that Stratford Will could not have written the plays because he was not a doctor, and we should be seeking out the medical professional who did write them.  (I heard that Oxford once successfully put a Band-Aid onto the pinky finger of his left hand, however.  So he’s still in the running.)

But Shakespeare did know his mental illnesses. The article notes that in his day, mentally ill people weren’t locked away in institutions. Shakespeare could train his powers of observation on people suffering all manner of mental disorders without going out of his way to encounter them.

It’s interesting to periodically step away and look at the words from this “100 years ago” perspective.  We’re so used to what Freud told us about Hamlet that we rarely stop to differentiate what Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been trying to say (because the very concepts did not exist yet), from what he really was trying to say that we’re not seeing because we fail to look at what he gave us from his own terms.  Would Shakespeare have had a name for the behaviors that he gave to Ophelia? Was he describing what he’d personally seen in someone else?

Since Freud comes so much re: Hamlet, I’ve often wondered what other modern psycho/socio creations we have today that Shakespeare might have been showing us, in his own way.  Does Hamlet, for example, go through the “five stages or grief”? Do any of his characters suffer from textbook schizophrenia?  In my review of Tennant’s Hamlet earlier today I deliberately made reference to Asperger’s (and, on Twitter, ADHD) to see if anybody with more knowledge of those subjects would pick up on the thread.

You know what just occurred to me?  I don’t recall seeing a single peanut in any of Shakespeare’s works.  Perhaps Shakespeare was suggesting that Hamlet was allergic?  More importantly could he have found a rhyme for “epi pen” while still getting the meter to come out right?

[Credit to vtelizabeth on Twitter for the Tweet which pointed me in this direction.]

Review : David Tennant as Hamlet, Nerd of Denmark

~ duane ~ 20 Comments

Ok, here we go!  The easiest way to review Hamlet, I’ve found, is to break it into three distinct reviews : the direction, the rest of the cast, and Hamlet himself.  Otherwise it’s just too hard to separate what David Tennant did with what he was given to work with. Let me just first say that watching Shakespeare on “live” TV as if it were some sort of major event was just awesome.  It was this wonderful combination of nostalgia (remember the days before DVR where if you got up to go to the bathroom you missed stuff?) with modern technology – I sat on Twitter and did play-by-play throughout most of the show.  Could I have DVR’d it?  Sure, and I did, kind  of — I was running maybe 45 minutes behind everybody else.  But it was important to me to watch it as live as I could, as if we were watching the Academy Awards or something.  I wanted to share the experience with my geeks.  Great time, and I look forward to what PBS has in store for us next time..

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