My kids were in a Shakespeare mood at dinner last night (yay!) and wanted to discuss the “best” of the plays.  But, I quickly learned, their definition of that word was different than mine when I said, “Favorite? The Tempest.  Best? King Lear.”  My oldest looked at me and asked, “Why is it different?”

I have very specific and personal reasons why I consider The Tempest my favorite of the plays.  It is the first one that I explained to my children, thus introducing them to Shakespeare and (hopefully) changing their lives because of it.  If that play did not exist, everything would be different.

But I acknowledge that this doesn’t make it the best.  I consider King Lear to be the best, because my criteria lies primarily in how much and how well the play “holds a mirror up to nature” and reflects what it means to be human.  When I stop to think about it I feel like I waited half my life to understand King Lear, and only now do I feel like I’ve reached the base of the mountain and that I could spend the rest of my life still trying to understand it.  I say that with awe, not frustration. My son (my youngest) asked me to explain it to him, and I told him that I would not.  I told him that it is a story so sad that when he was younger and I explained it to him, that not only did he cry for the characters, but the strength of his emotional reaction made me cry while telling it.  Sitting in a nice restaurant is not the time for a replay of that scene.  (But astute readers can go searching in the blog history, because I did write about it!)

Neither being my favorite nor what I consider the best necessarily correlates with the most well known or most often produced play.  I think that Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet has to take that honor.  Both have their iconic scene (the balcony, or the skull), where whenever you see it, you immediately think Shakespeare.  Both have their iconic line (Wherefore art thou, Romeo? / To be or not to be) although I think Hamlet gets the edge there.  Can any other play rank on that criteria? I think maybe Macbeth might be a distant third for the witches around a cauldron, but while many people recognize “Double double toil and trouble,” it tends to make you think halloween, rather than Shakespeare.

How about you?  What do you think is the “best” play (whatever your personal criteria might be)? The most popular?  Your favorite?  Do they overlap? I noticed that mine don’t. 🙂

And I mean that literally. My daughter is about to start studying the play in school (she’s been doing sonnets and Shakespeare bio for the last week or two).  I’ve tried to sit down with her and look at the original text.  It’s difficult.

I’m not talking about the prologue.  I think that’s pretty self explanatory.  I mean this part:

SAMPSON 

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.

GREGORY 

No, for then we should be colliers.

SAMPSON 

I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

GREGORY 

Ay, while you live, draw your neck out o’ the collar.

SAMPSON 

I strike quickly, being moved.

GREGORY 

But thou art not quickly moved to strike.

Somebody please explain to me how you open a play with the “carry coals” / “colliers” wordplay and make it interesting and entertaining to a bunch of 13yr olds, instead it being about as interesting as Shay’s Rebellion, the French and Indian War or any other number of “Trust me, you have to learn this because I said so” lessons they’re so used to?

Shortly we can get into it a bit and have fun with the “I do bite my thumb at you” scene, and the action picks up.  I’m specifically asking about the above bit.  Without simply just skipping it, or otherwise giving it ye olde “modern translation”, how do you explain why it’s there?

Well, this is amusing.  I  just googled “collier carry coals” because I wanted to get some idea of the working definition fresh in memory — and my own post is the first thing that came up!  I honestly had forgotten about that post (written in 2008!) but it’s nice to see that I’m consistent.  When explaining it to my daughter off the top of my head, I explained it now like I was apparently doing back then – this is Elizabethan “I don’t take crap from anybody” bragging to get the play started, with associated puns and wordplay to make banter out of it.

I tried to show my daughter the Zeffirelli version of the play, but it actually doesn’t start on the text. So then we went with the Luhrman version, which is closer to the text, but basically starts at “I will bite my thumb.”

So I’m curious how we’re dealing with this in the real world.  Teachers, you out there? Do we skip it?
(I’m reminded of the schoolteacher friend of mine who once told me she skips Queen Mab, but that’s a whole different sacrilege…)

Ok, so, fine, somebody managed to make a list of Shakespeare adaptations I’ve never seen.  We get back into the comfort zone with this list of Teen Shakespeare Adaptations, supposedly “ranked”, which really just means the arbitrary personal opinion of whoever made the list, based on which ones they’ve actually seen rather than just spotted a YouTube trailer.

All the standards are here – 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s The Man, Get Over It, etc…  They include Romeo+Juliet which always makes me on my soapbox about, “What did you mean by adaptation? Because some of these are original text and some of them are just storyline similar.”

Who knew that Nicholas Cage’s 1983 “Valley Girl” was a Shakespeare adaptation? I remember staying up late to watch that one on Cinemax back when cable television was new.  Now I may have to go back and watch it again since I never made the connection.  The wikipedia page tells me there’s at least some similarly beyond the “star-crossed lovers” bit, as Cage’s “R”andy meets “Julie” when he crashes a party at her house. Does that mean that “T”ommy is supposed to be the Tybalt character? Because somebody may need to read the play again, as he’s Juliet’s cousin, not her boyfriend.

Oh, and I also recall there being a reasonable amount of gratuitous nudity, which I now realize must have been an homage to Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

Sitting on my DVD shelf is the old 1936 Romeo and Juliet starring Norma Shearer.  I keep telling myself to watch it, but this the year 2016 and “watch the DVD” in this house means, “rip it on the computer, put it on the video server, and watch it at will on television.”  But of the four computers floating randomly around my house at any time – two modern Macbooks and two Chromebooks – none of them have a DVD drive. 🙁

So I was looking on YouTube for clips to post, and I discovered a channel called Sword Fights Galore! which is nothing but clips of sword fights from classic movies.  Awesome!

So, check it out – 1936 Romeo and Juliet, just the sword fights:

We start with Benvolio vs. Tybalt in the “Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues and thee” opening:

Then we jump right to Mercutio vs Tybalt.  “Come, you rat catcher! Will you walk?”

Doesn’t end well for Mercutio.  Enter Romeo the avenger! I love Tybalt’s death scene.

Poor Paris was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One of these days I’ll get the DVD into my online collection and get to watch the whole thing.  Of course now I’ve spoiled it for myself by watching all the good parts 😉