Though it’s not yet achieved the classic status of the knock-knock joke, the “I have a _____ joke but ______” has become an Internet favorite over the last few years. As is our wont, let’s add Shakespeare to that list, shall we?
I Have a Shakespeare Joke, But…
What is the deal with these fardels? Are we bearing them, are we not bearing them? Who are these people bearing all the fardels!
I have a Hamlet joke but can’t decide how to finish it.
I have a Romeo and Juliet joke but you probably heard it back in high school.
I have a Macbeth joke that always gets a good laugh, but it really kills in Scotland.
I have a Lavinia joke but can’t say it out loud.
I have a Midsummer Night’s Dream joke but it’s pretty asinine.
I have a joke about that silent bit during the play-within-a-play in Hamlet, but it’s dumb.
I have a Shakespeare joke but everybody else claims they wrote it.
Nice grille you got there, Shakespeare. What is that, a Weber? How much that set you back, you don’t mind me asking?
In all our years of writing and collecting Shakespeare jokes, I can’t remember if we ever did this theme. We’ve got knock-knock jokes, lightbulb jokes, and duck jokes, and I’ve forgotten how many others. But we seem to have snubbed the classic, the “Dad joke.” Which is surprising because if you ask my kids, dad jokes are all I’ve got.
Let’s rectify that situation, shall we?
Hamlet: “I am too much in the sun.” Claudius: “Hi, too much in the sun. I’m Dad.”
I heard that Lavinia can play the piano by ear. Which makes sense since she can’t use her hands. (Was that tasteless? I heard Lavinia jokes were tasteless.)
Juliet: “I’ll call you later!” Romeo: “Don’t call me later, call me Romeo!”
Ophelia didn’t suffer from insanity, it seemed like she was really enjoying herself.
Romeo: I had a date with Juliet tonight. It was awesome. Mercutio: Wait, seriously? Romeo: Yeah. Tomorrow, we’re going to try figs.
Gloucester walks into a bar. And then a table, and a chair, and another table…
Beatrice: Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face. Leonato: I didn’t like it at first either, but it grew on me.
Of all the crimes that Macbeth committed, people often forget that both he and his wife were guilty of resisting a rest.
Where my Shakespeare dads at? Add your own in the comments!
Shakespeare makes life better. Sir Patrick Stewart is among the pantheon of modern actors who stand as a walking embodiment of Shakespeare’s work. Ergo, SirPatStew makes life better.
This pic is AI generated. Patrick Stewart dressed as Shakespeare.
I may have mentioned that I live for my audiobooks. I go into the office two days a week in this modern hybrid world, and my commute is about 90 minutes each way. That’s 6 hours a week of audiobook time. And when you listen on 1.5x speed, it’s really more like 9 hours/week. (I think I did that math right.) So, with a typical audiobook being around 8 to 12 hours, I fly through them as you might imagine.
Enter Making It So, the newly released memoir from Sir Patrick Stewart, thankfully read by the author. I had to make sure about that last part, as this would have been a totally different experience with someone else reading it. We all know that Patrick is as famous for his voice as James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman. It is so worth it.
I love every word of this book. The man’s had a lengthy and illustrious career spanning not just Shakespeare but Star Trek, the X-Men, and classic literature ranging from Charles Dickens to Herman Melville. It’s all here, but really, we’re talking probably 80% of the book is Shakespeare.
Like any memoir, we start with his growing-up years. We learn about his mom and brothers and his distant relationship with his abusive father. Strangely, his brother Geoffrey comes up maybe once in the whole book, while brother Trevor is an important part of the story. Not much is said about that disparity.
But soon we’re into the meat of the book, his time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The stories come fast and furious, from his earliest days of being the new kid getting the non-speaking roles and standing in awe of his own idols, to eventually becoming an idol to the next generation (see what I did there?)
If you’re like me, you’ll already be hanging on his every word at this point, so when he starts dropping names – whether Shakespeare characters or Shakespeare actors – you may find yourself laughing out loud or literally having your breath taken away, as I did.
I’ll tell one quick story to illustrate how much I loved this book. Otherwise, I’ll talk forever. For me, the works of Shakespeare are kind of like a snow globe on the bookshelf. Inside, there’s this fascinating little world that I could stare at for hours, always finding something new, always wondering what that life might be like. But it’s a different world. A bubble. There’s a barrier between my world and that world. A transparent one, but not a permeable one.
Then Stewart talked about his audition for the RSC and said two words – John Barton.
And I was right there on stage with him. Words like breathtaking are rarely used literally, but I can use such a word here. I was transported. (See what I did there? ;))
John Barton did a PBS mini-series some years back called Playing Shakespeare where we got the pleasure of watching a parallel universe where young Shakespearean gods like Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart learned their craft right there on the stage, in plain clothes, taking notes from teacher/director Barton in his comfy cardigan, no doubt channeling no small amount of Mr. Rogers for those of us who grew up on American television. It is the most inside and intimate look at the world of “behind the scenes” Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. It took only two words from Stewart to shatter that barrier between our worlds and make me feel like I was right there with them. I’m still getting goosebumps writing about it.
Enough about Shakespeare, though. I want to tell you all the stories like that, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s talk about the rest of the book.
There’s a lot of Star Trek in here, to be fair. But for a 12-hour audiobook, Star Trek gets mentioned maybe 8 hours in, to give you an idea. He speaks of his Captain Picard role with the same respect that he speaks of Shakespeare. The fact that he got to act in Star Trek opposite some of his Shakespeare heroes (hello, David Warner), makes it all the more special. There are four lights!
Being a brand new book, this is very up-to-date, taking us all the way through the pandemic and three seasons of the Picard show. He tells us all about his social media adventures, from “folding his first New York slice” to reading a sonnet a day on Instagram during lockdown. I was there for all of it, and I loved hearing about all of it again.
There’s one surprise in the book. Sir Ian McKellen is hardly mentioned at all. The Internet wants to think that these two are inseparable BFFs for life, but this memoir does not paint that picture. Patrick loves Ian and they are no doubt now the best of friends, but if you’d gotten the idea that they grew up together on the Shakespeare stage, that is not the case. Apparently, they never even played together at the RSC, and didn’t really start doing projects together until X-men! WHAT?
Ok I’m done. If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, what are you waiting for? You’re on a Shakespeare site, you’re a Shakespeare fan. This book is like distilled essence of Shakespeare, you’ll want to spray it on yourself like cologne and walk around in it all day.
It’s rare that I pick up a book the day it comes out. But when somebody tells me that we’re doing a science-fiction locked-room murder mystery version of Hamlet where Horatio is an AI, I’m getting in line. So it is with The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu. Was it worth the effort? Read on!
I always appreciate a good Hamlet modernization/novelization. There’s so much room to work with. How close will they stick to the original, and where will they go off on their own? After all, the original’s got ghosts and poison and all sorts of murder, intentional and accidental. How do you compose a believable story that doesn’t take place in the Danish royal court?
This one’s pretty good, all things considered. We’re in a super secret lab where they’re experimenting with the kind of thing that will revolutionize everything … so, of course, people will kill for it. You’ve got the father, chief scientist, already dead when we start. So we go into lockdown. Did the son do it? Or the uncle? What about the trusted advisor, who is also the father of the young intern who used to date the son? The characters are all there. And the plot does hit most of the necessary beats, I’m happy to say. They handle the ghost thing in an original and, for the purpose of this story, believable way.
In the end, though, it started to lose me – and I blame the narration. If you know Hamlet, you know that there’s really only one character who can be the one to tell the story. But is that true here? The author opts to go for this sort of “I’ll justify an omniscient narrator through various excuses” approach where sometimes it’s in first person; sometimes it’s transcripts from other people’s diaries, sometimes it’s log files from the computer or security tapes … basically, especially in audiobook, when you heard “I felt this and saw this so I did this” you typically have no idea who I is. Whenever you think you know, suddenly that character’s being referred to in the third person again, so now you have to figure it out all over again.
There’s one thing I hated about the book, though, and I’ve debated just saying it since it would be a total spoiler (that has nothing to do with the plot resolution), I’ll just say it like this. Do you know how sometimes people get overly obsessed with how the Hamlet/Horatio relationship could have gone? Yeah, this is one of those books. I thought you said Horatio was an AI? I did. You’ve been warned.
My wife and I have reached that age where quality time together means binge-watching the latest show that all our friends are discussing. This explains how I ended up on Firefly Lane, a very, *very* girly story that tells us the life story of two best friends. It stars Katherine Heigl of “I remember her from Grey’s Anatomy” fame, and Sarah Chalke, who will forever be Elliot from Scrubs to me. It’s a very well-acted show (especially Elliot), but it is also one of the most cliche-ridden, predictable things I’ve ever seen, which is what probably made it tolerably entertaining for me. Scene after scene, I’d do some of the dialogue, only for that exact dialogue to come out of the screen 10 seconds later. (And I’m sure my wife found it equally entertaining, right? 🙂 )
So it was in this context that we find Kate (Chalke) and Tully (Heigl) in a flashback to their high school days, sitting in English class and debating whether “fake stories about fake people” are as interesting as “real stories with real people.” In the background, we see a chalkboard with “But soft what light through” marked out in iambic pentameter, and I note, “….and, there’s the obligatory Shakespeare. I wonder if there’ll be any more.”
But indeed, there is! We quickly learn that the English teacher – the young, hot English teacher – is going to have the class do Romeo and Juliet because, of course they are.
I’m not going to spoil a bunch, but I’ll post some funny observations. There turns out to be a good amount of Shakespeare content covering multiple episodes, including a play performance (though not much of one), There are people hurling quotes at each other outside play rehearsals, and there are callback quotes when they’re adults. There’s the obligatory “will the real-life romances in the story map to the Romeo and Juliet casting” story arc that ends up resolving in what I thought was a pleasantly surprising way.
You probably already know much of the story, anyway, just from my description. One friend is the nerd, who of course knows all the words and longs to be Juliet, while the other is the popular girl who could care less. Guess who gets to be Juliet? And did I mention that the English teacher is handsome? Start writing your own script, and you’ll probably be pretty close.
Anyway, it’s a good show, and if you’re looking for something to binge-watch, you might want to consider it. If the story of two women’s decades-long friendship (including all the ups, downs and dirty details) is something you or someone you love can get into.
Random Thoughts
Most of the budget seems to have gone into costumes. Lots of kids roaming around in nice costumes, but the actual stage we get is pretty bare (and we don’t get much time for them to actually use it).
The quotes they use randomly are not what you normally see. There are the typical highlights, but then random stuff that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in this context before. I don’t remember Marcia Brady talking about sharp sauce and sweet goose. The kicker is that they then give that line to the wrong person 🙂
None of it is particularly well acted, except perhaps for the obligatory scene where the hot teacher demonstrates how to do it and all the girls swoon.
Teacher: Come up on stage, show us how Juliet’s supposed to be done right.
Juliet<enters>
Me from couch: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo…
Juliet: O Romeo, Romeo, where the f%^& are you, Romeo?
Me: THAT’S NOT WHAT IT MEANS!
Kid hoping he’ll be cast as Romeo, talking to his friends in the hall: And at the end I get to stab my own guts out!
Me from the couch: NO YOU F*()&$ING DON’T!
I have a tendency to talk to the screen when I get passionate about things.
Juliet, rehearsing: Oh happy dagger, here is thy drops dagger
Dead Romeo: Ow.
I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I laughed myself silly.
