Category: Shakespeare Geek

The Better Death Game

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Kit Marlowe got a great death regardless of which story you believe – stabbed in the eye during a bar fight?  Faked his own death because he was a spy for the crown? Both awesome.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, likely got a really bad cold.  Maybe it was after a night of heavy drinking when his friends carried him home, maybe not.

So, here’s the game – write Shakespeare a better death. You get to change any details you want, including where he is (or isn’t) buried, and when.  What kind of dramatic end should we give him?  Did he have issues with his daughter’s husband, who had him killed? Did he sell his soul? Did the witches finally come for him?

The more creative (while still remaining about as feasible as any random Oxford theory you’ve heard), the better!

 

ADMIN : Comments Work Now!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Hello everybody!

I’ve heard from many regular contributors that ever since I switched to WordPress, commenting has been giving them trouble.  As in, it doesn’t work.

I am happy to report that with the help of Erin Nelsen Parekh, they seem to be working again!

In case her name looks familiar, Erin is the author of Behowl The Moon, a Shakespeare baby board book on Kickstarter last year.  In fact, some of the swag I got from backing that project is now part of the ever growing Shakespeare shrine on my desk!

Thanks Erin!  Sorry for the inconvenience, everybody.  Now let’s get those discussions heated again!

 

A Shakespeare Framework

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

A coworker challenged me to participate in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writer’s Month.  If you’re not familiar, this contest challenges writers to create a complete fifty thousand word novel in just thirty days. Technically November is past, but there’s no reason why you can’t attempt the challenge any month you like.

I’m not scared of word count. Most of the time you need me to cut words out.  What I can’t do is stream of consciousness for that long. I can’t just start writing and assume that a novel will plop out at the end.  I’m a computer programmer by trade, and you can’t just open up a text editor not knowing whether you’re going to end up with an ecommerce site or a mobile videogame.

What we do is start with a framework.  Just like a building has a floor, four walls and a roof, the same logic is true of software projects. A video game has backgrounds, sprites, controls, a scoreboard. An ecommerce site has navigation, a shopping cart, buy buttons.

So naturally before I’d attempt a novel I’d ask whether there’s a framework I can start with.  See where I’m going with this?  Whether it’s The Lion King, Forbidden Planet or West Side Story, there’s clear precedent for taking the minimal plot elements of a Shakespeare play and then rebuilding your own story. I immediately thought of doing something along the lines of The Tempest, although I’ll have to make it a point to stay out of Forbidden Planet territory.

What I was wondering, though, is whether we can make a framework out of all the plays. Everybody does Hamlet or King Lear or Romeo and Juliet. Could you use, say, Coriolanus as your starting point?  What would that look like?

Pick a play, and break it down to the minimal plot skeleton. Hamlet, Disney taught us, is any story where the uncle figure kills the king and the son has to take his rightful place on the throne. Romeo and Juliet has been reduced to “two groups of people don’t like each other, until one from each side falls in love.”

Pick a harder one. What’s the framework for A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Who Is Shakespeare’s Most Fleshed Out Character?

~ duane ~ 4 Comments
Falstaff
Not what I meant by “well rounded”.

I wrote to someone the other day that they could pick a play, pick a character, and then see five productions of that play and learn something new about the character every time.

So today I’m thinking, are there characters for whom that isn’t true?  In other words, where did Shakespeare make it most perfectly clear how he wanted the character, leaving the least room for interpretation?  So that if you saw a production five times you’d come away thinking that they (the character, not the play) are all generally the same?

It would be easy to go for the most minor characters with the fewest lines, but that’s no fun.  I also might disagree with it.  Consider Francisco, the guard we meet during the opening scene of Hamlet and never hear from again.  What’s his story?  Having the fewest lines to work with isn’t necessarily the same thing as having the least room for interpretation.  I like to ask people whether they think Francisco saw the ghost. Wouldn’t it make sense? The ghost is walking the walls until someone gets the point and goes to get his son.  So maybe other guards saw it as well. But Marcellus and Bernardo have each other to back up the story and say, “Did you see that?”  “Yup, I saw that.”  Poor Francisco has nobody to believe him. No wonder he’s jumpy.

I suppose the Porter from Macbeth is a good example.  He’s got lots of lines to work with, but is there really that much room for interpretation?  Either he’s a jolly drunk or a grumpy one.

Can you even have a “major” character and have this discussion? Is it simply true that the more detail we’re given for a character, the more room it opens for interpretation, rather than less?

 

 

Shakespeare’s Red Wheelbarrow

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I remember studying poetry in high school.  William Carlos Williams and his chickens:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Or his poor old woman:

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
They are simple, yet so memorable.  Both of those were some random lesson on some random day, thirty years ago. Yet when I found this link and this idea I knew exactly which ones to go get.
A new psychology study claims to have determined what makes poetry pleasing, and it’s using sonnet 18 as a thumbnail so you know I was going to click on it.  What do they say is the secret?
Sensory imagery.
The sights, sounds, smells. Those are what make the poem leap off the page and into your brain, where it stays.  The Williams poems I selected are pretty obvious examples, the first reducing it all down to the red wheelbarrow next to the white chickens.  You may ask yourself, “Why are we studying this?” or “What am I supposed to get out of this?” but you can’t deny the image that pops into your brain.  I never really knew what to do with “glazed with rain water,” though. That’s just not a visual image for me.
My first that is that sonnet 18’s not really the greatest choice.  What images does it paint, exactly?  Show me “a summer’s day” or “rough winds” or “his gold complexion dimmed.”  I think Shakespeare’s playing the game at a different level than Williams.  Those aren’t sensory images in the “sights and sounds” category, those are deeper.  Those are more about the experience of something you’ve felt.  We’ve all experienced hundreds of summer days, days when it’s too hot or days when it’s too cloudy.  We don’t have to paint a picture in our mind’s eye, we just feel it.
Earlier today I was talking favorite sonnets with someone and brought up 29, which I think is another great example. You can’t paint me a picture of “my state from sullen earth singing hymn’s at heaven’s gate” or “troubling deaf heaven with my bootless cries,” but damnit if I can’t feel it in my bones, can’t you? I remember reciting 29 on the fly at work one time and this girl stopped me and said, “What’s bootless mean?” and it so caught me by surprise that I didn’t even have an answer for her. She was thrilled to have stumped me, but I was left thinking, “If you’re stringing it together one word at a time, you’re missing the point. You have to feel it.”