Tag: shakespeare

boopifer:

patrickat:

deliriumcrow:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

minerfromtarn:

costlyblood:

likeniobe:

a whole theatre

PLEASE LET THIS BE REAL

@thefingerfuckingfemalefury @cblgblog @chiribomb

Part of me thinks “Surely this isn’t true” but another part of me is like “This is not the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard”

There’s part of me that can’t possibly believe this is real, bit I’ve read parts of the Old Bailey records, and this is … not exactly normal, but not that far from it. People stole lots of shit, and drunk theater people are a very odd lot.

“Let us steal… a theatre!” – W. Shakespeare, Leverage (1601)

I’m writing this fucking movie

tiger-in-the-flightdeck:

smallest-feeblest-boggart:

amuseoffyre:

nerdyblogname:

shesafunnyshoney:

pettybitchcatullus:

foxhounders:

ppl who dont even like shakespeare: WOW how DARE you alter the original text these are CLASSICS have you no RESPECT, going around DESECRATING these sacred texts in the name of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!!!!!!!

people who love shakespeare: im going to stage a production of hamlet where all the actors are dogs

it’s what he would have wanted 

Okay so the universal law of Shakespeare, as I’ve heard it, is that you can take things out, you can rearrange them, you just cannot add anything in that conflicts with the original texts. So while you cannot have a production of romeo and juliet where the houses get along and they get married, it’s perfectly acceptable to replace all the actors with dogs in hamlet because the characters are never outright stated to not be dogs.

“The characters are never outright stated not to be dogs”

“It was never a part of their journey” but better.

Things I have seen:

• Hamlet set in a psychiatric institution where it was heavily implied the whole thing was his imagination
• Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues were aliens
• Steampunk Hungarian Romeo and Juliet musical with a fleet of rapping white boys
• Russian King Lear which was the bleakest thing I have ever seen
• Richard III set in the 1930s including fascist iconography
• The Tempest in Space
• Meiji Era Twelfth Night set in a Kabuki theatre in a fascinating meta examination of the role of women and men who play women (being performed entirely by a company of women)
• Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and Hamlet each with a single very drunk performer.

I love seeing what different productions bring to the table, because it’s so much fun! It’s also fun to watch Shakespeare purists pitch a fit about it being wrong. Bitch, stfu. I know for a fact that when Shakespeare’s globe burned down, one of the drunken audience members put out his burning trousers with his pint. This was not high-brow sober art. This was for the people and they loved it.

fun fact, i played the prince in a high school production of The Tempest and looking back it so easily could have been set in space

I was once in a film noir gangster style version of Romeo and Juliet. Where I played Romeo in a pinstripe suit and a fedora.

incorrectshakespeare:

melusineloriginale:

Well…yes and no. Which I know is a cheat but there it is.

There are definitely characters in Shakespeare’s plays who we can identify as LGBT to varying extents, and there is of course an enormous amount of queer theory to back up these identifications. However, it’s a bit of a misnomer since during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, these particular terminologies did not exist. Which is not to say that homosexuality did not exist or that it was impossible to be transgendered in that period–both of these have been around pretty much as long as humanity has been around. But they didn’t have the same names, nor were they necessarily placed in their own categories.

If you’re curious to know more about queer readings of Shakespearean plays, I’m going to tag @shredsandpatches in this post since that was partly the topic of her doctoral thesis and she’s got an enormous amount of material on it. However, here’s a shortlist of plays that I would say include significant homoerotic and/or non-binary gender themes (and, anyone who reads this and notices anything missing, please feel free to add on).

– Twelfth Night (Viola dresses as a man and Olivia falls for her; also hints that Orsino is attracted to her while she’s pretending to be a man)

– As You Like It (Rosalind dresses as a man and engages in all sorts of fun gender-bending roleplay with Orlando before eventually marrying him)

– Coriolanus (Aufidius and Martius are gay; well, Martius is more likely bi since he’s also married and has a kid)

– The Merchant of Venice (Antonio loves Bassanio who at least claims to love Portia who has an awesomely sweet relationship with Nerissa…needless to say, things get complicated. Trigger warnings for anti-Semitism.)

– Antony & Cleopatra (All sorts of interesting gender stuff going on here, usually paired with interesting race/culture stuff, plus Cleopatra is a BAMF)

– Richard II (Richard is bi but that is the least of his problems)

– Romeo & Juliet (Mercutio is often coded as queer in productions and there’s a fair bit in the text to back this up)

– Othello (critics have argued that part of Iago’s tangled feelings for Othello include unacknowledged sexual attraction; it’s not the reading I personally follow but it’s popular enough to be worth noting)

– Julius Caesar (I know there’s a pretty substantial fan following for Brutus/Cassius, but it’s honestly been long enough since I read the play that I can’t speak to it in much detail)

“richard is bi but that is the least of his problems” i am laughing so hard

ansiblelesbian:

blue-author:

I don’t hate Shakespeare. 

I love Shakespeare. 

In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he’s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.

Perhaps you’ve had it explained to you that Hamlet’s talk of “country matters” was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of “nothing” was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing? 

If you’re aware that “nothing” was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeare’s England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?

Translate that into modern-modern English, and you’d get something like Everybody’s Up In Arms About Pussy. Though you’d lose the pun on “nothing/noting” in doing so… yes, that’s how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.

And yes, Much Ado is not one of the Bard’s more serious works to begin with… but then, what is? We divide Shakespeare’s plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all comedies in the modern sense of “things you go to expecting to laugh”. The country/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold. 

Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says “to thine own self be true”… or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that “brevity is the soul of wit”.

Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when he’s giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying, “This. This thing. Do not do this thing.”

Anyway, let’s talk about the idea that he “invented the English language”; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we don’t know how many he invented. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.

There’s a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is “elbow”. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for “the bendy part of an arm” until an actor gets up on stage and says “elbow”, and everybody’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it is.”

Except it didn’t happen like that. The noun elbow isn’t what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb to elbow (as in “elbowing someone aside”) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. That’s not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. That’s naturalistic language use. 

Even if he was the first person to describe the act of “elbowing someone”, it caught on because it worked, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English. 

So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call “Buffyspeak”. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.

This is your daily reminder that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’ is a dick joke.

shakespearean-spunk:

“you make my heart beat in iambic pentameter.”

no you don’t understand shakespeare literally writes to the beat of your heart

• that’s why shakespearean actors will sometimes pound their chests in time to the words during readings

• that’s why you use fluctuations in the rhythm to track your character’s emotional state – any irregularities in the scansion are like the character’s heart stuttering or jumping or skipping a beat

• that’s why when characters share the rhythm – switching off in the middle of a foot – those characters inevitably have an extraordinarily intimate connection

shakespeare fucking writes viscerally, he is literally in your body, and that, my friend, that is why the best shakespearean actors don’t posture and emote

you have to be fucking alive and passionate and electric – it can’t be intellectual, in the end, it has to be about connection and the sweating, cheering, jeering, bleeding masses you’re performing to, because make no mistake, shakespeare may go to lofty heights, but he only works if you’re just as grounded in the earth. he has to be in your body. he has to be in your body.

holy motherfucking shit i love shakespeare so much, get him in your bones, breathe him in, stomp and rage and pine, dadum dadum dadum dadum dadum, it is literally to the beat of your heart