Shakespeare - Blog Posts
NOOOOO! DAMN IT, BILLY-BARD! I love Shakespeare so much, but this one play just will not stop haunting me. I'll never reach the ends of it. It's like a puddle that goes down far enough to have angler fish.
I have been exposed to this more than any other of The Bard's work, and never once by choice. I have been forced to read this play cover to cover four times in school, including for one exhausperated highschool teacher who got the lot of us engaged by giving extra credit to whoever found the most dick jokes. I've seen it performed by every kind of troop from school kids to the actual globe theater. I once got roped into playing a bit part in a performance art street production because I happen to be walking by, and I NEVER CAUGHT THIS?!?
I tip my hat to you, thank you for showing me yet another facet to the peerless jewel I am repeatedly clubbed over the head with whether I like it or not.
It's a perfect sonnet.
14 lines. 3 stanzas in ABAB rhyme, and a rhyming couplet at the end.
It starts off with each of them speaking a whole stanza. Romeo offering up a self depreciating metaphor (a pilgrim at a holy shrine, sinful for wanting to place a kiss on her hand), and Juliet returning it (it's not a sin for a pilgrim to touch the hands of a saint. Pilgrims and the saints hands can touch. )
Then they share a quatraine, keeping the rhyme and rhythm steady, the flirting turning even more overt. (Saints and pilgrims both have lips, yeah? Well, sure, for prayer. Well if a pilgrims hand can touch a saints hand, then their lips...)
Then they each speak half a couplet (the saints dont make the first move, but if its a prayer....well, here I am, praying....), and share their first kiss.
It's flirty and silly and a little irreverent, and they become more and more in sync as they speak.
This is a heightened, fantastical, almost reality bending moment. This is a moment where two lonely teenagers, one who is having her future decided without her and the other fresh from an unrequited rejection, feel the world shift around them.
And the foreshadowing sits at the end of stanza 3. This is an act of faith, but if it cannot be, it will turn to despair.
And I just. The craft of it. The poetry of it. How the form and the rhythm mirror the metaphor and mirror the emotion of it.
I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1
Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.
Sampson, Romeo and Juliet
— Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War
— Mary Oliver, Entering the Kingdom
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
— Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
— Sarah Williams
I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
“If someday the moon calls you by your name don’t be surprised, because every night I tell her about you.”
— Shahrazad al-Khalij
“What a strange thing! To be alive beneath cherry blossoms.”
– Kobayashi Issa
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
— W.S. Merwin
People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Complete Prose Collection; “The Brothers Karamazov”
I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.
– Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, “I would have loved her.”
- Nicole Lyons, Hush
– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) dir. Kenneth Branagh
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/
I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
Puck, After casting a spell on the Wrong Person: Heartbreak Is One thing, my ego's another
Oberon: I beg you don't embarass me (motherfucker)
Denmark’s a prison. Then is the world one. Hamlet (1996), dir. Kenneth Branagh
Hamlet (1996)
Three equally adorable photos of Kenneth Branagh directing his adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” 1993.
Withnail & I (1987)
"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension. How like a God! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither. Nor woman neither."
I love this idea! However, I think you could do Midsummer Night’s Dream if you start and end the play outside (or next door, whatever) and use the large, labyrinthine coffee shop from Tempest for the woods. Bonus points if the mechanicals do Pyramus and Thisbe as if it were set in a coffee shop!
Coffee shop AU, except the original media’s setting is otherwise largely unaltered – it just has a coffee shop in it now, or the nearest remotely plausible equivalent.
Patrick Stewart has gotten to my favorite Shakespeare sonnet, 130!
Love people for who they are, not some idealized version of who you or society think they should be.
I would love to see a Wild West version of the Scottish play! That sounds like it could work extremely well.
Cowboys are witches and horses are their familiars