Shakespeare more like shakesQUEER

A couple of years ago I turned my Shakespeare sideblog into a poll bracket blog and now it's back to being a general Shakespeare sideblog. But I didn't have the heart to change the URL and icon back so here we are --- Main is dracolizardlars

[gayestshakespearecouples]

Man I just saw Twelfth Night by an (excellent!) small local theatre group at a place that was never designed to be a theatre (outside, bring your own chairs) and it was FANTASTIC I love this play SO MUCH in every single performance ever done of it

[gayestshakespearecouples]

I am accidentally seeing the same theatre group again somewhere else outside, doing Comedy of Errors! I wasn't sure it was the same group until I hunted down this post and did some cross referencing. They are NOT LOCAL I don't know why I thought that it's the damn Festival Players International and they're great

[mephistopheles]

midsummer: if the feudal strictness of your home kingdom can’t give you what you want, try going on an adventure guided by magical supernatural beings

macbeth: but not like that

hamlet: if you’re in a duplicitous violent world, your king and your peers and your girlfriend may lie to you, so only follow to the advice of your steadfast best friend

othello: but not like that

as you like it: if you undergo a misfortune that causes you to hate your life in your city, give yourself a makeover and run away to the woods

timon of athens: but not like that

two gents: if you’re in love in italy, you can quickly and easily communicate important information via the verona postal service

romeo and juliet: but not like that

[princessdelacruz]

She's The Man (2006) dir. Andy Fickman

[gayestshakespearecouples]

Can anyone who's seen this and is also familiar with Twelfth Night tell me if it's any good?

[lipstickhamlet]

look you can't say [shakespeare character] HAS TO BE [thing] without exception in every single production, otherwise you're kind of misunderstanding why we put on these 400-year plays over and over again with different twists and modern adaptational choices each time. because theatre isn't stagnant. every actor & director chooses to focus on a different aspect of the play to highlight and draw out different messages and meanings from the same text. you can't be saying [shakespeare play] HAS TO include [this scene] or have [this interpretation] or portray something [this way] or whatever every single time without exception because WHYYYY would we be still putting them on!!! if every production of hamlet made hamlet the same age and put it in the same era and had gertrude know or not know claudius' murder and so on and so forth we would've stopped putting it on ages ago!!!! shakespeare's modern day appeal is its versatility !!!

[lipstickhamlet]

it literally ultimately depends on what version of this story the director wants to tell this time. want to show a man lashing out and hurting others and crumbling as the catastrophic consequences of his own actions spiral his life out of control? make hamlet 30.

want to show a teenager helpless in a world of adults, powerless under his guardians but with unimaginable burden on him, trying and failing to cope with his grief as the ground spins out from under his feet? make hamlet 19.

want to show the complexity of gertrude's relationship with her son, and have her quiet complicity finally catch up to her in the last guilt-ridden effort to save her son? have her drink the poison knowingly.

want to emphasize the tragedy of the story and show the consequences of the depths claudius sank to? have her drink the poison by accident.

want to portray elsinore with an insular, suffocating atmosphere in which the rot and madness festers? cut fortinbras out.

want to emphasize the collateral damage of elsinore's deterioration on a national and international level, and leave a current of militaristic tension beneath? leave fortinbras in!

hamlet is too much of a complex and multi-layered play for ANYTHING in this show to be definitive!!! hamlet doesn't HAVE to be any age! fortinbras doesn't HAVE to be present or not present!! it's fair game as long as it makes for a good story in this iteration of it! nothing in hamlet HAS to be anything universally and i'm sick of posts claiming that it does

[butchhamlet]

my other titus thought is not to sound like i’m saying “you know what the goriest shakespeare play of all time could use? an element of violent homophobia“ but i think……. production where lavinia and bassianus are both women. no wonder bassianus can’t object to the saturnius/lavinia marriage in public. no wonder lavinia runs away with bassianus rather than talking to her father. no wonder all of lavinia’s brothers seem to know and side with her but titus doesn’t. also it just makes me sad

[two-bees-poetry]

the grief of growing

[ryebreadgf]

yayyyy

[jomiddlemarch]

[henryclervals]

Riz Ahmed giving Edmund’s ‘Stand up for bastards’ speech from King Lear (Act I, Scene II)

[shutinshowdown]

Welcome... to Shut-In Showdown!

Shut-In Showdown

Give me characters who are shut-ins!

This is a poll bracket / tournament for your favourite characters who are shut-ins! It's time for the agoraphobes, hikikomori, socially awkward, those with debilitating disabilities, and just general sad bastards who never leave the house to duke it out in a popularity contest!

Guidelines for character submissions:

Absolutely no real people please

Characters who are/were "shut in" entirely because they were held captive Rapunzel-style by someone else are something I consider to be a separate trope and will not be accepting them to this tourney, sorry! I may be able to be talked round on edge cases though

"Shut in-ness" is up to you, even if they technically go outside sometimes, if they "feel" like a shut-in I will definitely consider including them

Characters who were previously shut-ins but aren't any more are totally A-OK - we love to see a recovery!

However, I would prefer if the characters were/are shut-ins for a significant length of time rather than it being like, a one-episode plot device

Submissions will remain open for... As long as I feel like leaving them open for depending on how many submissions I get 🤷 But definitely at least a week, probably more idk!

Psst, you should check out @whitehairandtraumatized-bracket and the soon-to-get-started @amnesiacbracket for more opportunities to cheer on your favourite pathetic blorbos! This is totally unbiased, I swear I'm not a mod myself on the former and dating the runner of the latter! :P

@tournament-announcer 👋 (thanks for doing your thing btw you are a vital service to this website)

[gayestshakespearecouples]

[gayestshakespearecouples]

By the way, I'm now reliving my poll bracket running glory days (seriously I had so much fun running this one) as I've become a mod over at @whitehairandtraumatized-bracket and am posting the round 2 polls right now :3 Wildly off topic for this Shakespeare blog but hey thought it was worth promo'ing that I'm involved in another tourney at last

[ricardianguy]

[mlleclaudine]

from pbsgreatperformances' Instagram

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh so this is why people are gaga over Peter Dinklage

[little-tornad0]

Oh this is what people mean by preserving the dick jokes in Shakespeare adaptations!

[chexala]

The full production is streaming for free on the PBS website until December 31, 2025! https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/twelfth-night-about/17254/

[nymphoutofwater]

Here's a remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)

Anthony and Cleopatra: ~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017

As You Like It: ~ At Wolfe Park - 2013 ~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006

Coriolanus: ~ NYET Alumni - 2016 ~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014 ~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011

Cymbelline: ~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014

Hamlet: ~ David Tennant - 2009 ~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000 ~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989 ~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990 ~ Broadway - 1964 ~ Christopher Plummer - 1964 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948

Henry IV: ~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989 ~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017

Henry V: ~ The BBC's - 1990 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944

Julius Caesar: ~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1979 ~ John Gielgud - 1970

King Lear: ~ The RSC's - 2008 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1983 ~ The BBC's - 1975 ~ James Earl Jones - 1974 ~ Orson Wells - 1953

Love's Labour's Lost: ~ Calvin University - 2016

Macbeth: ~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017 ~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969 ~ Sean Connery - 1961

Measure for Measure: ~ Hugo Weaving - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1990

The Merchant of Venice: ~ Al Pacino - 2004 ~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001 ~ The BBC's - 1980 ~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973

The Merry Wives of Windsor: ~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982

A Midsummer Night's Dream: ~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019 ~ City of Columbus's - 2018 ~ Julie Taymor's - 2014 ~ The Globe's - 2013 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986

Much Ado About Nothing: ~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019 ~ David Tennant & Catherine Tate - 2011 ~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993 ~ The BBC's - 1984

Othello: ~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990

Richard II: ~ David Tennant - 2013 ~ Deborah Warner's - 1997 ~ The BBC's - 1978

Richard III: ~ Ian McKellen - 1995 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1955

Romeo and Juliet: ~ Simon Godwin's - 2021 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954

The Taming of the Shrew: ~ Ontario production? ~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976 ~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967 ~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929

The Tempest: ~ Gregory Doran's - 2017 ~ The BBC's - 1988

Timon of Athens: ~ Barry Avrich's - 2024

Troilus and Cressida: ~ Audio Production ~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016

Titus Andronicus: ~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999

Twelfth night: ~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015 ~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970

Two Gentlemen of Verona: ~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018 ~ The BBC's

The Winter's Tale: ~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)

Bonuses:

Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)

Rock Opera Hamlet???

Shakespeare animated tales

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy

Romeo and Julieta: A Día de los Muertos Love Story

There’s also many other Latine Shakespeare adaptations listed in this archive

From the original post:

A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.

Russian Hamlet here

Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Macbeth retelling.

Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.

This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.

The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!

Here's the 1948 one,

the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there

A Lego adaptation of Othello here.

Here's commentary on David Tennant's Richard II

[lipstickhamlet]

some of my oddly specific shakespeare staging opinions:

modern stagings of hamlet should keep them as royalty unless the fact that they aren't is hugely relevant to that production.

benedick and beatrice should be in their early 30s at least and claudio and hero should be noticeably younger. beatrice being adamant against marriage and both her and benedick's reaction to each other makes more sense if they're older.

this one's controversial but i think paris should be in his late teens, not way older. i might make another post elaborating on this but paris' death frames him as another victim of the families' violence, with romeo mourning + identifying him as being in the same situation as himself. it's not that old man paris isn't a good interpretation; it's often the easiest way to show romeo and juliet's positions as children helpless under their parents, and makes very clear what demands are being made of juliet. but i feel that adding paris to the list of young people killed in the play as a byproduct of the adults' violence gives romeo's identification with him more weight. given that he clearly has much more control than romeo and juliet but is still identified as a victim of the violence, i think it makes the most sense if he's a bit older than r&j but still very much young.

modern stagings of julius caesar should keep all the knives as knives, but if there has to be a gun, make cassius shoot himself in the head while caesar and brutus still die by stabbing. i've posted about this but the short version is that's it's the best way to show cassius' death as cowardly in contrast to brutus and caesar, whose deaths still mirror each other.

give the fool in king lear an onstage reason for disappearing. i like the 2018 national theatre version that has edmund kill him, and the 2023 south korean production that had cordelia be the fool in disguise the whole time. there was one from 2014 where lear beat him to death in madness which i think would be very shocking, but to good effect. the subsequent lack of comedy in the play after his disappearance would feel more jarring if we actually see his death.

benvolio should appear again in the last scene of romeo and juliet, mourning the two along with everyone else.

[shaxgirlsummer]

i read something so so fascinating about hamlet and particularly ophelia’s role in it a while back (when working on my ophelia & abortion paper) which is, summarily, that ophelia does not obey the “expected” behavior of a love interest as typical for early modern drama at this time, including in shakespeare’s own works. simply put? she denies her own desires and obeys her father. this was not the case for virtually every other early modern women “love interest”! (scare quotes because ophelia is far far more than a love interest, but it is one of her many roles in the play.) women in early modern drama did not obey their fathers, they chased after/worked hand in hand with their beloveds. juliet is an obvious and probably the most well-known example, but desdemona also defies her father’s preferences to marry othello, bianca defies baptisa, etc. and so it is deeply fascinating that, at least on one level, ophelia chooses to obey her father’s wishes and thus denies her own desire to be with hamlet. (and the fact that ophelia even “helps” her father investigate hamlet was even more a distortion of the aforementioned early modern theatrical trope—daughters helping their fathers against their beloveds simply was not done.)

which of course creates a fascinating parallel: ophelia does not fulfill her desire just as hamlet does not fulfill his revenge. these characters are defined by what they do not do throughout the play. from this alone, it is easy to argue that hamlet and ophelia are the most clearly defined foils in all of hamlet, but the reasons go on and on—they are the only two characters who experience madness, they both prioritize obedience to their fathers above all, ophelia is the only character to verbally match hamlet’s wit, etc.

[butchhamlet]

professor just said “Macbeth’s best friend is not his wife, it is the audience.” not even my shakespeare class professor. my head is spinning. his best friend is the audience...

[butchhamlet]

i know that in many ways this is just how soliloquies work. but now i'm also thinking about how macbeth increasingly withdraws from lady macbeth through the second half of the play, becoming less and less transparent. and to some degree he does this with us too, his language getting more tangled as he hesitates to put words to his worst plans, but then, he hesitates to say "murder" in his first soliloquy too. we're the ones who go with him to the witches; we're the ones who hear tomorrow and tomorrow. again i promise i understand this is how soliloquies work but it's not something i've thought about this way with him before rather than, like, hamlet