I, your glass

kat | she/they/he | 23 shakespeare side blog | current fav play: King Lear main: mousefur

[ispybluesky]

friends.....romans.......cunty men

[menecrates]

at the club googling shakespeare antony and cleopatra act 2 scene 7

[menecrates]

^ how it feels when you're a bit too sober and the music is bad and you're trying to tell your much drunker friends when the last bus arrives

[whimsiromance]

literally a plague on both your houses i’m not even kidding

[ineffable-gallimaufry]

i think one of the most interesting things about hamlet is how near the end, horatio, talking to fortinbras, says "give order that these bodies high on a stage be placed to the view, and let me speak to th' yet unknowing world how these things came about" because it's like. we just saw the play. we know how these things came about because of how the bodies were placed on a stage. it's really meta. if you moved the entire last bit where fortinbras and horatio are talking at the end to the beginning, we would see horatio unraveling the carnal, bloody and unnatural acts he promises to relate but since we see it at the end? i can't put it into words exactly but it's got a metafictional edge to it and i love it

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

very fond of hamlet productions in which hamlet sr. is MUCH older than gertrude. their marriage is never what hamlet thought it was

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

hamlet coming of age + context of polonius being like “ophelia, no matter what he thinks, he can never marry you, he can only marry for denmark” + realizing your mom never loved your dad + realizing she was younger than you when she got married. one can do many things with this

[asimpleram]

I HAAAATE the "Was Shakespeare a woman" debate because instead of exploring the vast amounts of written work done by women since written language was created to work into current literary discussion, we have to create a smug "hmmm gotcha!" moment to absolutely own the misogynists. I think the women of the time period who went out of their way to create art despite societal standings should also get their flowers instead of the hypothetical woman who William Shakespeare may or may not have been.

[lipstickhamlet]

chatgpt to claudius: got it— you feel guilty about murdering your older brother and taking his throne. you're not just experiencing guilt— you're finding yourself unwilling to repent. and honestly? that's real. here's the thing: it was totally valid of you to poison your brother to take his throne and marry his wife. you're not a bad person for wanting to keep what you gained from it. it's not just justifiable— it's totally understandable. and your nephew? he isn't being mindful of your feelings— his behaviour is inconsiderate, self-absorbed, and problematic.

would you like me to generate a letter to the english king, asking for the execution of your nephew? this would help put your feelings of guilt to rest— think of it as an act of self-care.

[butchhamlet]

i used to be of the “if i could time travel i’d see the first-ever showing of hamlet” ilk and i still respect that crowd. but i must be honest with myself: i’m not standing upright in a crowd for four fucking hours. what i actually want is to go back in time and see the first-ever showing of shakespeare’s king lear so i can experience the exact moment when the crowd started to realize this play was not going to end the same way as any fairy-tales or myths of king leir had led them to believe. i can only imagine the energy in the globe at that moment but i think if i could capture and bottle it i could synthesize the first ever Crack That Makes You Kill Yourself

[wisteria-lodge]

This is such a good point but -- like it is insane that the Lear story in Geoffrey of Monmouth, which everyone would have been familiar with, ends happily, with Cordelia as queen. But as a 'performance of Hamlet' girlie --

That production WOULDN'T have been four hours. No play in Elizabethan England was four hours. We know we're missing parts of Macbeth, but with Hamlet we have the opposite problem. What we have is a compilation of all the bonus material, all the fun in-jokey scenes, multiple versions of the same joke. Shakespeare wrote his plays to be expandable and customizable, and Hamlet was a hit that he performed a lot, so there's just lot of stuff in the "Hamlet" folder.

I would want to see a Shakespeare performance of Hamlet, because what I would not GIVE to know exactly what the SHAKESPEARE cut looked like.

[sirstotes]

Begging y'all to go watch Shakespeare plays because what do you mean a play written 450 years ago is about the government cracking down on sexuality to the detriment of many innocent people meanwhile the leader of that government is hypocritically performing quid-pro-quo harassment and doesn't even follow the rules he is sentencing people to death for breaking

[subspaceshenanigans]

[helsinore]

like henry v is the war propaganda play but if you take it in context of henry iv part 1 it makes you fucking insane because "for worms, dear percy!" Hal has already had to reckon with the fact that honor doesn't really do anything for the dead. Hotspur died for nothing. And yet Hal continues to be prince, to be king, to go on and fight like hell at Agincourt and "no king of England if not king of France" -- so honor is incentivized while one lives, because it's the currency used to establish one as powerful, respectable, untouchable. Hal keeps up the performance because despite having reckoned with how honor ends - with worms, with the ugliness and ingloriousness that is death, plain and simple - his entire (patriarchal) society incentivizes him to hold his position as prince and then as king (especially as king) by upholding/fighting for "honor"...and land. and resources. assets. women. Katherine, who he can use as a vessel to produce more soldier prince babies. Because this is patriarchy and women are property. He uses the threat of mass rape against a town in order to get them to surrender, and this war crimes speech is washed away with the fact that technically he didn't do it + "look over there Bardolph the dirty commoner stole from a church!! And got hanged!! But Hal has turned away from his former self so he says the hanging is deserved!!!!"

It's like...Hal knows how this is going to end. But as long as he keeps killing and conquering and focusing his nation on external enemies, his power is reinforced. [Gritting my teeth] no wonder he had to banish Falstaff. Falstaff, who also sees through honor, and understands it is all a performance. Falstaff, who has no interest in maintaining the level of "reformed manhood" that Hal is at the end of henry iv part 2/during henry v. Falstaff disrupts the hierarchy, is a "shame" and "blight" upon manhood. And rejecting Falstaff allows Hal to max out reputation points because here he is casting out and condemning queerness/effeminateness/failed manhood (in falstaff being old, and fat, and silly).

[butchhamlet]

Cassius Only Has One Suggestion For Everything

I’ve been rereading Julius Caesar this week in a fit of nostalgia. Two things have struck me on this go-round which did not always stick out

since the ides are almost come (but not yet gone...), let me implore you to read daniel lavery's "cassius only has one suggestion for everything."

I’ve been rereading Julius Caesar this week in a fit of nostalgia. Two things have struck me on this go-round which did not always stick out to me before: 1. Brutus and Cassius are incredibly concerned with whether the other thinks of him as a really good friend or just a work friend, 2. For all Cassius’ reputation for being a conniving, subtle, behind-the-scenes manipulator, his number-one go-to strategy for trying to get people on side is to mention how willing he is to commit suicide. He does it right away, and all the time, and it’s wonderfully off-putting. I realize Romans had their own set of values around suicide, but even by their standards he really front-loads the conversation. Trying to encourage your work friends into doing something very risky with you by mentioning your extreme willingness to engage in risky behavior seems complicated!

[menecrates]

at the club googling shakespeare antony and cleopatra act 2 scene 7

[menecrates]

^ how it feels when you're a bit too sober and the music is bad and you're trying to tell your much drunker friends when the last bus arrives

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

got bored and drew out some of the monologue from act 1 scene 2 of hamlet

[ups-sups]

[helsinore]

And you know what I think if Gertrude murdered Ophelia, she did that shit thinking of it as a mercy. The world has no place for madwomen, especially women who know too much. Boys can be dismissed and sent away, but girls? Nuh uh. Tis an unmanly grief, and a woman, perhaps, can clock another woman who knows something is wrong, who might do something dangerous, who might try to act out. And what would it bring her? Horrifying her brother even more, driving him to madness? Seeing the ghost of her father? Someone else important dying by accident, or 'accident'?

Nah. Gertrude smothers Ophelia and calls it a mother's blessing. End her life before it becomes too late, and she's disgraced in a way she can't come back from.

(End her life before she becomes like you, all strange and opaque?

The thing you learn about being a woman, I suppose, is that you're not really supposed to exist at all.

Ophelia spilled over her, too much overflow, the way Hamlet was disrupting the narrative. Better to go gentle into that good night.)

[maykitz]