MasterShake

A blog about all things Shakespeare

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ACT BREAK! Don’t worry, we’ll be back with Act 2 of A Stick Figure Midsummer Night’s Dream next week, but for now, here’s a couple photo comic summaries of two of the Stratford Festival’s 2018 productions, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus!

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A hardback copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare: £16.21

A blu-ray copy of Hamlet from the RSC: £21.10

Misreading everyday words as Shakespeare titles: Pericles.

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“anti-fascist space latino whose best friend is a droid” is the best new weirdly specific character archetype of the 21st century

[shakespearenews]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, the most memorized speech from Shakespeare in British elementary schools was the eye-burning passage from King John.

Source.

Interesting choice… 

“Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect: Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes?

And will you?

Have you the heart? When your head did but ache, 

I knit my handercher about your brows, The best I had, a princess wrought it me, And I did never ask it you again; And with my hand at midnight held your head, And like the watchful minutes to the hour, Still and anon cheer’d up the heavy time, Saying, ‘What lack you?’ and 'Where lies your grief?’ Or 'What good love may I perform for you?’ Many a poor man’s son would have lien still And ne'er have spoke a loving word to you; But you at your sick service had a prince. Nay, you may think my love was crafty love And call it cunning: do, an if you will: If heaven be pleased that you must use me ill, Why then you must. Will you put out mine eyes? These eyes that never did nor never shall So much as frown on you.” 

(via shakespearenews)

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You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf. Now get ready for…

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I present to you, BLACK post its

Stage managers, dressers, deck managers and running crew… you’re welcome

[shakespearenews]

James and Emily Blunt perform an abridged version of the William Shakespeare classic love story, “Romeo and Juliet” set to 14 modern songs, across seven different sets and just one take to get it right.

[shakespearenews]

The Brain on the Bard: How Shakespeare Impacts Children With Autism

An ongoing study at Ohio State is developing both the science and the art of teaching students on the autism spectrum.

Sitting in a circle, a group of children and young teens on the autism spectrum meet each other by mimicking the pulsating beat of a heart. This “heartbeat hello” is how the Shakespeare and Autism Project at Ohio State University begins its annual workshop each spring. In addition to providing fun for students after school, the program is providing data to the Nisonger Center at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center on how Shakespeare can mitigate symptoms of autism.

[goodticklebrain]

Don’t forget the poor second Jaques in As You Like It, the deus-ex-machina man himself, Jaques de Boys.

Upcoming Appearances

September 6:

Stratford Festival Forum - Willy Shakes: Fanboy

WHO: Me! And also Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery of the Kill Shakespeare comic book series. WHAT: Panel discussion on Shakespeare in pop culture and graphic novels. Part of the Stratford Festival Forum series of events. WHEN: Wednesday, September 6, 10:45am WHERE: Chalmers Lounge, Avon Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. WHY: Because they asked me! HOW: Buy tickets at the Stratford Festival website.

Taking September “Off”

I’ve got a very busy September coming up, so instead of new comics I’m going to be posting some filler material taken from past social media posts and some of the bonus comics I share with my supporters on Patreon. It will hopefully (a) still be fun for all of you, and (b) allow me to take the time to get the rest of my year’s tasks and projects in order without having a nervous breakdown.  Thanks for understanding! The Good Tickle Shoppe, with all its objectively awesome merchandise, will remain open for business, although orders placed between September 4 and September 11 won’t ship until September 12.

[shakespearenews]

Falstaff’s Wedding (1760 and 1766) is a play by William Kenrick. It is a sequel to Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Most of the characters are carried over from the two Shakespeare plays. The play was first staged in 1766, but was not a success. It was infrequently revived thereafter.

The play exists in two quite different versions. The first version, published in 1760, is written in verse. Its main storyline involves an embittered Falstaff being drawn into a plot to kill Henry V of England. The second version, staged in 1766, drops the serious plot and expands the roles of the comic characters, becoming a farce about their plans to marry into money. It is mostly in prose with snatches of verse appended to the end of several scenes.

[shakespearenews]

Lesson Plan | Teaching 'Star Wars' With The New York Times

If you’re looking for ways to bring “Star Wars” into your classroom, we offer teaching ideas for subjects across the curriculum — from analyzing Yoda’s syntax to investigating the economic consequences of destroying the Death Star.

But, Yoda’s speech can serve as more than just a grammatical novelty in English classrooms. It can aid students in tackling the challenging syntax commonly found in both poetry and Shakespeare’s plays. If they can comprehend Yoda’s wisdom, they will be on their way to making sense of “King Lear.”

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OK, in case you haven’t been paying attention for the past however many months, here’s basically what happens in Romeo and Juliet.

And that’s it! Thanks for taking the time to follow my re-telling of Romeo and Juliet. Tune in on Thursday, when we’ll have SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! YAY!

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Cast Announced For Read Not Dead: Mucedorus

The cast have been announced for our next Read Not Dead event this Sunday 16 July.

Joining us for the reading of Mucedorus are (left to right): Rhys Bevan; James Askill; Tim Frances; Mary Doherty; Sam Cox; Lucy-Rose Leonard; Edward Elgood; Emmanuel Kojo; Rowan Williams

This Sunday morning, these actors will be given the script. By the afternoon, they perform in front of a live audience.

These one-off performances are instinctive, adrenaline driven and inventive. Come and share in the excitement of reviving these forgotten plays that definitely deserve to be Read Not Dead.

Watch the trailer >>

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I love Mucedorus so much!

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Performing Restoration Shakespeare

Dr Claude Fretz (Research Fellow, Queen’s University Belfast) explains how Shakespeare’s plays found new life on the Restoration stage…

When the English civil war began in 1642, London playhouses were shut down. A temporary parliamentary edict issued on 2 September declared that “publike Sports doe not well agree with publike Calamities”, and by 1647 the ban had become permanent. Other than a few unauthorised performances during the Interregnum, the theatres did not officially reopen until 1660, when the monarchy was restored and Charles II returned to London (theatrical activity had in fact resumed in late 1659 when the Royalist victory began to look inevitable).

After he was restored to the throne, Charles II granted exclusive licences (‘patents’) to just two theatre companies: the King’s Men led by Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke’s Men led by Sir William Davenant. These two companies continued until 1682, when they were merged. Because theatrical activity had been prohibited for nearly twenty years, very few new plays were immediately available, and the theatres therefore turned to the old pre-1642 classics of Fletcher and Beaumont, Jonson, and Shakespeare. 

Since the King’s Men consisted largely of veteran actors who had been active before the start of the Civil War, they managed to secure the rights to most of the plays performed by the pre-1642 King’s Men - which was, of course, the company for which Shakespeare had been a sharer, playwright, and actor. The Duke’s Men, on the other hand, were made up of younger actors - including Thomas Betterton, who was to become the foremost actor of his time. Partly out of necessity - the Duke’s Men had not been granted the rights to the more obviously popular plays by Shakespeare - they started reforming the old works. Under Davenant’s imaginative leadership, they rapidly gained a reputation for creatively adapting plays and for pioneering theatrical innovations.  

Initially, the theatres staged Shakespeare’s plays mostly unaltered, and while Othello, Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet were successful, problems with other plays soon became apparent. Samuel Pepys noted in March 1662 that Romeo and Juliet was “the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life”. He was even more scathing in his review of an unrevised A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he called “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”. Pepys soon got his wish for an improved version of Shakespeare: Davenant’s first adaptation, The Law against Lovers, a hybrid of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing - was performed in 1662. 

Samuel Pepys was, of course, just a single spectator. But his negative appraisals of ‘untouched’ Shakespearean drama tell us something important about changing expectations on the part of Restoration playgoers. In the Restoration, Shakespeare’s plays needed to be substantially rewritten - not just in the light of the new political situation, but also because of new tastes and expectations that demanded clearer and more intelligible language, tragicomic plots, increased sentimentalism, and poetic justice. As Michael Dobson writes in his book The Making of the National Poet, “[i]n the 1660s, Shakespeare’s plays belonged to the theatre more significantly than they belonged to Shakespeare”. 

From early on, major differences between Restoration and Elizabethan theatre were apparent. Not surprisingly in the context of the restored monarchy, the dominant genre was the tragicomedy; even a play like Richard III was reframed as a tragicomic story about a failed (Commonwealth) tyrant. Indeed, most of Shakespeare’s history plays and Roman tragedies were converted into more or less conspicuous political commentaries. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works, for example in The Tempest, the threats of usurpation and rebellion were often muted or defused. 

Perhaps the most seminal change brought about by the Restoration theatre was the introduction of female actors: women now played women’s parts, and this was routinely exploited for sexual titillation. When revising The Tempest, for example, Davenant and Dryden added numerous female roles, including Caliban’s sister Sycorax, Miranda’s sister Dorinda, and Ariel’s female companion Milcha. Whereas Shakespeare used boy actors for female roles, actresses were now sometimes recruited even to perform male parts; these were the so-called ’breeches parts’ designed to display an actress’s legs, which would be covered by a gown when playing a female role.

To cater to the new theatrical tastes, staging also changed dramatically. Enabled by the indoor theatre culture and inspired by continental operas or semi-operas and by the pre-war court masques designed by Inigo Jones, the Duke’s Men introduced special effects including machines and movable scenery, and placed a heavy emphasis on music and dance. These changes were hugely successful and forced the rival King’s Men to follow suit. Pepys noted on 24 August 1661 that a performance of Hamlet had been “done with scenes very well”.

If Pepys liked Hamlet, he absolutely loved Davenant’s new Macbeth with its music and special effects, describing it as “a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable”. Pepys was not alone in admiring the play. John Downes, the long-serving prompter for the Duke’s Men, later remarked that the play, “alter’d by Sir William Davenant; being drest in all it’s Finery, as new Cloath’s, new Scenes, Machines […] with all the Singing and Dancing in it […] it being all Excellently perform’d, being in the nature of an Opera, it Recompenc’d double the Expence”. Of Shadwell’s operatic 1674 adaptation of Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest, Downes wrote that “all things [were] perform’d in it so admirably well, that not any succeeding Opera got more money”. Davenant’s Macbeth and Shadwell’s Tempest became two of the most popular plays of the period precisely because of their special effects, music, and dance. The witches in Macbeth famously flew on and off, requiring flight ‘machines’ with ropes and wires, and the first stage direction in Shadwell’s Tempest, which seeks to represent the storm conjured up by Prospero, stipulates 24 violins, “several Cupids flying” around, and “Several Spirits in horrid shapes flying down amongst the Sailors, then rising and crossing in the Air”.

Restoration Shakespeare was thus a complex theatrical experience that integrated song, music, dance, and acting; indeed, music and dance, alongside stage machines and movable scenes, were central to the success of Restoration theatre more generally. The emphasis on textual adaptation that often dominates scholarship in this field, however, fails to do justice to this very distinct identity of Restoration Shakespeare. 

Starting with the workshop on Shadwell’s Tempest to be held in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe on 12-13 July, the ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ project seeks to correct this imbalance by focusing on the performance dimensions of these adaptations and by forming a community of scholars and artists who together will undertake archival study and create public performances. This will not only result in a renewed appreciation of the Restoration stage spectacle, but will create fresh theatrical experiences that are meaningful to audiences today.

[shakespearesglobeblog]

Mucedorus was the play that never looked back

Our next Read Not Dead event takes place on Sunday 16 July and forms part of our Before Shakespeare season of readings co-ordinated by James Wallace. James will be directing Mucedorus, a play published in 1598.

Ahead of the event next Sunday, Dr Peter Kirwan, Associate Professor in Early Modern Drama from the University of Nottingham, looks at why this play was so frequently performed at the time…

Photo: Title Page of Third Quarto of Mucedorus, 1610, from Wikipedia (Public Domain).

What happens when Comedy and Envy get into a fight about who is more powerful? The answer, Mucedorus - perhaps the single most popular play ever performed on the London stage.

Mucedorus and Amadine are two of the unluckiest star-crossed lovers in the early modern dramatic canon. Not only is Amadine a princess and Mucedorus a shepherd (at least, so he says…) but they have to contend with the menagerie of villains thrown at them by Envy: a ravenous bear, a jilted suitor, a disaffected soldier, and finally Bremo, the cannibalistic self-proclaimed “King of the Forest”. It’s a breathless romp through the motifs of romance, with a high body count and a hilariously irreverent sense of humour.

Mucedorus went through more printed editions than any other in the seventeenth century, played repeatedly at court, on tour and in the London theatres, and was revised at least twice to take into account changing monarchs and developments in taste. These days, it is best known as part of the so-called ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’, thanks to a spurious attribution in the 1630s (and some still argue that he wrote the additional scenes in the third quarto). But the play’s anonymity didn’t stop it being regularly performed, quoted and referenced.

It’s hard to pin down what made Mucedorus so popular, but its experimental intermingling of slapstick comedy and genuine threat, sympathetic romance and high adventure, may well have been part of it. Mucedorus complicates simple genre categories, offering non-stop entertainment. As Mucedorus and Amadine face one challenge after another to their love, the play keeps its audience guessing about the eventual outcome.

Any play that starts its main action with “Enter, pursued with a bear” sets up high expectations, and Mucedorus never looks back. This Read Not Dead is a rare chance to see one of the most innovative, entertaining and unexpected plays of its time.

Photo: In our Read Not Dead series, actors are given the play on a Sunday morning and present it, script in hand, to an audience later that afternoon. 

Book tickets online for the Mucedorous event on Sunday 16 July.

[goodticklebrain]

Everything could have been averted IF ONLY Friar Laurence had kept himself in better shape and was a faster runner. RUNNING SAVES LIVES, PEOPLE.

[shakespearenews]

The Rumoured Lyfe and Certain Death of Delia Bacon: A New Musical

All materials found on the site are property of Elise LeBreton, Zdenko Martin, Madeline Myers, and Matthew Russell. Copyright © 2017.

The Rumoured Lyfe and Certain Death of Delia Bacon explores the life of American pioneer Delia Bacon (1811-1859), the first person to advance the theory that William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. The “authorship question” is inherent in the structure of this sung-through musical, with music and lyrics written by several authors in close collaboration. Delia unearths the murky story of Delia’s life, from primary schoolteacher, to budding playwright, to infamous novelist. The narrative is punctuated by commentary from an onstage band, which functions as a Shakespearean chorus.