Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Paul from Hull
Date: 19 May 02 - 04:32 PM

Interesting, 'Councillor'....are you going to offer Her Majesty a ticket to see it when you meet her? *G*

I have to say I DO, of course, enjoy Midsummer Nights Dream now...even though there ARE others I enjoy more (I havent seen the modern Hollywodd version though (with Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, was it?)

'Much Ado About Nothing' I LOVE....& the Branagh/Thompson/Keanu Reeves/Denzil Washington version is SUPERB.... Twelfth Night is also a fave of mine.

I have to agree with you about Branaghs Henry too, Alanabit..... & I'm a little surprised that the execution of the French captives wasnt included..... he was playing Henry 'dark' enough & hot-headed(if thats the right term) enough to have 'carried' that aspect of the tale, even if they had shown it as a 'revenge' for the attack on the baggage train & the boys.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: GUEST,Nurk the lurk
Date: 19 May 02 - 05:03 PM

Favorite Shakespeare performance:

Comedy of Errors performed at the University of Anchorage Alaska, costume and set for a cast and planet in a galaxy far far away. Beat anything ol' Lucas ever dreamed up.

Next to Shakeseare the main concentrated influence on the English language by one Samuel Johnson and thridly in the mid Twentieth Century by The Goons, of whom we just lost Spike Milligan, but that's for another thread.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: alanabit
Date: 20 May 02 - 10:03 AM

Fully agree Paul. The execution of the hostages was historical fact as well. I don't believe that chivalry was ever doled out in generous portions, although I view the act as a horrible mistake - however indefensible.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Fibula Mattock
Date: 20 May 02 - 11:28 AM

alison - I saw that production of Midsummer Night's Dream in Belfast too - in the Opera House, wasn't it?
I was at school at the time, and my mum took my sister and me to see it. She didn't know how much we'd understand, but I can vividly remember it hurting because I was laughing so hard, especially at the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes at the end ("I die...argh..ugh..I die..." - and still dying 5 minutes later). I got to see a few more RSC productions later when I was on school trips, but none topped that performance.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: DMcG
Date: 20 May 02 - 11:34 AM

I saw a production of MacBeth in the Globe recently that was very odd - the witches wore dinner jackets for example. People lives were symbolised by small balls or stones that were wrestled over. However, this did manage to make one of the lines sensible which is very difficult to act well conventionally:

"They have killed me, mother. Run away, I pray you."

The usual way of doing this is with the victim having a clearly fatal wound, but it still seems to get chuckles from the audience.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 20 May 02 - 12:12 PM

I thought the recent Midsummer Night's Dream was well done. It is set in the late 1800s. Solid performances from Kevin Kline as Bottom, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and the rest of the "rude mechanicals". The unintentionally comical presentation of Pyramis and Thisbe contains an excellent bit, where the actor who reluctantly agreed to portray Thisbe transcends the script and moves the audience to tears. I have never seen it played that way before, and that points up a fact about Shakespeare : There is a depth and dimension to his words that make them work on a variety of levels.

I also enjoyed the recent film of Twelfth Night with Ben Kingsley doing excellent work as the Clown, mixing humor, sarcasm, and pathos in equal measures.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Penny S.
Date: 20 May 02 - 03:38 PM

One of the most stunning performances in Midsummer Night's Dream I saw was - believe this or not - Jeffery Archer as Puck in an open-air theatre in a park in Dover (Kent, England), where every one of his entrances was made over the high hedge which formed the surround of the stage, impelled from a small trampoline behind. He was wearing little, but much green greasepaint, and his hair pulled in spikes, and he has lied about where this happened, but I know, I was there.

Type casting?

Penny

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Kim C
Date: 20 May 02 - 04:23 PM

I love Shakespeare. I kept only two of my college textbooks: my Riverside Chaucer and my Riverside Shakespeare. For those of you who don't know about the Riverside company, their books are large enough to require transport on a small cart. Lucky for me I've been lifting weights and can now carry said books around on my own strength.

Macbeth is one of my favorites, and Hamlet, even as long and cumbersome as it is. Comedy of Errors is quite hilarious. And yes, Iago is just about the most villainous villain who ever graced a page of print.

I think one reason people are put off by Shakespeare is that so many think Romeo and Juliet was the Only Play Ever Written, and has consequently been done to DEATH. It's an all right story, but I wouldn't consider it one of his better works. It's become such a cliche, and there are so many other plays to choose from.

Some directors like to take liberties with the classics - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, it's just plain weird.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: M.Ted
Date: 20 May 02 - 04:50 PM

Capri-Uni--There is little record or evidence of any sort about the life of William Shakespeare--curious for a man whose work, even in his lifetime, was greatly acclaimed-- his plays seem generally to have been generally published anonymously, only aquiring the attribution "Shake-speare" in reprintings after about 1598, and of all his literary contemporaries, only Ben Jonson made any reference to him--Indeed, early biographers began to have doubts about him simply because there was no record of him at all, even in places that there should have been--

When William Shakespeare of Strafford-on-Avon died, there was no public tribute to him, though he was wealthy, his estate contained no copies of his own work--no plays, no poems, no first editions, no manuscripts, and his will made no mention of them--strange indeed for a man of such literary impotance, and perhaps even unique in history--

WS works may utilize as many as 21,000 words, Milton used only 10,000, and Bacon, master of law and philospohy and regarded as the greatest intellect of his time, only used about 8,000--WS works include nearly 2000 words that had never been used in print before(at a time when the average man used only 2000-3000 words in total), he demonstrated a mastery of law, yet there is no record that he had any formal education at all--

Another peculiarity is that nowhere in his writings are there either incidents that parallel incidents in his own life, or characters that correspond to those that he knew--nor is there mention of the place he lived in his writing--

It was a time of conspiracy and , and more than one writer payed the ultimate price for his literary creations, so there concealed poets, and anonymous or pseudonymous playwrites. If there is mystery about the authorship of the plays, it seems to have been deliberately imposed--There are many posssible candidates for Shakespeare's works, and the open minded individual will find each compelling, at least until reading about the next--the reason that this is true is that of all the prospects, William Shakespeare seems the least likely to have written his plays--

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: CapriUni
Date: 20 May 02 - 06:32 PM

M.Ted:

Well, as you like it, if you do, that's fine. ;-)

Personally, I simply do not like conspiracy theories, even for "an age of conspiracy" -- we can call it that now because the conspiracies of the time have evarporated over the last half millennium, all the people who had a vested interest in maintaining the conspiracies are long since dead, and we can say with confidence who was plotting against whom and why. The intricate plots have become as transparent as tissue paper in the rain... All except for this one. Do you really think that 500 hundred years of theaters owners and Drama and English teacher have that big a vested interest in maintaining a fiction?

You may very well be correct: that W.S. was not a single man, and/or was not a low-born man. All I have to go on is my Pelican collection of Complete Shakespeare, and after reading (and rereading, in some cases) a sizeable portion of the words printed therein, I, personally, find it easier to believe they were all written by the same person over a lifetime, and that that person spent more time among the lower and middle classes than he did in court.

Whether my conclusion is correct or not certainly won't stop me from enjoying those words in the future, or recommending them to others, so it's all a bit of a moot point.

Kim C. --

Couldn't agree more on your assessment of R&J. Last time I saw it was an outdoor performance under a tent. The production and acting were all fine, but it struck me that there were several holes in the plot you could drive a coach and four through -- The main one being that the friar didn't simply tell Juliet's parents that she was already married to Romeo, and that no man could put them assunder, rather than handing a pre-pubescent girl a vial of poison. Of course, the plot wasn't original to the play W.S. was adapting a renaisance version of a Harlequin novel. The skill level is higher than in earlier plays attributed to him, but it was harldly the peak of its genre.

If it were up to me, and I had to choose one W.S. play to teach for school, this wouldn't be the one. ... If I didn't have to worry about the schoolboard censoring me, I'd go for one of the comedies, with the bawdy jokes to catch the kids' attention. Otherwise, I'd go for Lear. Downright depressing at the end, but supurbly written, with a decent gore factor to make up for the lack of sex, and the whole plot revolves around a father not understanding his kid... which I suspect the kids could relate to.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 20 May 02 - 08:38 PM

Kim said R&J had "several holes in the plot you could drive a coach and four through -- The main one being that the friar didn't simply tell Juliet's parents that she was already married to Romeo".

Is it not plausible that the priest, who married the two with good intentions but against the will of their two powerful families, feared for his position if the secret marriage was discovered?

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: NicoleC
Date: 21 May 02 - 12:17 AM

CapriUni, you're right about Lear. In high school we got split up into groups and assigned Shakespear plays to do a project with -- my group got Lear and made a movie. We had a blast laughing at all the silly disguises and turned it into kind of a dark comedy.

Whadda ya know, I forgot about that one. My flair for non-performance was established early on... I was the cameraperson :)

Of topic -- why do they insist that you memorize the prologue to Canterbury Tales? Oh please. If we were allowed to read the Wife of Bath, Much Ado is nothing!

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: CapriUni
Date: 21 May 02 - 12:19 AM

actually, it was me who talked about the plot hole...

And yes, I suppose it's plausible. But it still felt like a hole... Still, as I said before, he was simply dramatising a Harlequin Romance novel of the time.

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: M.Ted
Date: 21 May 02 - 01:01 AM

Capri-I don't think it much matters to five hundred years of producers, theatre owners, actors, audiences, how the plays came to be--Ben Jonson said(in a very circumspect way), in his introduction to the first folio that we shouldn't worry too much about who wrote the plays, and just concentrate on the plays themselves--

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: CapriUni
Date: 21 May 02 - 10:53 AM

Well, I'll agree with that. Personally, I this think whole debate was created simply a gossip outlet for those who consider themselves too highbrow for the talk shows on tv...

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: alison
Date: 21 May 02 - 11:18 AM

yeah Fib, Belfast opera House... and probably as part of the "Queen's Festival".... I wish you hadn't said you were at school though.... now I feel old...... *grin*


slainte

alison

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: Fibula Mattock
Date: 21 May 02 - 11:55 AM

aw, sorry alison! ;)

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakspeare very strange..
From: M.Ted
Date: 21 May 02 - 06:22 PM

The debate went on long before there were talk shows--in 1592, a dramatist named Robert Greene published a story, Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, in pamphlet form, about a thinly disguised, disgraced young dramatist who is asked by a wealthy actor to write plays, which the actor takes credit for--the actor was an even more thinly disguised Shakespeare-Greene and George Peale seem to have written the original versions of all three parts of "Henry VI"--

Even Ben Jonson, in an epigram called "On Poet-Ape", says "To a little wealth and credit on the scene, He takes up all, and makes each man's wit his own"--

The questions about the authorship of Shakespeare seem to be about as old as the works themselves--

Subject: RE: BS: Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange..
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 Aug 25 - 07:17 PM

LYR ADD: Several Vaughan Williams Songs has one message that includes the text of the Full Fathom Five scene mentioned in the first post. And it was brought up on Facebook and needs to be moved over here to Mudcat so the discussion isn't lost, so this thread is reopened, though a dedicated one to Seeger and his use of the lyrics of Full Fathom Five would also be suitable.

Subject: RE: Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange
From: GUEST,keberoxu
Date: 07 Aug 25 - 08:16 PM

In the opening post, Dave the Gnome compared
A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Taming of the Shrew.

I think MIdsummer Night's Dream is too weird and wonderful
to be by anyone else but Shakespeare.

I have seen some convincing arguments, however, regarding plays like
The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice,
saying that multiple hands were at work there,
with Shakespeare writing the really stellar speeches
and other authors working out the rest of the plays.
It gave me something to think about, anyhow.

Subject: RE: Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange
From: Vincent Jones
Date: 08 Aug 25 - 05:36 PM

About ten years ago Maguire and Smith identified parts of All's Well that are collaborations with Middleton, but this is still disputed. Middleton added musical sequences to Macbeth. Henry VI part 1 was likely collaborative with Nashe and others. It's not so much that Shakespeare wrote the important parts and had others fit the less important bits in; it's more like one can tell which bits he wrote because they are so much better than, say, Fletcher or Kyd.

Taming of THE Shrew and Merchant of Venice were not collaborative, according to my missus, who is a Shakespeare scholar, although Taming of A Shrew (in the quarto) may have had collaboration. So I'd be interested to read the arguments presented. My missus also says that a good example of a collaborative work is Sir Thomas More, the currently accepted position is that WS wrote about three pages, although my wife's more interested in the history of the plays in performance, rather than who wrote what bits. But it interests me as my MSc thesis was on stylometric identification of authorship of seventeenth century political papers.

Shakespeare valued his poetry more, and he worked on their publication, which he didn't for the plays. He was a theatre man, a player as well as a playwright, so he was collaborative almost by nature.

But as for those who claim that Shakespeare didn't write his plays (particularly supporters of de Vere), they generally boil down to them being so posh, or servile, that they cannot stomach the idea that a Midlands grammar school boy could write what he did.

Subject: RE: Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 08 Aug 25 - 05:46 PM

Here is the recent FB post that is the reason this thread was revived.

Subject: RE: Is it me or is Shakespeare very strange
From: Charley Noble
Date: 09 Aug 25 - 08:56 PM

Stilly River Sage,

I would eventually gotten around to providing the link to Pete Seeger's rendition of "Full Fathom Five" but I got distracted by a song that is raised in The Tempest:

"The Master, The Swabber, The Boatswain and I"

I've extended the lyrics a bit so it now reads:

From The Tempest by William Shakespeare, as sung by Stephano, 1611
Adapted by Charlie Ipcar, 7/31/2025; tune after "The Mariner's Compass is Grog"
Key: G (7/C)

The Master, The Swabber, The Bosun, And I

C----------------------------------G7
The master, the swabber, the bosun, and I,
------C--------------------F---C--G
The gunner, the cook, and the mate,
---------C-----------------------G7
Loved Molly, and Meg, and Margery,
-------C----------G----------C
But none of us cared for Kate.

C------------------------F---------C
None of us cared for Kate, me lads!
--------F-C---------F/C-G
None of us cared for Kate!
---------C-----------------------G7
Loved Molly, and Meg, and Margery,
-------C----------G----------C
But none of us cared for Kate.

Kate loved not the savour of tar nor pitch;
And she had a tongue with a tang;
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch,
But she'd cry to a sailor, "Go hang!"

She'd cry to a sailor, "Go hang!" me lads!
She'd cry to a sailor, "Go hang!"
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch,
But she'd cry to a sailor, "Go hang!"

So Molly, and Meg, and Margery,
We’re off to sea once more;
And it will be a long, long time
Till we return to your shore.

Till we return to your shore, me loves,
Till we return to your shore;
And it will be a long, long time
Till we return to your shore.

When I manage to record it I'llprovide a link but it's still a work in progress.