Puppets, Sandmen, and Knots

Plus: Headlines and Herbs

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Headlines and Herbs

Usually when something Shakespeare-related attempts to be deliberately provocative, I don’t include it in the newsletter. Nine times out of ten it leads to a desperate/(ly) boring Oxfordian.

But this week it lead to a book excerpt: “Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned?” The headline perfectly illustrates Betteridge’s law and I think many of the words under it are un-excellent.² Let us count the ways:

• The painful attempts to equate Shakespeare’s time to ours:³

  • No, Shakespeare was not “basically…the Walt Disney of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” “a stoner,” or “in danger of being canceled.” No, the yard at the Globe was not a “mosh pit” and “If he were alive today, Shakespeare might be a rapper” is cliche.

• The casually conspiratorial tone:

  • “That’s not a question they want answered” (With bonus Bacon! “Hey, maybe [the pipes] were planted in his garden by Sir Francis Bacon, right?”)

• The combination of academic sycophancy and scorn:

  • “This guy [with a Yale PhD] is legit” vs. “Shakespeare scholars tend to get a bit defensive…”

The entire excerpt has strong “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids” and “Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way”⁴ energy. The intent is to be chummy and clever (“lively” and “hilarious”) but the impact is phony and forced. Also wrong.⁵ For decency’s sake, I’ve replaced my actual reactions with the name of my favorite hobgoblin:

• “So did Shakespeare smoke cannabis? The scientific evidence suggests he probably did.” (No, it pucking doesn’t.)

• “The wording in Sonnet 76 is pretty convincing.” (No, it pucking isn’t.)

• “Basically, [Juliet] roofies herself—Shakespeare might just as well have been talking about GHB.” (Puck off.)⁶

Moving on.

Quick Links

• Can someone please tell me what Macbeth line (and Lord of the Rings reference?) ended up in All’s Well?

• Did Kurosawa solve Lear?

• Oberon and Titania in The Sandman.

• Shakespeare's attitude to puppets.

• Raphael Emmanuel on his Black Bohemian Winter’s Tale at ASC and the (can be interminable) sheep-shearing scene.⁷

  We’ve creatively repurposed the text in a way that I think is fun and enjoyable and still maintains the the integrity of what the storytelling is…

• PBS will broadcast the Shakespeare in the Park Twelfth Night.

• Knot Shakespeare.

• “Gruoch is the first Scottish queen whose name is known to history.”

• “The next evening, on the jaunt back to Ludlow with Aira, he says just two words to her: King Lear.”⁸ (Paywall)

• Stop Stealing Canadian Costumes.

• How Many of William Shakespeare's Atoms Are in You?⁹

• Doreen Woolley sounds delightful.

  “I can interact with people as they’re coming by,” she said. “And sometimes they come by with really grumpy looks. So I try to smile at them and talk to them. Sometimes they’ll smile back. Sometimes they’re still pretty grumpy.”

• Biko Eisen-Martin and Ian Merrill Peakes are playing Hamlet and the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (Again.)

• Tchaikovsky wrote an “Overture-Fantasy” for Romeo and Juliet, though Wikipedia points out that it is really a “symphonic poem in sonata form.”¹⁰

• Shakespeare in the House.

• The Tewkesbury Medieval Festival is the biggest annual medieval battle reenactment in the UK¹¹ and an excellent excuse to buy yourself a new armor (based on your 12th great-grandfather’s) if that’s your thing.

• Katherine Steele Brokaw and Elizabeth Freestone’s Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet is available for free until July 18.

• “Motley’s the only wear.”

• Silly Shakespeare (via Jane Mallison)

• Shakespeare and Wales.

Recommendations

• A rooster manicule.

• Lasers over Long Island.

• TCG’s 2024 Salary Survey. (data)

• Doodle-documentation via

  Brian Eugenio Herrera
  .

• Shipping Continental Congress secrets in wax heads.

• The “Private” Photographs of Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg.

• Hitting trees with sledgehammers to mimic extinct elk kicks is an entirely legitimate forestry practice via

  The Garden of Forking Paths
  .

• “I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber, without any clothes whatever” via

  Histories
  .

1. Like this one.

2. Also old news and the choice to make Friar Lawrence a stoner is still lazy.

3. “Not of an age but for all time.” Jonson said it first/best.

4. The last line is: “Maybe his real genius was knowing what worked for him.”

5. No, the love potion in Midsummer is not “pretty obviously opium.”

6. I KNOW you aren’t flippantly referencing date rape. (Author.) (and.)

7. I love this description of Leontes’ brain from actor Jordan Friend:

His lack of clear reasoning isn't a bug but a feature…he has this thought and then the thought becomes its own machine of kinetic motion…everyone starts treating him like he's crazy and that causes him to dig in further…a thought that doesn't have any bearing in the world can take root and its presence in your mind can change your behavior…

8. From the author: “that sight, of someone discovering their true identity, is so beautiful: love can be built on such ephemera, in the theatre.” (Also, Beckett cross-gendering will be legal in 2059.)

9. “...about 400 million dead Shakespeare atoms in all of us. Maybe a bit less depending on the whereabouts of his skull.” However:

English pigs and sheep probably have a bigger chunk of the Bard in them, because they're directly grazing the ground where he was buried and where his solid and liquid waste was deposited.

(Details, details.)

10. Also:

Different variations of the love theme were also played in the original The Sims video game, when two Sims successfully performed the "Kiss" interaction. How "powerful" the theme was depended on how compatible, or how in love, the interacting Sims were with each other.

11. Not the “A horse! a horse” battle (that’s Bosworth and bi-annual). This is the “mis-shapen Dick” battle. (Link is safe for work/life, promise.)