An urbanist in the suburbs.

Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”. 

There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.

or the one where the bridge never came out for Javert’s suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out

best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere

During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well

Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.

Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.

So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).

This is wild from start to finish

I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)

In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer night’s dream, Thisbe didn’t have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger

My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.

i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show. 

my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.

in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.

so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-

PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.

the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just can’t recover from.

During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gaston’s introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?

Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.

The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.

Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.

Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.

Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.

Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.

Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.

Sunday Night:  Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise - apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.

Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesn’t notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.

I was in Twelfth Night during high school and we were lucky enough to have identical twin girls playing Viola and Sebastian. Due to the blocking in the first half of the play, their characters didn’t appear on stage together but rather almost consecutively one after the other for a majority of the first act.

It was awesome because when people saw the play and didn’t know the girls were identical twins, it literally looked like it was one actor doing multiple, uber fast costume changes.

One of our first performances was for our peers and it was a big school so lots of people didn’t know the twins. This - for some reason - was also the performance they chose to record.

Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE FUCK” so loudly it drowned out everything else.

The best thing? That was the copy of the play that was made available for purchase by family and parents. Haha.

Oh my god. I went to one of the Spiderman shows where he flew out above the audience and then got stuck and had to awkwardly hang there for about 10 minutes, but these stories are brilliant.

okay so, my senior year of high school and I’m part of the stage crew for Peter Pan. There’s a scene where Hook and Smee are searching for Peter and the Lost Boys. Now the theater department at my high school isn’t very well funded (in the southern USA, football is king), so the sets we managed to make were pretty kickass for the money we had. We had a structure painted like a big tree stump for the entrance to the Lost Boys’ hideout. You could climb to the top of it, but also go inside it through a trap door that we kept locked up during most of the play.

It’s like our third show and everything has been going surprisingly well. Hook and Smee climb to the top of the “tree trunk”, supposedly looking for Peter and not knowing they’re standing above his hiding spot the whole time.

Turns out someone didn’t close the trapdoor properly, because the second Hook steps on it, he plunges through the thing. He’s able to catch himself, but he’s got his ass and one leg dangling through this hole where it’s like a ten foot drop to the ground. All of us stage crew are literally two feet away from him offstage, just gaping at him because???? Y'all this fall looked BAD. Looked like my dude did the splits in mid air. The whiplash caused his fucking wig to come off. The audience is dead silent, all of us backstage are dead silent, the director is like already looking up how to treat a broken groin.

The kid who was playing Hook was like a fuckin sophomore and he KILLED it. He gave himself a second to catch his breath, never broke character, just looked up at his castmate and growled “Smee, you fool, help me up!”. He ended up playing off the wig thing as an embarrassing comedic bit for Hook, and the play went on. He was completely fine. It was the best thing I’d ever seen.

There was an infamous performance of the opera Don Giovanni where in the last act Giovanni was suppose to be dragged into hell via trapdoor but the overweight actor got stuck, leading someone from the audience to shout: “Hey everyone, Hell’s full!!” 

I’m pretty sure I’ve reblogged this before but the Lefou story has me in tears every time.

As someone who did Tech stuff in High school for 4 years, Lefou!

I was a costumer on a stage version of Titanic, and in the scene where the women and children are getting in the lifeboats, one of the men (who was supposed to be saying goodbye to his wife he knows he will never see again because his is about to die), realized his fake mustache was falling off and instead of playing it cool… he rips it off his face, and hands it to his wife with the line “Something to remember me by”…it was the funniest thing that I have ever seen in my 8 years in theatre, the entire cast lost their shit laughing at the most dramatic moment possible

I am laughing so hard I’ve been crying for ten minutes. Thank you

in my last year of secondary school, I was in the pit band for our schools production of the Wizard of Oz. during one of the performances, while Dorothy and the gang are in the Emerald City, the girl playing the main makeover artist managed to rip off the Lion’s tail. the kid playing him, who was probably about 13, stared at this tail in horror, felt behind him, and then, still using the voice of his character, WAILED “MY TAIL!!” and pretended to cry as the Cowardly Lion was wont to do. the performance was derailed for a good five minutes as everyone laughed hysterically, audience and cast alike, and to this day I am glad I had no music cue there because there is no way I could have played it while tears were streaming down my face like that. I’ve never been able to forget the quick wit of that kid, he was an absolute gem on stage.

So. Today in class we assigned Macbeth roles to students to read. When I asked the class who wants to be Lady Macbeth, a young man raised his hand. I kind of stared at him like “Lady Macbeth,” and he nodded like “I know what I’m about ma’am.” So then the student who ended up as Macbeth raised his hand and said “HE’S THE ONE, HE’S MY WIFE!” So I said “yeah sure why not,” and the entire class period they were blowing kisses to each other and winking at each other, and every now and then Macbeth would say “I’m the luckiest man on Earth” and Lady Macbeth would put a hand to his chest, and be like “BABE!”.

I just stared at them, knowing that they CLEARLY have never read ‘Macbeth’ before, so… all this lovey dovey… I don’t know if I have the heart to tell them the truth.

Update:

admittedly I don’t normally like modern shakespeare adaptations but once I went to see my cousin in a midsummer night’s dream and it opened with a high schooler saying “I don’t wanna read this play” so he sits down and eats an entire chipotle burrito on stage and then immediately falls asleep and the play begins but instead of the forest the faeries all hang out in a rainforest cafe TM and at one point in the middle of a scene the guy from the beginning just slowly drifts across the back of the stage on a skateboard, staring at all the characters as the events of the play transpire in the form of some sort of chipotle-induced coma lucid dream

THAT is EXACTLY what Shakespeare would have wanted

I swear if this isn’t floating around on the internet I’m gonna cry

Oh buddy IT’S ABOUT TO BE. I am like, 98% sure this was my high school’s production and I’ve got photos and video clips like craaaazy…

Here are some fun additions… the Mechanicals were also based on the characters of The Breakfast Club (here I am below, eating an actual Captain Crunch and Pixie Stix sandwich on stage.)

…and the one on the longboard was actually our Puck - he rode it through the whole play in the background. Please note his “Forest Cafe” shirt… which we also had logos for on the cups.

…and we had both a flash mob at the end AND an interlude where myself and one of the other Fairies danced to “Sexy and I Know It” while we were cleaning up the tables at the cafe.

I will post more of this later. I have a DVD at my house and will endure cringing at myself to bring you some quality clips… there’s probably one of K eating the burrito before the start of the play, too.

@hullaballoons Here is more Ktown Lore for you 

@cupcakelirry 

Here ya go kids… all 2h20m. if you make it through the whole thing once, that’s probably more times than any of the cast watched this DVD. You can probably see why. Tbh if you watch this, I am sorry in advance.

Important notes:

- Chipotle burrito makes a cameo about 30 min in,

- the end has a flash mob and a “commercial” for the Forest Cafe, 

- unfortunately, the lunch scene where all the mechanicals whistle like the Breakfast Club got mostly cut for some reason?

–

@vampireapologist in case you have any interest in reliving this… at the very least you can prove to any doubters that there was, in fact, a Chipotle burrito onstage.

I cannot even fully conceptualize, much less put into words, how wild this chain of events has been.

I have dozens of posts going around that have broken 50,000 notes, and plenty that have broken 100,000.

On every single one of these posts, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of comments and tags calling me a liar and the story fake, but none so much as this post.

This post was my most doubted of all.

And you came in………

with a Two and a Half Hour Long video.

I’ll never forget this.

We have a bond forged in fire and spirit now.

The play was Julius Caesar. By Shakespeare.

Delta believes firmly in the annexarion of Gaul and stands with the Julii. 

Fine, so perhaps this adaption might have chosen some modern iconography. But it’s still a play about how stable governments fall apart very easily. Also it’s Trump so who gives a shit. 

Oh cool, we’re normalizing censorship now. Great.

IT IS JULIUS FUCKING CAESAR. IT HAS BEEN ADAPTED FOR USE AS POLITICAL COMMENTARY EVERY GODDAMN TIME IT’S BEEN GODDAMN ADAPTED. THIS IS NOT NEW.

Considering Fox News didn’t say SHIT about people LITERALLY hanging and burning Obama in effigy they need to shut the fuck up about this. Also, it’s a fucking play adapted happens all the fucking time. Grow the hell up.

There have been depictions of Obama as Caesar, and not only did conservatives not care, they found it “riveting”.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/shakesblog/obamas-ides-of-march/

Would you look at that…

Delta has clearly never actually seen *Julius Caesar,* because then they would know that the entire play is actually about how political violence is a terrible way to effect change. So, really, their Twitter account is telling us all that they are okay with assassination and subsequent civil war.

I feel that anyone who believes Romeo & Juliet is about some kind of Great and Timeless Love TM* needs to see this.

WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS TODAY IN MY SHAKESPEARE CLASS. 

If you go and actually read what Romeo says to Benvolio in the first scene, you will realize that he is only upset because HE WANTED ROSALINE’S BODY AND SHE SAID NO AND SO ROMEO WAS MOPING AND PITCHING A FIT ABOUT IT. Then, the second he lays eyes on Juliet, he’s basically saying

External image

During the balcony scene, Romeo talks about how he scaled the wall of the garden to see Juliet. That is not romantic. That is disrespectful to her. This is a private area of the Capulet home, and Capulet built the wall around it to protect his daughter. This was a time when a woman’s virtue was the most important thing she owned. If Juliet was found with a man in this very private part of her home, everyone would think she was no longer a virgin, her reputation would be ruined, and it would be much harder, if not impossible, for her father to make a good marriage.

Speaking of good marriages, Count Paris is seen as the bad guy because he “comes between” Romeo and Juliet. Capulet had arranged for Paris to marry Juliet in 2 years time, when she would be 16, in a time when most women were already married and mothers by the time they were Juliet’s age at (almost but not quite) 14. Most fathers would have already had their daughters married by now, but he wants to wait two more years AND PARIS IS OKAY WITH THAT. Not only that, but Paris is young (her father could have had her married to a 60 year old man), titled (he’s a fucking Count), wealthy (again, he’s a count, which means Juliet will have financial stability), and, from what we see of him, he is a very good guy. Capulet could have done a LOT worse in choosing his son-in-law.

Finally, here’s something to consider: Juliet was 13, Romeo was 17. Their relationship lasted 3 days, defied their parents, and ended in the deaths of 6 people.

If I ever hear you say that Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told, I will bitch slap you.

That is all.

And then, in Shakespeare’s next play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he basically went out of his way to make fun of the people who thought that Romeo and Juliet was so deep and romantic in writing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” sequence performed by a bunch of lousy, middle-aged men who saw too deep into it.

Rejected dude on the rebound initiates a murder-suicide, OMG GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD.

Shake-speared!

Bitch I have a degree in this, so you can fucking try to bitchslap me but I will punch you in the face, because you have serious genuine factual errors and reading comprehension FAIL.

Which is to say, without the nasty attitude, this post is actually wrong about a bunch of stuff.

POINT THE FIRST: Let’s start with the stuff about Juliet and Paris. Let’s also start with this “everything you ‘know’ is actually wrong” problem with the idea that sixteen was a normal marriage age.

It wasn’t. The average age of marriage in Shakespeare’s day and culture was MID-TWENTIES. Marriage of kids younger than that was something the aristocracy did, mostly to secure alliances, and was seen as kind of squicky. Even there, a lot of those young people stayed with their parents until their late teens. It was rare - not Unheard of, but rare - for girls younger than that to be encouraged to have children because, bluntly, IT TENDED TO KILL THEM, and that’s a waste of a good alliance.

Further, Italy was the place where you set stories when you wanted to get away with Ridiculous Edge Cases. You know how, like, _The King and I_ is set in “Siam” so these things can be pushed to their ludicrous and most violent edges? Same with setting shit in Italy. English audiences would go LOL THOSE CRAY ITALIANS AMIRITE and not get hung up on feeling insulted/etc. The fact that Juliet’s thirteen and Paris is going “younger than she are happy mothers made” and her dad’s giving in etc is SUPPOSED to be skeezy as fuck. Paris pushing for her marriage RIGHT AFTER Tybalt dies and, again, her dad giving in is SUPPOSED to look like they’re being assholes, because they ARE. Capulet threatening to throw Juliet out on the street when she doesn’t want to marry Paris isn’t supposed to be “normal”, it’s supposed to make him look like the pride-bound domineering asshole he is.

Same with the whole “walled up young woman” thing: that’s another “those fucking Italians, lol” touch.

Which brings us to POINT THE SECOND: Romeo and Juliet’s love affair didn’t kill no-fucking-body.

THE FEUD killed four people (Mercrutio, Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet) and Paris being a fucking gross and uncompassionate selfrighteous dick killed two more.

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT Mercrutio and Tybalt! The morning after the Capulet party, Tybalt wants to kill Romeo. He wants to kill him, not because of his cousin - as neither he nor anyone else has the FAINTEST IDEA that Romeo and Juliet are in love - but because Romeo showed up at the Capulet party the night before PERIOD.

One: Romeo didn’t even want to go to the party. Mercrutio insisted (and insisted, and insisted) that they gate-crash in masks. Two, Capulet, Tybalt’s uncle and the head of his family and THE GUY IN CHARGE basically told Tybalt to chill out, it’s fine. Tybalt’s devotion to The Feud is so intense that he’s ignoring that because of the ~*insult*~ Romeo has done the Capulets. Three, the Prince just said YESTER-FUCKING-DAY that if he caught anyone feuding again he was going to kill them.

Remember the previous day? When Romeo didn’t know Juliet from Eve nor she from Adam, but we opened the play with servants fantasizing about killing the other sides male servants and raping their female ones? Because of The Feud? Just checking.

Tybalt gives no fucks. Tybalt is going to avenge ~*his family’s honour*~ by at the very least beating the shit out of if not killing Romeo.

And you know what Romeo does *because of his love for and romance with Juliet?*

He refuses to engage. He says no, Tybalt, I know you hate me but I don’t hate you and I’m not going to pay attention to the insults you’re slinging at me, I apologize for wrongs I’ve done, let’s call it all fair. No, I’m still not gonna fight you even if you keep insulting me.

For love of Juliet, Romeo tries like crazy NOT TO FIGHT.

Mercrutio, on the other hand, either can’t stand to see Romeo insulted or thinks because he’s the Prince’s nephew he’s special and the no-brawling rule doesn’t apply to him, pulls out his sword and starts to fight. It’s IRONIC that in trying to stop Tybalt and Mercrutio, Romeo gets in the way of Mercrutio’s parry and gets stabbed, but it’s also Mercrutio’s own damn fault. His “a plague o’both your houses” speech may be very quotable and thunderous, but it’s also hypocritical as hell, considering how DELIGHTED he was to participate in their Feud for his own amusement right up till he got stabbed.

(Watch out for Shakespeare: he likes to do things like that.)

This, really, is the point of the entire prince’s bloodline in this play: they every damn one of them think they can just sort of ignore or deal lightly with the Feud, and the Feud gets them.

So that’s two for the Feud.

Then Juliet fakes her own death. Well, actually, after being told by her father she has no choice but to marry Paris whether she wants to or not, and RIGHT NOW, or he’ll physically throw her out on the streets to starve to death or whore herself, she shows up in Friar Lawrence’s cell saying “fix this or I will fucking kill myself.”

And Friar Lawrence is a coward and fails her. Because here’s the thing: she and Romeo are married. End of story. All Lawrence has to do to FORCE the Prince to get involved and give them protection (or for that matter the local bishops and even the pope) is walk out there and say “they’re married, I witnessed it, we’re done.”

The thing is, this is entirely likely to get the FRIAR into a metric shittonne of trouble. So instead he concocts this huge complicated bullshit plan, and to the appearance of everyone except Lawrence and Juliet, she dies. Then Romeo thinks she’s dead so he kills himself, then she finds him dead and kills HERSELF and wait why was this all a problem in the first place?

OH RIGHT, because of the Feud. (Otherwise frankly the Romeo/Juliet match is fucking AMAZING and would give both families the economic power to dominate Italy. Seriously they’re idiots.)

Now, on his way in to kill himself Romeo also kills Paris and Paris’ servant, in both cases in self-defense. They’re there because despite Juliet rejecting him Paris basically feels a proprietary ownership of her DEAD BODY because her father promised him her living one. Basically.

Just think about that for a while. Think of how GROSS that is. Because it’s really gross.

Those are the only two deaths you can sooooort of blame on the actual romance. I feel they’re more appropriately blamed on patriarchy, but whatever makes you happy.

But. The point is: THIS PLAY IS ABOUT HOW THE FEUD KILLS PEOPLE. Like it literally tells us this in the prologue. “Two households, both alike in dignity/in fair Verona where we lay our scene/from ancient grudge break to new mutiny/where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Aka “so these two idiot families start brawling and killing each other over an old grudge.” The relevance of the children is not that they were in love: it’s that they were BECAUSE of their parents DOOMED. That’s what “star-crossed” means. It means “you are fucked”. It means “fate says you can’t have this.” Their “misadventured, piteous overthrows” - aka their fucked up, incredibly sad efforts - “doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.”

This is a tragedy about how THEIR PARENTS STRIFE killed them. They’re doomed from the start. And you know what Romeo and Juliet’s romance - their “death-marked love”, which is to say “the love that will get THEM killed” - ACTUALLY FUCKING DOES?

It saves Verona.

“The fearful passage of their death-marked love/and the continuance of their parents’ rage/WHICH BUT THEIR CHILDREN’S END, NAUGHT COULD REMOVE/is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage.”

Again, translating for those who need it: this really sad and fear-inducing story of their totally fucking doomed romance, and how NOTHING BUT THEM DYING would make their parents stop fighting, is what we’re going to show you in the next two hours.”

People were already dying from the feud. They were being injured. Property was being damaged. Brawls were spreading out and killing innocent bystanders. *The Montagues and Capulets were effectively having a gang war.* What Romeo and Juliet did was *make it stop*. Except that everyone involved, the Prince included, had their heads so far up their asses that nothing but their children killing THEMSELVES because of THE PARENTS’ ACTIONS (or in the Prince’s case two of his relatives getting killed along the way) could make them realize oh shit, this is not good, and make peace.

The Prince reiterates this in his closing remarks, in case anyone missed it, even blaming himself: “and I, for winking at your discords, too have lost a brace of kinsmen.”

Modern readers should actually hone in on this pretty well, because we’re still doing this shit. The publicized suicides of queer kids, of girls who were raped, of trans kids - notice how there are all these things a lot of society was fucking ignoring until those happened?

(And actually killing yourself explicitly to bring attention to the wrongs and abuses being done to you that you cannot escape was a cultural norm even then, and can be found behind a ton of ghost stories and revenge stories. Shakespeare knew what he was doing.)

POINT THE THIRD: let’s talk about Romeo and Rosalind vs Romeo and Juliet.

Some context: Shakespeare is not a boy band. Shakespeare is Fall Out Boy. NEVER take anything he’s saying at surface level. His most famous cycle of sonnets is actually a super bleak charting of the failure of love between an older and younger man that sort of devolves into this sordid triangle between Narrator, Golden Youth and Dark Lady, and that whole “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet is nowhere near as complimentary or appearance-positive as people seem to think it is. (The Narrator - who is a character in his own right - is tearing down other women, not elevating his mistress.)

So there was this guy named Petrarch, who popularized the sonnet to HIS format (in Italian) by writing a whole bunch of poems to Laura, who was unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead. THIS BECAME THE FASHION: devoted love and adoration to this woman you couldn’t have, who didn’t want you, and perferrably died chaste so you could idealize her without fear she’d do something human. And Romeo is ABSOLUTELY being a Pining Petrarchan Lover with Rosalind. He’s also writing cliche drivel so cliche it’s MEANT to sound like cliche drivel, to a woman we never even see on-stage.

Then there’s Juliet. And you know what the BIG difference is with Juliet?

Juliet is right there. She’s *PARTICIPANT*. She is matching him passion for passion and lust for lust and, in poetic form, EVEN LINE FOR LINE. Their speech together COMBINES into sonnets - SHAKESPEAREAN sonnets, aka the form Shakespeare made up for himself because he thought Petrarch’s wasn’t as cool. And suddenly cliches are being thrown out. The cliche was the mistress being the moon: fuck it, Romeo says, Juliet is the SUN; the cliche was to swear by the moon, the stars, and Juliet says no don’t do that, swear by YOU. They even get into blasphemy. Juliet is the OPPOSITE of a Petrarchan mistress: she is right there, she is SO right into Romeo right back, she’s alive, and the more he encounters her and the more she’s human and wanting and silly and joking the more he adores her. He loves her MORE after they’ve fucked, after Juliet is manifestly no longer the chaste unachievable idol.

Is it true love? Who knows. They’re both babies, and it’s a play: conventions of the theatre DO allow for people to fall in love at first sight. But whether it’s love or just infatuation, the point is they’re both right there, they’re both feeling it equally and as partners, and Juliet gets to be a living participant with her own desires.

(Like seriously her wedding-night speech before she finds out Tybalt’s dead is pretty damn sexy, guys.)

And whether or not it’s love or infatuation the play and the text very clearly come together to indicate that what’s between Juliet and Romeo is DIFFERENT than that crap with Rosalind.

POINT THE FOURTH: And minor, but still important - R&J and the Dream were almost certainly written more or less at the same time, and it’s of note that the Play Within The Play in this case both STARTS OUT lacking all the other context thats attached to Romeo and Juliet’s story as I laid out above, but that Bottom et al go on to strip it more and more and more of its meaning and context as they go on, rendering it nothing more than silly melodrama. The joke, thus, is rather more complex.

SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.

Also common knowledge about social practices of the past is usually wrong. Thank you and good night.

I have been waiting for this rebuttal for ages oh my gods. 

Sassy gay friend! This man is my hero.

I have no stake in one interpretation or the other, I just like these kinds of intellectual deconstructions filled with snark. =)

“…unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead.”  :) Fabulous. And so true.

For a long time I’ve felt like THIS is why this play is often the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies that gets taught to high school kids.  Adults know instinctively that teenagers will connect to it.  But adults also seem to miss the reason why.  They tell themselves the kids are into the ~dewy romance~ and they miss the part where teenagers GET IT because they know what it feels like to be so screwed over by the adults around them that they feel like it’s going to kill them.

-Oskar Eustis on ArtBeat Nation (he told the same story on Charlie Rose)

i can’t stop fucking thinking about my english prof talking about the queer historical significance of the word “sweet” as a deliberate indicator of homosexual love and how that relates to both edward ii and gaveston, as well as hamlet and horatio. so, because shakespeare was likely totally knowledgeable about codes that queer men were using (cos like duh obvs), the inclusion of “sweet prince” at the end of hamlet is in all likelihood a completely deliberate indication that hamlet and horatio were in love

i’m???? so gay for literature and history lmao

my good sweet honey lord????

I WROTE A WHOLE PAPER ON THIS SHIT IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS HIT ME UP LITERALLY ANY TIME YO.

“goodnight, you gay fuck”

This is your daily reminder that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’ is a dick joke.

Also, in re the whole “white cis male shitlord” aspect: One of Shakespeare’s favourite things was to take an existing bigoted play that was really popular (often a comedy), and tweak it into a tragedy where the audience was forced to empathise with the person they’d been hating, and recognise their humanity. Merchant of Venice is a retelling of the Very Standard conversion play, except the standard version of the play is a comedy! And when the miserly Jewish antagonist is converted at the end, he’s super happy at being saved! But Shakespeare’s version has one of the most gut-wrenching monologues about the humanity of the othered, and presents a very reasonable man driven to distraction by abuse. He takes the original “miser” stereotype and shows a fully realised human whose concerns about being robbed and left without a way to survive in a hostile city are realistic and sympathetic. He keeps the conversion ending, but shows the violence of it, and Shylock is destroyed by it, not “saved.” Othello was based on an older Italian play that revelled in the evil of its title character, and the tragic innocence of the nice white girl taken and defiled and murdered by a savage black man. Very popular. So he took the same premise, and wrote a play that spends c. four hours examining the manipulation and gaslighting and psychological abuse it would take to drive a good and honest and trusting and caring husband to such violence. In Shakespeare’s version, there’s no violence rooted in Othello’s blackness, no “aha” moment where the fact that he finally succumbed to Iago’s machinations is blamed on something wrong in Othello’s nature, it is heavily and repeatedly shown and stated that his character is DEEPLY good, and then works to show how someone this good can be abused and manipulated into doing something they so TERRIBLY regret.  Romeo & Juliet was based on a play that was all about how teenage sluts ruin everything and deserve to die, but Shakespeare’s play tells technically the same story, but his moral is kinda more that cultures of hate and families which dehumanise their enemies set up future generations for horrible and unnecessary misery.

I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.

Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.

no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -

it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.

we think the answer is polar bears.

no, seriously!  in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’  it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.

of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they?  so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless?  well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences.  and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear?  what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity? 

and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.

you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR

every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken

Exit, pursued by unbeatable once-in-a-lifetime mega fauna dramatic opportunity.

okay but if you’re ever in london and you have the chance to see a shakespeare play performed at the globe theatre itself DO IT even if you don’t think you’d dig shakespeare

if you need convincing here are a few highlights from when my family and i went to see the official globe theatre production of a midsummer night’s dream:

its what shakespeare would have wanted

Can confirm, fantastic experience

YOU GUYS!

I AM ABOUT TO WATCH A BROADWAY SHOW LIVE STREAMED TO MY COMPUTER. FOR TEN BUCKS. (Plus the monthly subscription fee, I think. But that’s fine. It’s still a thousand times cheaper and easier.)

HISTORY! WE ARE MAKING HISTORY!

BLESS BROADWAY FOR THIS INNOVATION I didn’t wanna pay $200 per seat.

EDIT: broadwayhd.com 

THIS IS AWESOME!!!

An adaptation of Hamlet that’s filmed like it’s an episode of like Keeping up with the Kardashians, and every soliloquy is just a character doing a talking head interview 

This is actually so brilliant that when I do a filmed Hamlet adaptation I will do this, pay you for the creative direction, and give you the concept byline.

I’ll be real, this post was like 5% joke, 95% realization that the purest preservation of the soliloquy in modern culture is the reality show talking head, a confessional both private and performative and essential to understanding the emotional underpinnings of the actions being played, all in a format of direct address that we accept.

The reality show as the modern melodrama