beetlebrownleaf:

spaceshipsandpurpledrank:

Yes! The whole point was they were just kids. They were kids behaving like kids. So Juliet is easily swayed and Romeo is a fickle teenager who falls in “love” at the drop of a hat. The point is that if their families weren’t sworn enemies, this probably would have played out very melodramatically with tears and teenage heartbreak. But no one would have died. The point was that this family feud took your average teenage love affair and made it into a big tragic mess. What would have been just a bad breakup for the both of them to get over in a couple weeks became a secret marriage and tragic deaths instead.

illonink:

wisteria-lodge:

cadhla-marie:

newlyorange:

Okay so a production of Hamlet that ends with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” etc. and then Horatio looks up and sees the audience for the first time and is both shocked and furious, because his world is falling apart and you sat there and watched.

This idea would go fantastically well with my director’s idea that Hamlet knows the whole time that he’s in a play. He had me (when I played Hamlet) interact with the audience, exchange looks with people in the front row, deliver my soliloquies to people in the first few rows casually like I was just talking to them, and I even had the idea to not freeze and just walk about the stage when other characters had their little ‘asides,’ which he allowed me to keep in.

Basically, if Hamlet continuously acknowledges the audience unnoticed by all the other characters (almost Fleabag-style) and then suddenly he’s gone, and obviously he knew he’d have to be gone at the end, and then poor Horatio is left all alone to finally realize there was someone else there the entire time, now that would make it all the more devastating.

There’s no difference between the Danish courtiers, who showed up because they wanted to see the Mad Prince get his butt kicked in a staged sword-fight, and us the audience (who… also showed up to watch Hamlet loose a sword fight.) 

I want to see a production where Horatio just stares at us, and screams “Now cracks a noble heart!” with the subtext “You fucking fuckers. He was better than all of you, you watched him die, and you just stood there.

Then, he just silently cries over the body. For like FIVE MINUTES. And the courtiers peel away into the wings, one by one, until Horatio is alone on stage with a lot of dead bodies. It starts getting uncomfortable. You’re thinking… is the play over? Am I supposed to go? (hamlet is just about the *only* play where the final scene is cut about 50% time, so use that uncertainty, use that ambiguity.) Maybe some people do get up to go. There’s definitely muttering. And then there’s smashing sounds coming from the direction of the box office, and Horatio looks up, with an expression like something’s gone wrong. 

But then he says, “Why do the drums come hither?” Fortinbras enters though the audience, and the play continues. 

(I *also* think it would be really cool to cut for intermission right after Claudius freaks out and breaks up the play-within-a-play. Just imagine it: king yells “Lights! Lights! Lights!” And the houselights come up.) 

All good. And also–

As Hamlet is dying in Horatio’s arms, he puts his hand on Horatio’s face and turns it toward us. And that’s when Horatio sees the theater.

krakenartificer:

thornheart-needs-a-break:

finnglas:

amodernjunecleaver:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

anais-ninja-bitch:

mother-entropy:

keepcalmandcarriefischer:

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he’s good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.

This man is fantastic. 💕

The thing that just destroys me about this, though – we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which…let’s be fair, most are, but not the way it’s said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I’m not really sure how to explain it except… like… “Thrice” is not a word you hear in common speech…unless you’re in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.

Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.

One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.

definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?

Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.

insomniac-arrest:

the idea that the best Shakespeare performances are always tastefully subdued, emotionally restrained to bring out the underlying Tragedy, and best served with the Queen’s English is bullshit.

The best Shakespeare performances are always deeply bisexual and unhinged.

eternalgirlscout:

shakespeare wasn’t lying that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow can creep in this petty pace from day to day

costlyblood:

So last week an email got sent round my college asking if anyone wanted to read some poetry to primary school kids and I was the only one who responded and I asked if I could do some Shakespeare, since I have quite a lot of experience with it, and the teacher said that would be fine.

So I was discussing with friends what I should do and they said ‘er yeah, don’t do Shakespeare.’ And I was like ‘what why’ and they went ’well, maybe if they’re over 10 but otherwise you’ll just get blank looks’ and I went ‘well I don’t want to insult their intelligence’ and then another friend was like ‘hey you should do that kid’s song ‘When I Was One’, they’ll like that!!’ (it’s a really babyish song for toddlers with silly actions) and I thought about it and was ‘like nah actually, I’ll do the ‘Once more unto the breach’ speech’

So I learned that over the week, and I was walking up to the school, and the whole way I was thinking ‘Oh god this was a terrible idea they’re going to hate it, they’re going to look at me blankly like those kids in The Polar Express, my friends were right it’s going to be a disaster’, and I was there early, so I sat in the classroom for the first half an hour, got given a cupcake by some kids from a different class, said hello to some of the kids in my class, they got a look at me.

At half 2 the teacher mentioned I would be reading some poetry, and I asked if we could go outside, which she was more than happy to allow, and the kids were all so confused (‘where are we going? Isn’t it only poetry?’) and we got onto the field, the teacher got them all to stand an arm’s length apart from each other, so I could walk around them, and I did a brief overview of where the scene came in the play, how the king is on the battlefield, talking to his soldiers (“Could all you be the soldiers?” “Yes!!”) and they’re attacking the French, who are all in a castle (forgot it’s really a castle town), and they’re attacking them through a gap in the wall, the breach. Me and the teacher emphasised that if there was anything they didn’t understand, that was completely fine and they could ask me at the end. I asked the kids to watch for when I held my fist in the air, which is when they had to cheer loudly, we had a practise at that, and then I did the speech.

Everything I had been scared about evaporated. All the kids were totally engaged, they were all watching me, they all listened right the way through, I saw lots of excited faces, and they all cheered really well at the end.

Afterwards, there was a lot of chatter, several of them asked me questions (”how do you remember all those words?”, “what did you mean when you talked about nostrils?”), one boy asked me to do it again, they were all really lovely and had genuinely enjoyed it. It was so much fun, and they especially loved it when I told them how my big college friends had told me not to do Shakespeare because they wouldn’t like it. Those kids 100% proved them wrong

sapphosewrites:

sapphosewrites:

Thinking about “The Die Is Cast” and Garak’s moment of “The fault is not in our stars, dear Tain” where he quotes Shakespeare

And at the start of “Improbable Cause,” he argued to Bashir that Julius Caesar wasn’t a good tragedy. Not just because he could see the end coming, but because Caesar should have expected he’d be betrayed. In Garak’s mind, any good leader would.

When he quotes to Tain, I’d always thought it was a moment that symbolized his acceptance of his connection to the Federation, that he wasn’t going to leave Bashir behind. But I somehow missed the more obvious, literal moment- Lovok has betrayed Tain, and Tain never saw it coming. Garak is watching the moment of Caesar play out and recognizing that it is relevant, and tragic.

The original quote is from early in the play when Cassius (the mastermind behind the assassination) is trying to convince Brutus to join in. He has a long speech discussing how, despite what the cult of personality pretends, Caesar is human and as such as human flaws. He has epilepsy, he can’t swim and is afraid to drown, he is greedy for power even if he won’t admit it.

Cassius says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He’s saying that it was not fate but them that allowed Caesar to rise so high above- and it is also in their power to lay him low.

When Garak quotes it, does he mean it in the sense of, “the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves [because we fucked up],” or is he seeing Tain as fallible and flawed, perhaps for the first time? No longer a mighty or mythic figure, but an inherently flawed man overreaching in his quest for power. Does Garak realize that the fault was not in his fate, but in himself, that he allowed Tain to control him?

(Even if he does, he is still loyal to the end. Brutus felt guilt and regret about the killing of Caesar, after all.)