Finally revisited The Bard! I took inspiration from the famous Chandos portrait by John Taylor for this complete redesign. Available now for purchase at my Etsy!
ophelia by alexander cabanel; ophelia by friedrich wilhelm theodor heyser; ophelia by jean baptiste bertrand; detail from ophelia by john everett millais
The university student is a strange creature, stuck in a curious limbo between adolescence and adulthood. It is said to be a time of great learning: you attend lectures on (hopefully) fascinating subjects, figure out how to pay an electricity bill, and do your own laundry. There is the pursuit of knowledge, the desire to evolve, a search for that elusive wisdom that all proper adults seem to possess… But you’re not an adult yet. Instead, you find yourself having water balloon fights outside the lecture hall and drunkenly debating the finer details of The Samurai Pizza Cats at a party while wearing a penguin suit you don’t remember putting on. This delicate balance between work and play, between newly-found responsibility and having fun, is exactly what Love’s Labour’s Lost is about.
The best joke ever translated into Spanish is the translation of “Much Ado About Nothing” by Shakespeare
Because in Spanish, the title is Mucho ruido y pocas nueces
This translation excellently preserves the double entendre in the English. In English, “Much ado about nothing” on the surface means what you’d expect, “making a big deal out of nothing”. But in Shakespeare’s time, “nothing” was slang for female genitals… the idea being they had “nothing” there.
So the English double entendre is that it could mean “a lot of fuss about nothing important” or “a lot of fuss about/over women”
The Spanish translation is mucho ruido y pocas nueces which translates literally as “a lot of noise and few nuts”. The general meaning would be implied as “you’re trying to get the nuts to fall off the tree so you hit it a lot”, aka “a lot of effort and little reward” which captures the first meaning.
And of course, “a lot of noise and no nuts” has dual meanings in Spanish. Because la nuez could be “nut” (specifically “walnut”), or also testicle, AND la nuez could also mean “Adam’s apple”
In that case it’s, “a lot of noise and no nuts” or “a lot of noise and no Adam’s apples”, referring to women.
And so both meanings of the joke get translated pretty equally well
The whole reason adaptations of Romeo and Juliet don’t work is wrapped up in the first line of the show.”
“Two houses, both alike in dignity –”
That’s it. That’s the entire point. The Montagues and the Capulets are both rich, noble families. They’re on equal footing with each other. Both are frivolous and careless in that specific manner that only the generationally wealthy can be. The show and its message only work if both parties are equally rich and careless. If you try to translate it into any other context (Juliet is an heiress and Romeo is a punk, etc) you may have a good story, but you lose the entire point that Romeo and Juliet hinges upon. You may have a perfectly good story in its own right, but that story is no longer Romeo and Juliet.
In Act 5 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One, King Henry IV has implemented a battle strategy in which there are numerous decoy kings impersonating him on the battlefield in order to confuse and frustrate his enemy. It works, as Douglas kills Blunt who was disguised as the king and believes he has triumphed, only for Hotspur to tell him “No, I know this face full well/A gallant knight he was; his name was Blunt,/Semblably furnished like the king himself” (Shakespeare 5.3.20-22). This occurs several more times offstage and in the following scene, Douglas exclaims “Another king! They grow like Hydra’s heads” (Shakespeare 5.4.25). While there is no number of how many King Henrys are in the fray, based on that statement it is likely a lot.
This strategy King Henry executes also connects directly to both the idea of theatre and throne, and while successful on the battlefield, could lead the audience to some potentially questionable notions about royalty and what it truly means to be king. The decision to insert numerous decoy-kings into the battleground is not something that could have been predicted because sumptuary laws were in place during the time in which the play took place as well as the time it was written and being performed. Therefore, doing so was technically illegal. In general, the theatre was the only place in which somebody of a lower station might dress up as though they were from any higher class, much less royalty itself. In the middle of a war though, King Henry has staged his own sort of theatrical production with several other soldiers playing the role of him. If we are to look at words alone, sometimes the place of battle during war is even called a “theater.” Thus, in a meta-fashion, Shakespeare has staged a performance with a man playing King Henry IV, and the king has staged one of his own and cast other soldiers as him, sumptuary laws broken twice over.
While doing this keeps Henry IV safer on the battlefield than he likely would have been otherwise, the idea that anyone could dress in kingly attire and thus in the minds of those around him, become a king, is perhaps the very reason these sumptuary laws existed. This scene demonstrates that when Blunt and numerous others assume the identity of the king and are truly believed to be the king until they are unmasked. Therefore, if somebody in Elizabethan England acquired the attire befitting a member of a higher class, they could become a part of that class with nobody the wiser. This fluidity in something that those of greater affluence and stature would like to be concrete and unchangeable arguably demonstrates the fickleness of being a member of the nobility. While it was often argued at this time that those of wealth and status had such because of divine right by God, this seems to present an alternative. They have these things because the society they have constructed says they should have these things and should somebody ingratiate themselves into said class with those things that qualify those already there, such as clothing, they could contradict this belief entirely. The play demonstrates in other scenes that this only goes one way– at least for royalty. Prince Hal may hang around with tavern folk, but it is rare anybody around him truly forgets he is the prince. Still, were he disguised while doing so rather than making himself known as the prince, perhaps he would be believed to be just another tavern-goer.
William Shakespeare’s Richard III and in TNT’sWill threatricalize English history. Both the play and television series depict a historical figure, but the way this is done caters more to their contemporary audiences. For Richard III this involves not only affirming his suspected villainy for Elizabethans, but both playing into it and inviting the audience to come along and watch his plots unfold as co-conspirators. Still, there is no question that even if portrayed by an actor or production as sympathetic, in his actions Richard III is evil. It would likely be approved of by his Elizabethan audience that Richard should be portrayed as deformed and immoral and that the Tudor dynasty that ends the War of the Roses should be a happy ending that ushers in better times on account of the fact the audience members were living in that present Tudor dynasty. This also would likely align with the perspective of the Great Chain of Being, a notion many Elizabethans subscribed to and something that is depicted in many of Shakespeare’s other plays. While Edward IV did take the throne for himself, being the oldest York, he was still the person who after conquering was supposed to ascend. If he perished, Edward Prince of Wales, his son, should have been his successor. Richard’s killing of others in line, such as his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and usurping the throne for himself is a flagrant violation of this God-ordained hierarchy and thus when Richmond takes the throne from Richard, order is restored.
Will depicts a London that is wild, raunchy, and likely not entirely true to the real Elizabethan London. Though London likely wasn’t as conservative as some period pieces, particularly older ones, may depict it, this almost punk-rock London is portrayed as intense and bohemian, somewhere not quite safe, but full of art, excitement, and potential. The trailer features modern music with a heavy bass and an encounter between Will and Alice Burbage that undoubtedly leads to sex. The addition of the theory that Shakespeare was a closeted Catholic could also speak to the contemporary audience viewing the show, particularly due to the fact the show came from the United States, not England. In 2017 when the show premiered, the U.S. was and still is facing religious turmoil. Earlier in that year, Trump enacted an executive order that effectively banned those from Muslim dominant countries from coming to the U.S. Even while the show was running its first season, a white supremacist rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, with attendees chanting things like “Jews will not replace us” and one even injuring and killing counter-protesters with his car. A London that is hostile to Shakespeare’s religion is something contemporary Americans could recognize if not personally relate to.
In this way, it can be argued that when one is theatricalizing history, one is taking meaning from it that aligns with the cultural values of the contemporary society in which the author lives, rather than the history itself. This is because history cannot truly be known at all; while it is possible to know basic facts, even ones’ personal account of an event in their own life could vary greatly from another present. Because of this, when theatricalizing history, it often makes sense even to handle it in a way that makes sense to modern audiences of the era in which the dramatizing is taking place.
Do you want to quote more Shakespeare in your life but never find opportunities to say “brevity is the soul of wit”? Do you rarely hang below balconies exchanging love vows with the daughter of your enemy? This is just the list for you.
“What an ass am I!” —Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
“I am not a slut,” —As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 3 (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” —The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2
“Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways,” —Henry IV Part 2, Act 4, Scene 5
“This is the excellent foppery of the world,”
–King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2
“Making the beast with two backs,” —Othello, Act 1, Scene 1
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” —As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1
“To tell thee plain, I aim to lie with thee,” —Henry VI Part 3, Act 3, Scene 2 (Works great for courting hot widows.)
“I would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me,” —Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” —Richard II, Act 5, Scene 5
“Marry, sir, in her buttocks.” —A Comedy of Errors, Act 2, Scene 5 (No judgement here.)
“My horse is my mistress,” —Henry V, Act 3, Scene 7 (Uh, there might be something wrong with that.)
“Thou dost infect my eyes,” —Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2
“Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit,” —Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5 (“Wit” is Shakespearean slang for penis.)
“[Wine] provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance,” —Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3
“I had rather live with cheese and garlic in a windmill, far, than feed on cates and have him talk to me in any summer-house in Christendom,” —Henry IV Part 2, Act 4 Scene 1
“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” —King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2
“Villain, I have done thy mother!” —Titus Andronicus, Act 4, Scene 2 (This means exactly what you think it does.)
“And thou unfit for any place but hell,” —Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” —Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
“Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.” —Othello, Act4, Scene 2
