Tumgik
#Shakespeare is so good
Text
the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"
just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible
#due to the Great Data Decay academics write viciously argumentative articles on which episodes aired in what order#at conferences professors have known to engage in physically violent altercations whilst debating the air date number of household viewers#90% of the couch gags have been lost and there is a billion dollar trade in counterfeit “lost copies”#serious note: i'll be honest i always assumed it was english imperialism that made shakespeare so inescapable in the 19th/20th cent#like his writing should have become obscure at the same level of his contemporaries#but british imperialists needed an ENGLISH LANGUAGE (and BRITISH) writer to venerate#and shakespeare wrote so many damn things that there was a humongous body of work just sitting there waiting to be culturally exploited...#i know it didn't happen like this but i imagine a English Parliament House Committee Member For The Education Of The Masses or something#cartoonishly stumbling over a dusty cobwebbed crate labelled the Complete Works of Shakespeare#and going 'Eureka! this shall make excellent propoganda for fabricating a national identity in a time of great social unrest.#it will be a cornerstone of our elitist educational institutions for centuries to come! long live our decaying empire!'#'what good fortune that this used to be accessible and entertaining to mainstream illiterate audience members...#..but now we can strip that away and make it a difficult & alienating foundation of a Classical Education! just like the latin language :)'#anyway maybe there's no such thing as the 'greatest writer of x language' in ANY language?#maybe there are just different styles and yes levels of expertise and skill but also a high degree of subjectivity#and variance in the way that we as individuals and members of different cultures/time periods experience any work of media#and that's okay! and should be acknowledged!!! and allow us to give ourselves permission to broaden our horizons#and explore the stories of marginalized/underappreciated creators#instead of worshiping the List of Top 10 Best (aka Most Famous) Whatevers Of All Time/A Certain Time Period#anyways things are famous for a reason and that reason has little to do with innate “value”#and much more to do with how it plays into the interests of powerful institutions motivated to influence our shared cultural narratives#so i'm not saying 'stop teaching shakespeare'. but like...maybe classrooms should stop using it as busy work that (by accident or designs)#happens to alienate a large number of students who could otherwise be engaging critically with works that feel more relevant to their world#(by merit of not being 4 centuries old or lacking necessary historical context or requiring untaught translation skills)#and yeah...MAYBE our educational institutions could spend less time/money on shakespeare critical analysis and more on...#...any of thousands of underfunded areas of literary research i literally (pun!) don't know where to begin#oh and p.s. the modern publishing world is in shambles and it would be neat if schoolwork could include modern works?#beautiful complicated socially relevant works of literature are published every year. it's not just the 'classics' that have value#and actually modern publications are probably an easier way for students to learn the basics. since lesson plans don't have to include the#important historical/cultural context many teens need for 20+ year old media (which is older than their entire lived experience fyi)
23K notes · View notes
jacobglaser · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
If you ask me, he's been up here too long. Gone native. Enjoying himself too much. Wearing sunglasses, even when he doesn't need them.
Crowley & his many sunglasses
[+ bonus]
Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
striving-artist · 1 year
Text
We need to fricking stop with this CinemaSins TVTropes style crap in fandom. Actually, we need to stop that attitude in all creative fields, but I'm talking about fic right now.
I have seen many posts ragging on over-used phrases in fanfic, and yes, I find 'cerulean orbs' deeply strange, but if I ever said anything hateful on the topic I wish I hadn't.
You know why we say 'smirk' a lot in fic? cause its faster than 'gave a tiny smile to one side with their lips closed, a little cocky and provocative' Smirk is an easy way of saying it. It's the correct word. We say it in fic a lot because people smirk a lot in real life. Go people watch, its all over. Also. Bring me a true synonym for smirk, and I'll use that instead, but these ain't it.
If you have a better way of saying 'took off his shoes without untying them, just levered the heel with the toe of the other' that isn't saying 'he toed off his shoes' I'd love to hear it. Cause that phrase is perfect for it.
'Huffed a laugh'? Yeah, they did. Cause I'm not going to spend extra words describing how they 'exhaled through their nose once, amused, but not enough to fully laugh aloud' Its a specific action. You think people don't do that all day? five bucks says its exactly what you do when you see a meme most of the time. You didn't lol. You huffed a laugh.
The idea that something that's been used before is inherently less valuable is ridiculous. Same with the inverse.
If the phrase you want to use is common or widely used, but is the best way to communicate it? Use it. Don't fall for this trap that is currently consuming hollywood. You don't have to have a clever twist just because 'they survived and were happy' is a trope. You don't have to use some insane alternate phrase just because someone thinks fandom uses 'smirk' too much.
And, as always, if someone gives you hell and you don't want to fight them? let me know, cause I volunteer.
9K notes · View notes
fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
584 notes · View notes
suits-of-woe · 3 months
Text
the two gentlemen of verona is fun because it's (maybe) shakespeare's first play and there are a lot of elements in it (julia dressing up as a boy to serve the guy she's in love with, valentine's banishèd speech, etc) that you can tell he's sort of testing out and will refine later in better plays. but it's ALSO the only play in the canon with a dog in it. which leads me to conclude that dealing with crab was such an absolute nightmare in production that for the rest of his entire 36-play-long career shakespeare was like "holy fuck never again"
759 notes · View notes
hamletthedane · 7 months
Text
Hamlet’s Age
Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesn’t even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamlet’s age is both in-text and as meta-text.
To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamlet’s age:
Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Master’s degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a master’s degree at 23.
Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a “youth” by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use “youth” to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless ‘men’ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)
King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)
Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard
In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamlet’s birth, and that he’s be “sixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.” However, it’s unclear if “sixteene” means “sixteen” or “sexton” (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)
Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says “dozen years” instead of “three and twenty.” This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huh…)
Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravedigger’s expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood
One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamlet’s death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)
Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that I’m fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.
However, it doesn’t really matter what the “right” answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:
Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of “youth”
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience
The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and that’s the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isn’t otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny
Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, that’s so interesting and cool.
*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Polonius’ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and been very well reviewed. Hamlet’s joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).
815 notes · View notes
mewtwo24 · 3 months
Text
I finally finished reading the fourth volume of svsss in full, and thing is--the first time through I only read the bingqiu content because I was ravenous for more of their happy ending.
Turns out that was a perilous mistake.
Because I started reading the airplane extras. And I swear to god. MXTX is trying to kill me
What do you MEAN demon lord Binghe was sitting on his big fucking throne. All stoic and forbidding. Surrounded by his demon generals who don't know shit about human courtship. Asking them what he should do, fully demoralized by constant rejections from sqq, only to have airplane tell him to act more pathetic and needy. Which is already hysterically funny and insane, UNTIL LBH'S RESPONSE IS THIS, KILLING ME INSTANTLY:
Tumblr media
LUO BINGHE. WHY DOES HE SAY IT LIKE: "I already tried that, didn't work--nothing works :/ not mean, not maidenly, not housewife, not spicy, not capable disciple. Is doubling down on clingy really all it will take? What's a born hater with only one love in his life to do????"
The dichotomy of him sitting there like 'how can I reach the unfathomable depths of shizun's heart?' A HEART HE'S ALREADY WON OVER, MIND and then in the Holy Mausoleum solving the puzzle without blinking and being like 'oh yeah you just have to hit the acupoints, no sweat.' Literally the comedy writes itself I'm so--
How am I supposed to be normal about this. MXTX understands the juicy quintessential queer joy of a person with the world's power at their fingertips wishing only for love. Willing to do anything to earn that love, when unbeknownst to them it's already been freely given. Totally not screaming and yelling and clawing at the walls
And that's not even touching airplane's uproarious account of events. The way he's like 'lol what's next, lbh and sqq are best friends now? smfh' only to see lbh TACKLE SQQ LOVINGLY. FOR SQQ TO BE BASHFUL ABOUT IT BUT SO SO FOND OF THE LITTLE SCAMP. This when we've been experiencing sqq's constant inner monologue of 'I'm so cool and so dignified about my role, truly the epitome of propriety and poser-level fortitude.' Meanwhile, in their universe:
Tumblr media
Airplane constantly flaming???? Sqq and lbh in his observations????? His absolute bewilderment and confusion????? Legendary. No notes every single second of this shit was hilarious.
Airplane's comment that sqq + older adolescent lbh traveling together was just watching a couple in their honeymoon phase. OR the fact that lbh is exceedingly petty and refuses to share their food in the wake of airplane's interruption of their time together, until sqq relents sheepishly and insists airplane eat what's left (ONLY AFTER PLACATING LBH WITH MORE FOOD FROM HIS PLATE, SOBBING)
Watching airplane salivate over Mobei-Jun and acting like that's totally normal behavior. Finding out mbj and airplane got together first. Finding out sqq encouraged airplane. LIKE THIS. WHILE HE IS STILL IN DENIAL ABOUT HIS OWN FEELINGS:
Tumblr media
Mobei-jun clearly thinking their arrangement is a forever thing, heartbroken his human abandoned him with all the hapless fury of a scorned wife swept away by false promises of fidelity. Airplane writing demons to be the type to beat up their crush lovingly and still unable to connect the dots about mbj's feelings. Mbj letting him go and respecting his wishes, only relenting when there's indication airplane was poorly processing his own feelings and didn't actually want to leave. Mbj caring for him and listening to him as soon as airplane voices what he needs directly and with clarity. None of these gays are functional and it's everything to me
Unrelated, but I physically can't hold this information in anymore:
I'm still reeling from younger lbh having his sexual awakening from the image of sqq wrapped in the immortal binding cables. Condemn me as you like he was so, so real for that.
And no I will not be taking any comments about how luo bingge couldn't bear to see luo binghe cherished in ways he never got to have and all the haunting implications of that. I will also not be taking any comments about luo binghe's instinct to look for sqq in that alternate universe, only to be shaken to the very core to be unable to find his shizun anywhere. The unspeakable and latent horror of his relentless mind likely piecing together what happened, but unable to say it; to suspect what is true, and live with the harrowing confusion of his double's actions. To blame himself, to assume that he had let his anger get the better of him in that world and result in unspeakable folly...
I also refuse to talk about how heartrending it is to hear Tianlang-jun weakly say "In the end, I really can't bring myself to hate humans." The implication that the foolishness of that hope and bright-eyed fondness--the very thing that put him through such unspeakable agony--couldn't be beaten out of him entirely. To discover that his faith in Su Xiyan hadn't been misplaced, to the contrary: his beloved hadn't scorned him at all, but rather fought to the miserable end to protect the fruition of their genuine feelings of love when she couldn't protect tlj or herself.
How MXTX has sqq deliberately draw parallels between their situation and that of ygy+sj and tlj+sx; desperately wishing it might not be too late for them. The concept of breaking cycles of abuse and harm pervasive throughout the newly devised story, how it evolves for the better only when love takes the place of power, pride, and domination. How the moment sqq chooses vulnerability instead of saving face, the genre shifts to the so-called "cringe" girly genre where most if not every character is more fulfilled, more true to themselves. How the "male-oriented" former genre was aimlessly sensationalized and sexualized, how it was a sustained performance of aspirational toxic masculinity. How men objectify other men without end. All of the unspoken gendered implications that come with that.
Anyways. Going to go put my head in a sandbox and try to process everything I just witnessed because even a second reading is not enough to find a modicum of closure.
#svsss#bingqiu#moshang#i swear to god this series is just 'gay man who doesn't know shit inflicting his delusional reality on everyone else and inciting chaos'#and literally it's slapstick levels of hilarious every single time; mxtx never change#also i fully agree that we did not get NEARLY enough mobei-jun and sqh/airplane content#the amount of mental illness to mental illness communication going on there was astonishing#mobei-jun being afraid of his uncle and bringing sqh because that's the only person he trusts fully (WAILING NOISES)#sqh having a tantrum but running away because for the first time he was honest about his needs + his dissatisfaction with catering to other#how that reflects his narrative compulsions and how he felt forced to warp more creative story paths for the sake of survival as a writer#how sqq's restoration of much of his original intent--as well as mobei-jun's acceptance of his needs--helps airplane begin to heal#how his happiness begins; how just like sqq he wanders in such confusion and denial before he's forced to realize what truly matters to him#SHREK VOICE: STORIES HAVE. L A Y E R S#it feels like modern day shakespeare and when i say that i don't mean it in a hollow elevating sense i mean it more like#mxtx just hits that perfect balance of poignance but also hilarious concentric circles of botched communication and brainworms#okay but real talk for a minute? .........;-;#the way lbh constantly struggles with such a crushing feeling that he'll be abandoned over any little mishap/thing/problem#really hit me where it hurts??? if only because its so clearly an anxiety that stems from original goods' upbringing#the way it becomes even more heartrending when you think back to all the sect leaders clamoring that he should have been killed as an infan#that he should have been aborted as a fetus--insisting right in front of him that his birth was a mistake and a disgrace#over having demon blood in his veins. like my god that scene is so viscerally upsetting i struggle to read it#the way its so easy to see the demons as a manifestation of otherness in precipitated form#how both sqq and sqh are influenced by human rhetoric without evening meaning to--assuming the worst against their better judgment#how both sqq and sqh both struggle with their own otherness in different ways and only find solace when they begin to accept who they are#how their lovers (lbh and mbj respectively) both are willing to navigate those confusing waters with them#how both demons love them as they are--accept them as they are despite how difficult forgiveness of perceived betrayal is for them#ty mxtx for changing my brain chemistry#as i get older i have such a fondness for the messiness of thematic queer self-discovery and growth into self-acceptance#that and how youth can so easily be defined by perfectionistic self-harm and the violence of repression
221 notes · View notes
afieldinengland · 4 months
Text
i do think there’s something to be said re: the fact that some people resent / dislike shakespeare purely because of the fusty and by-rote way in which they were taught his plays in school. which is fair! because it strikes me that teaching shakespeare to kids purely with a view towards exams drains the plays of the very things that make them beautiful, and that make them so deft in what they have to say about the human condition. it’s like people who say they don’t like vegetables, but really they’ve never had them prepared properly. of course you’re going to hate shakespeare if they’ve boiled him within an inch of his life what you need is shakespeare fried in butter
238 notes · View notes
knittedbond · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Much Ado About Nothing, Great Performances (2019) dir. Kenny Leon // Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs - Frederic William Burton
783 notes · View notes
butchhamlet · 3 months
Text
"But there is something particular about Cleopatra and the imaginative escape she offers for white performers. She presents a fantasy of a stately queen with an erotic power that white actresses can inhabit and take pleasure in without facing any of the difficulties faced by Black women. Like white European colonial settlers, they occupy her character though only briefly. And this is nothing new. In the seventeenth century, one aristocratic woman had her portrait painted as Cleopatra—a performative act in which it was possible to pretend to be the kind of woman she could never actually be within the chaste and virtuous bounds of Renaissance white womanhood. The sitter is identified as Lady Anne Clifford. A Jacobean lady in Egyptian regalia, according to seventeenth-century orientalist notion of national costume, holds an asp above her breast, iconically invoking Cleopatra. For a long time, it seems, white women have stepped into the fantasy of the dark queen. It seems odd that Antony and Cleopatra was not always viewed as one of Shakespeare's race plays. That is changing, finally. If theatre directors continue to centralise whiteness in their readings of the play, however, it in many ways replicates Caesar's triumph over Egypt. We relive Cleopatra's defeat every time we watch a white woman play her—due respect to Dames Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, and Eve Best. But we begin to see more clearly the Egyptian Queen's own prophetic vision as she chose to end her life on her own terms. She imagined herself being performed for years to come by actors who do not resemble her in any way—and that is, for the most part, what has happened."
—Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (emphasis mine)
179 notes · View notes
mariathechosen1 · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Beatrice & Benedick - Much Ado About Nothing
Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, 1993
David Tennant and Catherine Tate, 2011
Charles Edwards and Eve Best, 2012
Grantham Coleman and Danielle Brooks, 2019
[Image description: A collage with eight photos of four different productions of Much Ado About Nothing comparing the same scene between Beatrice and Benedick. There are two row of photos: The first row depicts the four productions’ version of Benedick either smiling and/or posing in a flirtatious and suggestive manner, while looking at Beatrice. The second row depicts each productions’ version of Beatrice looking back at him, unimpressed and with a deadpan face. /end ID]
215 notes · View notes
fearandhatred · 5 months
Text
damn we really don't think enough about the major world events that crowley and aziraphale have witnessed on both ends. all the horrible things like wars, discrimination, natural disasters, genocide, etc. yes but also all the good: liberation, major political reforms, the invention of new genres and materials and technology and fields of study.
like oh my god. they were there for all the centuries that women had no rights at all and then they got to witness the suffragettes, the women writers and royals and inventors and activists. they got to witness the overturning of anti-lgbtq and racial segregation laws and the celebration of human rights and identities. they were there to witness international tragedies but also the solidarity from everyone all over the world rallying for peace for people they don't even know. they got to see humans create new forms of art and fashion and the printing press and electricity and poetry and and and coloured television and music and they got to see humans constantly find new ways to find connection and love and fun and passion and their own forms of expression.
like imagine being there for everything. how could you not love the world after seeing the fall and rise of humanity over and over again in every way shape and form for six thousand years. holy shit
164 notes · View notes
postmodern-blues · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
BEATRICE: You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about to protest I loved you. BENEDICK: And do it with all thy heart. BEATRICE: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest. BENEDICK: Come, bid me do anything for thee.
192 notes · View notes
littlebirdy0301 · 7 months
Text
Ross Bryant in an improvised storyline be like “I WILL romance a character and I WILL tenderly touch their arm and I WILL take their hands & look lovingly into their eyes”
233 notes · View notes
aithusarosekiller · 2 months
Text
'The album title is trashy/cringe' have you considered that you're just allergic to fun?
80 notes · View notes
brainfullofquotes · 7 months
Text
I'm REALLY enjoying this David Tennant hyperfixation I'm on. I've watched so many things I never would have before, and honestly, I've liked every single one of them so far!
227 notes · View notes