Taming of the Shrew: An Overview

This week we are taking a look at Shakespeare's comedies.  I originally signed up for Twelfth Night, but after today's class discussion, and talking about Taming of the Shrew, I am thinking that I will read this play.
I have read this play before, but not really all that well.  I was in this play in High School, but I just memorized my part and was done with it.  I am looking forward to a more involved reading of this play, especially looking at the ideas of feminism and gender roles and family relationships in the play.  I will also be reading this play in English and German, comparing the language and the phrases used to see if there are any distinct differences in the play in these two languages.

First: The title in German is Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung, which is Taming of the Unruly, Rebellious, Wayward, Stubborn.
I don't know if that changes the meaning or interpretation of the play at all, but it at least makes it a little more understandable.  I remember the first time I heard about the Taming of the Shrew I thought it was about an actual shrew, the little vole-like animal.

Wouldn't be hard to tame, honestly.

Well, we'll see what else I find as I study this play in depth.  Stay tuned.

An Apology for Richard

I have been reading and writing about Richard II lately, but today in class I sat in on a small group discussion about Richard III, a play and a character that I am very familiar with.
First, there is no relation between the two Richards, who ruled England nearly 80 years apart.  Just the briefest of history lessons: Richard II was deposed by Henry IV, whose grandson Henry VI was deposed by Edward IV, who died leaving the throne empty for his brother Richard III.  


As I mentioned, I have study Richard III quite a bit,  two years ago I wrote a 6 page paper in defense of Richard, and last year I wrote a 16 page paper defending him and comparing him to a character in a German novel who I saw as very similar.  Let me set up my defense of Richard, but with one caveat: I do not condone Richard for what he did.  He is a villain, a devil, an evil, evil man who committed many atrocities.  But, I can begin to understand him and where he came from.


The question is asked again and again, "Why is Richard the way he is?"  And for me, part of the answer has to be, That is the way society made him.

Was Shakespeare revolting?

 Please excuse the poor pun in the title, but I want to write about something I came across while studying Richard II: Shakespeare's subversive nature.  Especially with the play Richard II, many see Shakespeare's plays as swaying public opinion either for or against the monarch.  In Richard II, an upstart young noble, Henry Bolingbroke manages to overthrow the king, which is not generally the kind of thing kings enjoy.  Elizabeth I is reported as once having said, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?", there were those who thought her unfit as a monarch, partly because she had never married, never produced an heir.  The Earl of Essex, reportedly, on the night before his planned rebellion against Elizabeth, paid the Chamberlain's Men to perform Richard II.  He was imprisoned and later executed, but the thought remains -- does Richard II have anything to do with revolution?  Does this play speak either for or against deposing a monarch?

The Earl of Essex turns his back on Queen Elizabeth I, , from COMIC ENGLISH HISTORIES by Dick Doyle, 1886.

Timeline of plays

As I was doing some background research on Richard II, I was looking at the date it was written.  The following excerpt from a chart I found with the left column showing the year in which these plays were first performed and the right column showing the year these plays were first published (as well as we can tell).

1594-95	Two Gentlemen of Verona	1623
1594-95	Love's Labour's Lost	1598?
1594-95	Romeo and Juliet	1597
1595-96	Richard II	1597
1595-96	A Midsummer Night's Dream	1600
1596-97	King John	1623
1596-97	The Merchant of Venice	1600

What I find very interesting is that at the same time that Shakespeare was writing Richard II, he was also working on Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.  What does that mean?  I don't know, but it is interesting to think that the themes and characters of these plays are all bouncing around inside Shakespeare's head at the same time.

As Shakespeare writes Richard II - with it's warring factions, Bolingbroke against Richard, did he dream up the idea of the forbidden love that makes Romeo and Juliet the classic that it is?  

One thing to consider is the staging of these plays -- Any theatre will tell you that you have to have variety in your repertoire, you cannot perform only tragedies or only comedies.  So maybe the fact that these plays were performed in the same year is only a reflection of the practicality of running a theatre as a business.  

But still, it begs the question, are there common themes that cross these plays?  Is Shakespeare dealing with similar issues in these plays?

A quick note to Richard II and the history plays

I have read Richard II Acts 1 and 2 in the last two days, and now I remember why reading the history plays is so hard:  the names are impossible!
Everybody has a name, say Henry or Richard, and then everybody has a title, like the Duke of Hereford, and to make things even better, it seems like everybody is named Richard or Henry!  There's Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, there's Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and then his son, also named Henry Percy, called Hotspur.  Confused yet?

All of this means that it takes a little longer to read these plays because you have to pay attention to who is actually talking to whom, and about whom, especially when they only refer to people by their title or relation (my uncle or cousin).

Really, this is worse than Comedy of Errors, at least there the twins are clearly labelled as being from Ephesus or Syracuse.

That's all for now,  I'll go back and try to figure out who's at war with who now, and why.

Shakespeare's history plays: War and Kings

Shakespeare's history plays are generally split among two tetrologies, the first comprising of Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; and Richard III  and the second being the plays Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V, though the events detailed in the second tetrology happened chronologically before the events of the first.  And it all comes down to wars and kings.  


To understand fully the background of these plays, one needs to understand English history, specifically the events of the Hundred Years' War and the War of the Roses.  I have studied this part of English history a bit, so let me attempt to give a little of the historical background.


Let's start with Richard II, who was king from 1367 - 1400.  (To remember the different Richards in English history, just remember your Clint Eastwood: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  Richard I = the Good. He was Richard the Lionhearted who led the crusades, you'll see him at the end of Robin Hood coming home.  Richard II= the Bad, generally considered a bad king, did not govern very well.  And Richard III is the Ugly, he's the hunchback, evil king who killed his brothers and his nephews to get the throne.)

The three Richards, Hollywood style.

A few final words to Hamlet: Staging

I have some experience with theatre, being the technical director for New Play Project and a producer for Zion Theatre Company.  When I think about staging hypothetical productions I generally think of one of two theatres where I have worked: my high school auditorium, a really nice space that was built for us while I was in high school, a large space with really nice lights and sound system; and the Provo Theatre space, this is a tiny theatre, fitting only 125 people, with a stage I can cross in three large steps, and an even smaller backstage.

Thinking about these two very different spaces gives a very different production, for I am very much of the opinion that productions need to be altered to fit the space.  You cannot do the same thing in two different theatres.

As I read Hamlet, I thought about how I would stage it at the Provo Theatre.  I am a fan of very simplistic sets, letting the audience help you build the scenery, getting them involved with the production.  If your actors and your script are god enough to get your audience involved, you don't need distracting elaborate sets and costumes, especially when this causes scene changes to be extremely long.

If I were to stage Hamlet at Provo Theatre, I would have to do some script edits.  I would probably edit out a few of the extraneous characters, since there is not a whole lot of space on stage for some of those court scenes where everybody's on stage.   I would probably either cut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern completely, or combine them into just one character (Rosenstern?  Guildencrantz?).  I don't really see these characters as very necessary to the overall plot of the play.  
I might also combine the two clowns into one, and have their dialog spoken between the one clown and Hamlet or Horatio.  That might change some of the meaning of the lines, that would be interesting to see.

Plays to read this semester

I guess I need to be a little more specific and post which plays I plan on reading.

History: Richard II
Comedy: Twelfth Night
Tragedy: King Lear (in English and German)
Romance:  Cymbeline

I will also, hopefully, be doing more extensive research into Shakespeare's plays translated into German, dating back to the first translations in the mid 1700s to modern translations.  I'm thinking I can use this research as I write a paper for my German class, as well.

Hamlet, Acts 4 and 5: On Death

I finished the play.  Not for the first time, but it is still fun to finish a play, especially such a play as Hamlet.  
I don't really have a whole lot to say about the ending- it ends much like we expect a tragedy to, with everyone's death.  But these deaths are not arbitrary, they are all products of specific character flaws and plot devices.  


1. Polonius:  Killed by Hamlet, mistaking him to be the king. This one is partly Hamlet's fault, but mostly I blame Polonius himself.  That meddling old man just cannot leave well enough alone.  He's always hiding behind drapes and spying on people, listening in, sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.   Hamlet, hearing a noise behind the curtain in his mother's bedroom, naturally assumes it is either the king or some intruder -- of course he stabs him.  Poor Polonius, but it's his own fault.


2. Ophelia: Drowned, possible suicide.  See my post from yesterday about Ophelia's madness.  There is some scholarly debate as to how exactly Ophelia drowned, some claiming she she drowned herself out of depression, others maintaining she drowned accidentally as part of her madness.  


3. Gertrude: Poisoned.  Claudius poisoned a goblet of wine, intending that Hamlet drink it and die, but instead his wife, Queen Gertrude drinks it and dies.  Claudius, in his anger, plans a treacherous end for Hamlet, only to have it backfire and kill the woman he loves.  But Gertrude is not entirely innocent -- some versions of the play show that she was complicit in the death of her first husband, King Hamlet, at the very least she did marry his brother, her brother-in-law, but two months after becoming a widow.  

Ophelia's madness

I will admit, there is one thing that has always bothered me about most productions of Hamlet:  Ophelia.  I have never really understood her character, her purpose.  We first see her as her brother and then her father tell her that she cannot love Hamlet.  Then we see her as she tells her father of Hamlet's antic behaviour.  Then there is the strange scene between Hamlet and Ophelia after the "to be, or not to be" speech, which concludes with Hamlet telling her, essentially, to buzz off.  But despite this, Hamlet makes some pretty suggestive comments as he flirts with her while watching the play-within-the-play.  We next see Ophelia after Hamlet has killed her father, and she is completely mad, child-like and nonsensical.

It wasn't until I watched Slings and Arrows, the Canadian television show based around a Shakespearean festival where they perform Hamlet, that I began to get a deeper insight into her character.  In the show there is a terrible actress who has been cast as Ophelia, who also does not fully understand her character, which leads to the following scene where the director, who has had a history with madness, tries to explain things.  I love the way he describes her.

Romeo und Julia für das Ruhrpott

As I was thinking about Shakespeare and German translations the other day, I remembered a book that I found while I was on my mission Romeo und Julia: Ruhrpott, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet taking place not only in Germany, but in this particular area of Germany known as the Ruhrgebiet or Ruhrpott.  I spent 18 months of my mission living in the Ruhrgebiet, so I really enjoy this book.


The Ruhrgebiet is the industrial heart of Germany, with coal mines, steel mills, foundries, etc.  There are a lot of large cities pretty close together, and as such industrial areas do, it attracts a lot of immigrants and foreigners.  Particularly in Germany, after WWII there was a large Guest-worker program bringing in workers from other countries since most of Germany's men did not return from the war.  


Because of the coal mines and steel mills as well as the many immigrants, the German spoken in the Ruhrgebiet is a little different from standard German.  Immigrants could not pronounce or conjugate German properly, and a lot of words get 'slanged' or shortened to facilitate work in the mines when you don't always have the luxury of time to be able to enunciate clearly.  


Not only is this book written in this dialect of German, which is mostly incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the Ruhrgebiet, it is set in Wanne-Eickel, a town in the Ruhrgebiet and stars Rom-Jo Czervinski, whose father is Polish and runs the local Bratwurst stand, and Yülle Özmir,whose father is Turkish and runs the local Döner stand.  As members of different minority groups vying for the same market stall the two families have become rivals until .... well, you know the story.

Wilhelm Shakespeare -- Shakespeare in Germany

William Shakespeare is loved the world over, but nowhere near as much as in Germany.  From some simple Google searches on Shakespeare and Germany, I have learned that the oldest Shakespeare Society in the world is German: Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, founded in 1864, English acting troops brought the Bard to Germany in the early 1700s with performances translated into German, and there have been so many translations of Shakespeare's plays into German that most Germans actually believe that Wilhelm Shakespeare was a German!

As a student of German, who has loved this language and this culture for over a decade now,  I find this fascinating.  I have found several translations of these plays online and they have evolved as the modern German language has evolved.  Shakespeare is very much alive in German, because he is allowed to be translated and retranslated, where in English there are always those purists who frown on anything but the actual, authentic, original text.  But Shakespeare has been allowed to thrive in Germany precisely because he is a foreigner.  And yet, he is very much a German.  A poem from the German Shakespeare Society reads,

Seht, heut' gesellt, im heil'gen Bund der Dritte,
Zu Deutschlands Dioskuren sich der Brite,
Auch er ist unser...

(See, today in the holy bond joins as the third, to Germany's dioscuri (referring to Schiller and Goethe), the Brit.  He, too, is ours.)

Hamlet, Acts 2 and 3

These two acts have some more impressive speeches, including my absolute favorite - "What a piece of work is a man."   What I found very interesting with this reading is the word "a".  I have always thought the speech was "What a piece of work is man" when it really says "What a piece of work is a man." That single word "a" makes a huge difference.  Without it Hamlet seems to be speaking about mankind in general, all of us at once, collectively.  But he is really speaking about a man, an individual.  Each of us individually are "noble in reason", "infinite in faculties", "In action how like an angel", "in apprehension how like a god."  Each of us have within ourselves this immense power of potentiality.  Not just as a whole.  Sometimes I am a little cynical and find it hard to see the "Götterfunken" - spark of God, as Schiller writes it - in individuals, when it is easier to see this power collectively.  


Of course, at this point Hamlet is very much in his melancholy moment, despairing, having "lost all [his] mirth."  He speaks these wonderful words about the grandeur of humanity, only to follow them with, "to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me -no, nor woman either." He is fed up with the world and the injustices he sees in it. 


And then of course there is Act 3, scene 1, "To be, or not to be."  Such a famous speech, everybody and their dog knows it, it must be hard for an actor to step into the role of Hamlet knowing that he will have to perform this speech.  As Jack says in Slings and Arrows:

Cheer up, Hamlet

This little gem comes from a Canadian television show Slings and Arrows, this is their theme song from season 1.

"So your uncle is a cad who murdered dad and married mum, that's really no excuse to be as glum as you've become."

Hamlet, Act 1

Hamlet is the first play we are reading as a class. This is a big one, everyone has heard of Hamlet, everyone knows "To be or not to be..." and the general plot, but who knows much more than that?

I have read Hamlet before, but it's been a while. I remember basically who the characters are, what's going on and why, but it is nice to reread this play and pay attention to the language. Particularly the amazing soliloquies. My favorite, even more so than the famous "To be or not to be", and coming in just ahead of "What a piece of work is man", is the soliloquy of Hamlet's in Act One, Scene Two.

What I find very interesting is what this speech tells us about Hamlet.  At the beginning he is wishing that he could die, that his flesh would melt, or that God had not commanded against suicide so that he could kill himself without guilt.  And all because of the sorrow he feels at his father's death, and what he perceives as his mother's betrayal.

Learning Outcomes

One of the main reasons I am starting this blog is because I am in a Shakespeare class at BYU. As part of this class we have been asked to start a research blog about Shakespeare, to help us achieve the learning outcomes of the course.

1. Gain "Shakespeare Literacy" - Gain a breadth and depth of Shakespeare's works by reading plays that I haven't before as well as studying one play more in depth. Plays that I want to read: Richard III, King Lear, Twelfth Night (which I haven't read yet), the Henriad. I also want to watch some vintage movie productions of Shakespeare, some Olivier, some Branagh, some other classics as well.

2. Analyze Shakespeare Critically - That's where this blog comes in. I will write as I read and analyze these plays and movies. I have a background in theatre as a technical director, so I will mostly focus on the technical elements, looking at how I would stage these plays if I were given the opportunity as well as analyzing the movies with these elements in mind.

3. Engage Shakespeare Creatively - I have a few ideas about how I will be creative with Shakespeare's works, including a monologue that I am working on based off of Richard III's opening speech, as well as some Shakespearean sonnets that I have written based on Shakespeare's plays. I will post anything I write here, of course.

4. Share Shakespeare Meaningfully - And that is again where this blog comes in. I will write and share my thoughts, discoveries, research as I read and study these plays and I invite commentary and discussion. I am a big fan of collective knowledge and learning through the communal conversation.

I am excited for this course, for this opportunity to explore and engage with Shakespeare and to join the scholarly and academic community. This should be fun. Let's see what happens!

Blogging about Shakespeare

People have been writing about Shakespeare for almost 400 years now. His works have been analyzed and re-analyzed using all of the latest literary and psychological and sociological theories. His works have been translated and transposed into countless languages and settings. There is truly a universality to the works of William Shakespeare, and the advent of internet technologies and Web 2.0 are no exception.

What does it mean to study Shakespeare in the Digital Age? How does one make the collected works of William Shakespeare accessible to an audience that is growing more global and more technologically savvy? How does a four hundred year old play stand up against the latest 3-D movie or video game?

These are the questions that we need to be asking ourselves as scholars of Shakespeare in the 21st century. These plays have so much humanity in them that they have continued to be relevant and insightful throughout history and across cultures. People enjoy reading Shakespeare and watching it performed, they enjoy taking the stories and characters of Shakespeare and using them and adapting them to whatever situation or circumstance they can. These plays still have meaning and purpose, but we need to start discussing how we can continue to use these plays in the world of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. Just doing a quick search for "Shakespeare" on YouTube returned 93,500 results. People are talking about Shakespeare, discussing Shakespeare, performing Shakespeare, reinterpreting Shakespeare on the Internet almost daily.