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Types of Shakespeeps

Comedy people: hopeless romantics but also really into dick jokes; unfazed by the wildest coincidence but confused about their gender, their whole identity, or both

History people: either Team York or Team Lancaster and will fight you over it; on a first-name basis with several dead monarchs; on a weird personal crusade to exonerate their problematic fave and won’t shut up about it

Tragedy people: love to suffer and plan to take everyone else down with them; ready to die for the ‘aesthetic’; not-so-secretly into BDSM

Romance people: consider themselves exempt from the forces of time, geography, probably gravity; high like 90% of the time; career prospects include pirate, statue, bear

‘Problem play’ people: too serious for the comedies, too squeamish for the tragedies; have a really strong opinion about the end of Measure for Measure and will tell you about it whether you want to hear it or not; DISCOURSE FOR DAYS

Apocrypha people: Shakespeare hipsters

BONUS

Jonson people: don’t actually like Jonson but Shakesepare is too mainstream

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Viola: my twin brother died in a horrible ship wreck.

Sebastian: stop telling everyone I'm dead!

Viola: sometimes I can still hear his voice.

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Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Buckingham to Richard  (via shakespeareismyjam)

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Julius Caesar: What are ya gonna do, stab me?

Brutus: Yes

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♫ hello from the other siiiiiiiiiiide ♫

King Hamlet to Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV (via incorrectshakespeare)

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The Riff Zine is a new monthly online-only zine based on the idea of “riff culture.” In other words, fandom. Each issue will have a specific theme that contributors can riff on: in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, or other written work. This month’s theme is Shakespeare. 

Interested in submitting? Please read our submission guidelines and then head to this post to submit your work. We are accepting submissions until August 15th for this issue. We look forward to reading your best work! 

Thanks for reading this, and please reblog this post if you think your followers would be interested! 

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–literally all my friends anytime I start talking

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Shakespeare Gothic

You were born on a ship at sea. No one survived the wreck but you. Or so you’ve been told. 

Your father has been dead for months, and your mother has remarried. He still comes to dinner every night and sits in his usual chair. Nobody can see him but you.

Your last lover disappeared. They told you she died, but they never let you see the body. The statue in the churchyard looks just like her.

Your pale white hands are stained with red. You wash them and wash them and wash them, but they will never be clean.

You find an infant abandoned on the beach. Your country does not have a coastline. You do not know where this ocean or this infant came from, and you do not ask.

The owls and ravens shriek wordlessly in the night, but you ignore their warnings. They are always shrieking about something.

You visit a faraway city where you have never been before. Everyone there knows your name.

You wake up alone in the woods. You have no memory of how you got there. You hear fey fairy laughter and someone singing in the darkness. You feel woozy, as if you’ve been drugged.

A girl you loved once tries to return your letters, even though you never wrote her any. Clearly she belongs in a convent. You burst into her bedroom half-dressed to tell her so.

You are invited to a ball and you go, despite the strange feeling that Death will find you if you do. You wear a mask. Death is not fooled.

Your young cousins went to visit their uncle last month. He says they never arrived, but you saw them playing in the garden. Nobody else has seen them since.

It is time for you to be married, but first your suitors must answer a riddle. If they guess wrongly, they die. Your love cannot save them. 

There is a storm on the heath. You do not know what a heath is, and you do not care. You are mad. You are naked. You are dancing in the rain. The storm never ends. 

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Oh hey, so I went on a backstage tour of Shakespeare’s Globe...

…and I totally forgot to upload the photos til now.

Let’s start in the ‘heavens’ right up top, where the cast pour libations for Dionysus before each run:

There’s also a bell made by the same company that made the original Globe’s bell, and a trap that goes right down to the stage. Someone fell down there during the opening season and broke their leg, and there followed a spate of leg/foot-related injuries until Mark Rylance called in a shaman, made a little paper replica of the Globe (complete with teeny paper players) and performed a secret ceremony before hiding the whole thing in the rafters. It’s still there, apparently, but no one knows where it is. 

(Spot the gold confetti leftover from Charles Edward’s Richard II… It’s EVERYWHERE.)

View from the musician’s balcony. In the original theatre, wealthy playgoers could sit up here to show off their outfits to the audience. Ditto in the pretty painted boxes to the immediate left and right of the balcony:

Next: backstage. Are you ready? 

(There are grease-stains above those little square windows because actors lean their foreheads against them to peek out at the stage, listening for their cue…)

View from the stage. Imagine the yard filled with groundlings…

The fucking detail…

I wanted to stroke the walls. And hump a pillar. And lie on the stage and cry. But I restrained myself. I am a professional. 

Then we went down into ‘hell’, under the stage, where no one has swept since forever and there is still SO MUCH RICHARD II GLITTER. 

(The tour guide told a great story about logistics of rigging up plastic drainpipes that stretched to each of the four corners of the stage so that Hamlet’s ghost could be lowered down into the trap and deliver his “SWEAR!” lines from different locations without having to scurry about under the stage. It is TIGHT under there.)

Finally: props department. I tried to hide behind a stack of shoes so that I’d get left behind and could live out my days as a little Globe hermit but they found me.

 We got to feel up some of the costumes though - all made by hand with authentic materials and techniques of Shakespeare’s time - aaand none of them can be washed (vodka and febreeze ftw). Each principle actor gets a handmade, tailored outfit of their very own to the cost of about £3,000 each. Rylance’s Prospero robes cost EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND. 

Oh look, fancy gloves:

I fucking love the Globe. 

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If fictional characters could text Shakespeare Edition! All credit goes to Sparklife from Sparknotes.com

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Montague & Capulet: But we had sworn eternal enmity

Prince: You fucked up a perfectly nice couple, is that you did. Look at them. They're dead.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream in rehearsal: Week one

Assistant Director Keziah Serreau shares an insight into the rehearsal process for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Emma Rice’s opening production for Wonder Season.

Week one of Dream rehearsals is over and what a week it’s been, hooray!

There is a general sense of excitement as we start to dig into the themes and the characters of the play. Every morning we start with our daily game of ‘keepy-upy’ volley ball which spreads playfulness, complicity and cheekiness throughout the company. 

Our rehearsal room is looking more and more like a giant tool box ready to be used by the skilled hands of the performers and creatives in the room. Costumes are stacked on railings, Stu Barker our composer and Pat Moran our Music Director have their hurdy-gurdy, trombones, cittern, hammer dulcimer, harp, drum kit, sitar, mandolin, ukulele, double bass, uilleann pipes; Galician pipes, gait pipes, Slovakian pipes, Macedonian pipes, whistles, bansuri, guitars, electric bass, banjo, piano, violin, synth, clarinet, shehnai…

The songs we are learning are setting the tone, the mood and the magic of our show. 

 Over hill over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander everywhere…

(2.1.2-6)

Etta Murfitt’s choreography reveals the energy, the joy, the sexiness and the power within this story. And Börkur Jónsson’s and Moritz Junge’s designs really open up the world, and the wonder of things to come. 

The whole company are really coming together and taking its first steps towards owning our Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Through a series of improvisations the actors are bringing flesh and life to each of the play’s characters. There is a general sense of wonder in the room as we meet all the characters and each time we do, we instantly love them and want to cherish them. Everyone takes part in each of these improvisations; every actor gets to feel what it is like to be a Puck, to be a Lysander, to be a Snug before the actor playing the role finally takes over alone… This creates a real sense of ownership over every character, and with it, the actors are starting to grow as an ensemble. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Emma Rice, opens in the Globe on 30 April. Find out more about the production and book tickets.

Discover more about Wonder, Emma Rice’s first season at the Globe.

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Guide To Shakespearean Tragedies

Romeo and Juliet: For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Julius Caesar: For never was a story of more blood and guts/ Than this of Rome and her Julius.

Othello: For never was a story with more calling an innocent lady a ho/ Than this of Desdemona and her Othello

Macbeth: For never was a story of more death/ Than this of Lord and Lady Macbeth.

Titus Andronicus: For never was a story more ludicrous/ Than this of Titus Andronicus

Richard III: For never was a story of less chill/ Than this of Richard and those he killed

King Lear: For never was a story more weird/ Than this of three girls and their dad, King Lear

Antony and Cleopatra: For never was a story of dying in more agony/ Than this of Cleopatra and her Antony

Coriolanus: For never was a story of more gayness/ Than this of Aufidius and his Coriolanus

Hamlet: For never was a story more overblown/ Than this of Prince Hamlet and the Danish throne.

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Folger scholar Dr. Heather Wolfe leads project to transcribe and digitize hundreds of documents about the Bard, discovering details that were overlooked for centuries.

““Wow,” said Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt, when told this week by The Wall Street Journal that Dr. Wolfe’s colleague had found the document. Dr. Greenblatt has written about the episode but didn’t know a more detailed account existed. “So many things are lost and have disappeared,” he said. “We think we know the past. We don’t know the past. We know pieces of the past.””

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Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.

Lear, definitely (via incorrectshakespeare)