butchhamlet

[butchhamlet]

Pls pls pls pls tell me where you found Tennant/Tate's Much Ado About Nothing it's one of my favorite performances and I can't find it for the life of me. I will pay you with this plant 🌱

if you shoot me a dm i can perhaps unveil it for you!

[butchhamlet]

amateurish first effort

[butchhamlet]

hi! do you know where i can watch Henry IV, Part 1 (2014, American Shakespeare Center) online? it was available online for a week during lockdown, do you know how i can get at the recording now?

i don't have this one downloaded/know where to access it, but posting in case my followers do!

[butchhamlet]

An exploration of the one left behind. There is a way out - more than one, in fact - you just might have to wander a while before you find them. Do tell me in the tags which you stumble on first.

Content warning for Hamlet-typical explorations of murder, suicide, and death in general, alongside a similarly Shakespeare-typical understanding of "insanity". Also, spoilers for a centuries-old play (bet you can't guess which one).

[butchhamlet]

the real main character of hamlet is daddy issues

[butchhamlet]

the bisexuality was there. it didnt change anything. it didn't save anyone. there were just too many forces against it. but it still matters that the bisexuality was there

[butchhamlet]

Bard Poll Round 1, Match 10

Propaganda

Twelfth Night

10/10 Shakespearean comedy. Possibly the most Shakespearean-comedy of any Shakespearean comedy. A letter trick, a ring exchange, twins, mistaken identity, a shipwreck, a funny side plot that's pretty messed up if you think about it, love triangles, cross-dressing, queer undertones... Most Shakespearean comedies will give you some of these, but only Twelfth Night has the guts to give you ALL of them. And on top of all that you have queer icon ViolaCesario, who could be read as any kind of trans and I would believe them all. Absolute banger every time.

Richard II

I adore him. Wet cat of man. Attached to being king and may not know who he is without it. Melodramatic to the bitter, bitter end. More than a little fruity. Not to mention that the language is beautiful and wonderfully quotable.

[butchhamlet]

i missed posting about edmund kinglear. when i explain the lear prod that 100% unironically and effectively used rudolph the red nosed reindeer symbolism on edmund and kent then you will all see

[butchhamlet]

join my hyperbeam swear fealty to my cause

thank you to everyone who came to the second half of r3 movie night! two weeks from now (monday, august 11th), i will not be around because i'm moving lol. so for next week (monday, august 4th), let us have a short one that we can do in one sitting. vote now on your phones

[butchhamlet]

votes are in! tomorrow night at 9pm est i will be inflicting the insane hour-long christmas-themed king lear production ostensibly for children upon everyone. you do not get a choice about this. hyperbeam link up tomorrow night; since people wanted a discord server, i will work on that when i am not so dog tired my eyes are shutting!

thank you to everyone who came to the second half of r3 movie night! two weeks from now (monday, august 11th), i will not be around because i'm moving lol. so for next week (monday, august 4th), let us have a short one that we can do in one sitting. vote now on your phones

[butchhamlet]

Bard Poll Round 1, Match 8

Propaganda

As You Like It

What if you (disguising yourself a man for what you plan on being an indefinite period of time) found out that the guy you’re into was also into girl-you and, instead of revealing who you were, you told him to treat you AS IF you were the girl he was into (you’re still dressed as a guy) up to and including a fake marriage? What if he played along the whole time while also remaining totally oblivious to the fact to who you are? What if??

Henry IV

Great play. Hal is in fine form, Hotspur rules, one of the best histories hands down. Just the right balance of shenanigans and serious stuff. I can and will cry if I think too long about all the parallel father/son relationships happening.

[butchhamlet]

Bard Poll Round 1, Match 7

Propaganda

Misdummer

Shakespeare play of ALL TIME. Just stellar work. Perfect pacing, perfect balance between the three plots, and some of the greatest lines in the canon. Everyone one should watch it. Everyone should watch it twice. It’s funny, compelling, and entertaining. The lover’s fight in 3.2 is fantastic, Pyramus and Thisbe is hilarious, “The forgeries of jealousy” is phenomenal. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a masterwork and it deserves to win this whole bracket.

Troilus and Cressida

An underrated gem with some of the best rhetoric and insults in the canon. Unintentionally hilarious if presented in the right light, but with plenty of power for genuine emotional impact. Ulysses is fantastic. Patroclus and Achilles are exactly as gay as you’d want them to be. Troilus and Cressida get surprisingly little focus given that the play is named after them, so maybe not the best adaptation of Chaucer but a pretty decent one of the part of the Iliad it’s concerned with.

[butchhamlet]

more thoughts from the imaginary production of hamlet i am carefully crafting in my mind palace:

to be or not to be is a weird speech, right? hamlet talks about dying like the afterlife is something uncertain and unfixed and about suicide as potentially courageous, even though we know from act one that 1. he curses the fact that suicide is a sin and 2. THERE IS A GHOST. HE SAW A GHOST. PEOPLE DO INDEED RETURN FROM THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. i've seen academics say (in the endnotes of the folger edition but also in the lockdown shakespeare podcast series on the speech) that you can easily read it as more philosophical debate than active breakdown, a "dispassionate mental exercise." you don't HAVE to read or perform it that way, but you could.

MORE than that, though: on a performance level, it is scary as all hell. because it's such a famous and iconic speech that it’s kind of transcended the context of the already iconic play called hamlet. everybody knows at least the concept of to be or not to be, even if they can't recite it or explain it. it's Thee Speech. how the fuck are you supposed to perform a speech with that concentration of accumulated historical and literary weight? how do you even sound natural doing it?

so. rather than duck away from that, i would love to see a 3.1 where hamlet becomes aware that claudius and polonius are eavesdropping (maybe ophelia discreetly signals as such), and hamlet decides, okay, fuck it, if they want a madman, i’m going to Act The Role Of Hamlet. because he knows what a revenge tragedy is like, and he knows the type of thing they expect from him. so he starts doing to be or not to be not just as a logical proof, but specifically like a mediocre shakespearean actor. i'm talking reading from a paperback Hamlet, speechifying in the I'm Reciting Shakespeare Now voice. i'm talking “high school student doing a stiff audition and leaning way too hard on the iambic pentameter” vibe. sure, okay, have a madman.

except. well. um. however it fits into the rest of the play, to be or not to be still has words, innit? it's still asking a question and the question is Should I Kill Myself. and even if you're just going through the motions, you're going to think a little about the words you're saying. and, uh, actually, maybe there is a point there? he can do his self-consciously melodramatic thing, but as the speech goes on, the question he's asking becomes more and more genuine. it starts "haha look at me i'm Being Hamlet," but somewhere in the middle it creeps over to a real begging of the question, from ophelia or the audience: why do we keep doing this? what if it just hurts from now until forever? and the mask starts to slip, and the constructed madness starts to collapse into despair, and when he hits "lose the name of action" he's out of momentum. there's no more facade. what the fuck is he supposed to do now?

[butchhamlet]

YouTube feels so completely deprived of good shakespeare studies videos when I search, are there any youtubers or videos you've seen that come to mind??

i fear that i do not watch a lot of youtube because i have the audiovisual attention span of a fucking fruit fly </3 but i am opening this question up to my followers!

[butchhamlet]

Happy disability pride month Im chronically ill my sister is disabled and we need 1k by the end of the week for our survival fund pls share this if u can

Kofi and paypal @/ninandrej

[butchhamlet]

hello max butchhamlet from tumblr dot com i am sooo certain that the answer to this question is somewhere on your blog already and so i apologize but i have so far come up empty handed and so i would like to ask!: do you have any favorite reads on shakespeare (or hamlet specifically?) i have a semi casual semi academic interest in Thinking More About Those Plays but im extremely unsure where to start poking around !!

i will admit i'm pretty basic and find almost all of my secondary sources in the "further reading" lists at the back of the folger shakespeare library editions of the plays lmfao. but you can find said lists online for free! this is the hamlet one! here is an ask i answered about hamlet resources once (not especially helpfully, but there are some links in there), and here is my general list of favorite free online shakespeare articles!

other online resources include: the lockdown shakespeare podcast about to be or not to be (diving deep into that speech and its context and legacy); the this shakespeare is gay podcast (ostensibly explaining how each shakespeare play is gay, but the analysis goes way deeper than that pitch makes it sound), and @noshitshakespeare, who i don't think? is active anymore? but whose archives are absolutely fantastic.

as for books: i'm currently in the middle of both dr. emma smith's This Is Shakespeare and dr. marjorie garber's Shakespeare After All and really really enjoying both--garber's is more academic and has an essay on each play, while smith sort of goes through the greatest hits and seems slightly more directed at laypeople, but both are really clever and keep saying things that make me giggle and kick my feet and so forth. (smith's hamlet chapter is really good. she also has lectures up online for free which cover most of the same ground as her book if you prefer audio!)

...most of the rest of my academic readings about shakespeare are about the roman plays. due to the 4-year haunting i experienced that culminated in the cleopatra thesis. but for the record my favorites are

Roman Shakespeare by Coppélia Kahn (about masculinity and gender constructs in the roman plays)

The Common Liar by Janet Adelman (one of the seminal texts on a&c)

Men in Women's Clothing by Laura Levine (about theater, arguments against theater, and the good old "ohhh god all our men are disintegrating into women" panic)

Notorious Identity by Linda Charnes (on shakespeare's use of mythological/historical figures who were already famous and how his plays deal with fame; this one is the densest on this list but it does fuck hard)

i am also reading harold bloom's book but don't do that.

[butchhamlet]

okay i know i’m Back On My Bullshit but hear me out: found footage macbeth