Adaptations and Parodies of Shakespeare

Theatre Folk has an actual store where you can purchase scripts of plays adapted from Shakespeare. Titles include “Drop Dead, Juliet”, “Much Ado About High School”, “Mmmmbeth”, and other more traditional adaptations (i..e for audience and time). All plays are safe for high school production, and seem to offer free sample pages. Cool.

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Shakespeare Parodies

I’m surprised I’d missed Shakespeare Parodies until now, given the obvious URL. It’s cute. It pains me that he has a typo in the title of the homepage, though (“colection”). Here’s how my favorite scene from Hamlet gets lambasted:

HAMLET
Now, Mother, what’s the matter?

QUEEN
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

HAMLET
Mother, thou hast my father much offended.

QUEEN
Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue

HAMLET
Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
And thou hast my father much offended!

QUEEN
Have you forgotten who I am?

HAMLET
No! You are the Queen, your husband’s
brother’s wife; and — would it were not so —
you are my mother! And thou hast my father
much offended! Let’s see you top that!

QUEEN
I don’t understand a word you’re saying.

Technorati Tags: shakespeare parody hamlet

I’m Back

Hi Everybody,

Sorry I haven’t been around — just took a week vacation with the family, and had absolutely no net access (believe me, I tried. Visions of me wandering through every corner of our rented house on the lake, laptop in hand, praying, hitting “Refresh wireless network list”, taking one step to the left, and repeating).

Anyway, I’ve caught up on my feeds so hopefully I’ll have a bunch of stuff to post. Here’s a random one — while watching Beauty and the Beast with the kids, Gaston (the bad guy) is singing something, I think the “Kill the Beast” song, and suddenly I hear, “Light your torch, Mount your horse, screw your courage to the sticking place…”

I lift my head. “Huh,” I say to the room in general. “Shakespeare. Macbeth.”

Nobody cared. But I figured somebody reading my blog would :).

Technorati Tags: shakespeare macbeth disney

Hamlet, by Shel Silverstein

It never fails to amaze me what new things I find in my daily trolling for all things Shakespeare.  Did you know that Shel Silverstein did a version of Hamlet for Playboy magazine? Warning, this is not a children’s story. It’s a bit more adult, as you can guess by the publishing credit:

Hamlet stabs Laertes, and Laertes stabs him.
Then Hamlet turns around and stabs his uncle, too,
While the queen drinks some poison the king had brewed.
So she dies, he dies, Hamlet dies, Laertes dies
On top of where Ophelia lies,
Right next to where Polonius died.
And before you can wink, blink or turn your head,
Chop-stab-slice — every motherfucker’s dead.