Atlanta Needs Money

Every year around this time, The Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta holds their fundraising drive.  This year they’re heading for $50,000 having been promised a matching gift that would bring them up to $100k.

The Tavern is very highly regarded for their “original practice” style, and we’ve spoken of them often here on the blog.  One of their staff, Ann, has been a regular contributor in the past (though I’m not sure if she’s still hanging out with us).  If you’ve got some bucks to donate and want to support Shakespeare, Atlanta can certainly put your generosity to good use.

New Merchandise Now Available!


Every time I showed my wife the t-shirts I was making she’d say, “I don’t like big stuff on the front. Why not make just a little Shakespeare up in the corner, like an emblem? And then put something big on the back if you want.”

Worth a shot.

I’ve added three new shirts, all in the same basic style – a white-on-dark image taken from the Chandos portrait that I use as my logo. The image really only works in this scheme – I’ve tried dark-on-light but it doesn’t look good. Please note that “Customize” button – all of these are available in all men’s and women’s styles and colors (just dark ones).

The difference between the three is in the text:

  • The image shown, with text ShakespeareGeek.com underneath.  This particular sample is on a red shirt, but that can be changed.
  • The same image (this time on a black shirt), with just “Shakespeare Geek”, no dotcom.
  • Image (shown on a dark blue shirt), with no text at all.

So there you have it. Hopefully my wife is right and people do like this more understated “small on the front” style.  Note that there is nothing at all on the back of these shirts.   Enjoy!

Chicken and Egg Shakespeare

This question has been explored by greater minds than my own, but let’s talk about the … universality? … of Shakespeare.

We know that modern audiences tend to appreciate a story with even the hint of a Shakespeare plot line : West Side Story.  Ten Things I Hate About You.  Lion King.   “Hey,” people tell each other, “Did you know that’s based on a Shakespeare story?”

Thing is, we also know that Shakespeare simply rewrote existing stories.

So if you remove Shakespeare’s words and retreat back to the story, where does the inherent value and appeal come from?  Do we like it because we associate it with Shakespeare and therefore lift it up more than we might? Or are we looking at the deeper story that predates Shakespeare, that caused even Shakespeare himself to say “Hey, that’s good, I should borrow that.”

Take Romeo and Juliet.  We know that Shakespeare rewrote that one.  He added characters and changed some stuff around.  So what if we staged the Romeo and Juliet story today, without those additions? Would it still work? And if it didn’t, would that be because it wasn’t as good a story until Shakespeare got to it? Or has the Shakespearean version become so ingrained in our brains that if we recognize it as “not Shakespeare” then it’s just not as good?

Where Are You On The Interpretation Spectrum?

OK, I’ve tried to write this post 4 times now and it never seems to get where I want it to go.  Let’s try again.

Whenever an interesting question comes up where Shakespeare didn’t necessarily make it clear what he meant, people start to split up.  Some folks dig into the text, and others move away from it and into pure conjecture.

So I’m imagining a line. On the far left is “perfect Shakespeare”.  As if we jumped in a time machine and travelled back in time 400+ years so that we could see, and thus mimic, exactly what Shakespeare meant and said and why he meant and said it.  Of course we’d have to actually go back and live there for a little while to get the right frame of reference, we couldn’t just pop in for a show, but you get the idea.

On the other hand is pure interpretation.  Or at least, pure in the sense that you’ve retained only the essence of the original, to the point where maybe “inspiration” is a better idea.  West Side Story comes to mind, or Lion King.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an interesting case, because on the one hand it’s entirely the imagination of Stoppard, but he’s weaved it beautifully into the original source material. 

So, where do you put yourself on that spectrum?  Would the time machine be interesting to you? Do you care at all about West Side Story sorts of production that have no actual Shakespeare content? What’s your opinion on each end?

I’m somewhere closer to the “inspiration” side than the time machine side.  I think that for Shakespeare to have remained relevant for this long, the important part has to lie more in the common core than in the details of what that specific audience would have known going into the show.  I do like source material. That’s where I draw the line.  If ya ain’t speaking lines that Shakespeare gave you, then have a nice day and go wait over there. I’ll enjoy you, but you don’t get to be in the same camp as those that use the source.  Make sense?  Take Shakespeare in Love.  Obviously, most of the lines in that movie are not in their original context.  Don’t care – they’re still good lines.

It’s not that I don’t like the lessons in Elizabethan history.  They’re … interesting.  But when the lesson becomes “To understand Shakespeare you have to understand the following,” I start to lose it.  I don’t *want* that to be true.  I want to be able to meet someone who’s never heard of Shakespeare and say “Watch this” and know that he can still come away seeing the genius.  You may understand it more if you study it, but that of course is true of everything.  When it’s presented as an obstacle to understanding, that’s when I camp myself on the side of the folks that don’t and possibly never will know or care about that stuff.  And then I go searching for as much of that core/essence that I can find, and share it with those folks.