Mariam-Much Ado About Nothing ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing nearly tumbled me off of the Shakespeare wagon. I almost tapped out. I almost thought I hallucinated that I liked the last couple of Shakespeare's. It was a rough two hours. 

But backing up. 

Easy, breezy listen. The internet told me if I couldn't find a Folger audio then to try Arkangel and it was a good recommendation.  It's not the funniest thing I've ever read, but it was good. I had NO idea why Don Jon, the bastard prince was ruining innocents' marriages except *villainy* but no matter. Being illegitimate seems to be motivational enough in Shakespeare. The comedy of the watchmen and the constable went totally over my head too. But I laughed out loud in the scene where Benedick overhears his friends saying that Beatrice loves him and his great conversion from adamant bachelor to deciding "the world must be peopled." Such a humanitarian, that Benedick. I give the audio a 3 stars.

No Great Courses lecture for this one. 

We decided to go with the Joss Whedon one. 2 stars. I was bored and I watched it in 20 minute increments. Here are my criticisms as best as I remember it. Black and white film for no reason that I could tell. The delivery was flat and one-dimensional. (I didn't understand this until I watched the Branagh version.) 

Beatrice was man-hating at all times including at the most inappropriate times. She didn't even make it sound like she was joking. Couldn't stand her, to be honest. 

Claudio, a giant red flag. He was incredibly insecure and expressed all of those insecurities as anger. So unattractive. 

Nathan Fillion as Dogberry was the best character by far. The rest of the characters felt like they'd were trying to make an Elizabethan social setting relate to modern times and failing. Nathan Fillion made it feel like an inept cop is a timeless joke. 

The "Remember, I am an ass" running joke was great. 

Missy recommended I watch the Branagh. I was not enthusiastic but I decided to give it a try. It was wonderful. 4 stars.

Emma Thompson as Beatrice made her much more likeable. She was deprecating enough that when she said all of those man-hating things, you knew she meant it half as a joke and half that joke was pointed at herself. 

Claudio was insecure but he expressed it not only as anger but as hurt and a fair amount of giving up. There was anger too but it was clear that Don Jon worked him up into it. 

The romance between Beatrice and Benedick was sweet and not just slapstick as in the Whedon. When they made their speeches after discovering the other "loved" them, you felt that all their bravado around singlehood had been hiding a vulnerability about being loved. 

Also great cast. Young Denzel Washington!

Keanu Reeves, as his brother! I still do not know why Don Jon was up in arms against his brother, but Keanu Reeves convinced me that whatever it was, it deserved cold fury.

I had several discussions with Missy about servants and hierarchy, the historical accuracy of the costumes (fairly accurate it seems), but I'll share the one about false accusations here. I was most indignant after watching both movies at how easily Claudio and Don Pedro were able to falsely accuse Hero and then suffer no consequences.

Perhaps it is my Muslim understanding, but in Islamic law, the amount of evidence required to bring a charge of sexual immorality is so massive, and the consequences for a false or unprovable accusation so severe, that it is actually meant to discourage making such accusations even if you are correct--much less willy nilly making false accusations in a public setting and then reciting a poem in atonement when you're wrong. 

Missy reminded me of the women as chattel in Shakespeare's time. It was however, she mentioned a litigious time. People sued a lot, even women, but a man had to do it on behalf of a woman and Hero's dad who seemed a little suspicious of his own wife's fidelity and immediately believed the worst of his daughter, was clearly not the man to do so.

My modern sensibilities want to believe that Shakespeare was pointing out social wrongs, but Missy corrected me. No, this was normal back then and people would have just found it funny, maybe sweet.

Next: Romeo and Juliet. We are choosing between Zeffirelli:

And a modern version with guns and Leonardo DiCaprio:

I, of course know what the story is about. Angsty teenagers led to extremes because of bad decisions made by the adults. I imagine it was the Titanic of Shakespeare's time. 

 

Missy - Suplemental - Dance

 

I belong to a gamer/maker club here in Frederick. During the cooler seasons of the year they often offer SCA adjacent dance lessons. 

Often those lessons are tied to an end goal of performance at a party. This year for our club Halloween party we are doing A Midsummers Nights Dream as our theme. 

So here we are with a bonus Shakespeare topic: Shakespearean dance. 

I am delighted. I am also not a dancer but I would love to be. I’m going to add a few suplemental entries over the next 6 weeks as I try out new Elizabethan and medieval dances. Some of these, and very likely most of these, were danced during the time of Shakespeare, and were danced by him and his troop and their audiences.

Last night we learned variations on the Bransle (Branle) that mostly looked like a conga line and then a conga line that got twisted up. The pronunciation of Branle is basically the same as brawl.

Here is a video from YouTube of people doing it right.

This was a fantastic ice breaker dance as mostly we shuffled and at the most rousing points we were all laughing hard and pulling each other about. 

Branle is a French origin dance popular from the early 1500s through the 1700s. This one is both Shakespeare  period appropriate and easy. 

After a break for fresh bread and butter (and lots of drinks) we moved on to our 2nd dance of the evening. 

This one, called the Maltese Bransle in the SCA, and also known as the Schiarazula Marazula was fun and a little violent.

I’ve seen a ton of different versions of this one on YouTube today and they all have circle and snap and clap but ours also had spectacular, establish dominance on each others feet, stomping!

Among its most notable aspects, this dance, first recorded in Italy the 1570s,  was recorded by the inquisition as being confused with witches summoning rituals, and the next best anecdote was of the whole thing being a post crusades version of belly dancing.

So there we have it for night one of Shakespeare oriented dancing.

Here we are in all our uncoordinated but enthusiastic glory.

Special thanks to The Haven Guys for the pics and video from last night!

Missy - Much Ado or A complicated number of stars

 

Our guide selected this one and I agreed right up until I saw it again and decided that I wanted to watch the Branagh even more. So I’m going to do a double review here. 

They are both fun and we have landed into the light fluffy Elizabethan plays with a light and fluffy plop. 

The Whedon is famous for being filmed in 12 days as a sort of offshoot project after one of his Avengers films was wrapped. It was shot at his house with his friends and he and his family did the soundtrack.

I used to be a massive fan of Whedon. I’m the right age for OG Buffy (even the movie before the show) and the right type of consumer for Firefly and the Avengers, I even loved Dollhouse.

I remember being thrilled when this one came out because Whedon plus Shakespeare!

But then…

Per Wikipedia: In July 2020, Justice League actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of showing "gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable" behavior toward the cast and crew of the film,[221] going so far as to invite Whedon to sue him for slander if he believed the allegations were untrue.[222]

And then: Jose Molina, a writer on Firefly, also spoke out against Whedon's behavior saying that "casually cruel" was a "perfect" description and that "He thought being mean was funny. Making female writers cry during a notes session was especially hysterical. He actually liked to boast about the time he made one writer cry twice in one meeting

And then the entire Charisma Carpenter thing.

It got to be too much. I couldn’t watch his stuff and not think about all of that. This is the first time I’ve watched this Much Ado since then and it’s downgraded the whole thing to 3.5 stars.

This isn’t entirely fair, nothing in the movie has changed.

I love the black and white, I love his character consolidation choices, I love the Beatrice and like the Benedict. I think the mafia spin is fun and love the small feel.

Special shout out to Fran Kranz’s Claudio who seemed just young enough and just dumb enough to remain likable despite his many dick moves.

I wish Whedon was a better person so that I could love his stuff wholeheartedly as I once did.

On to the Branagh.

Let me say here that I love Keanu Reeves. I love him and I feel like he was acting in an entirely different movie from the whole rest of the cast here.

QQ

BUT beyond that weirdness, this is a wonderful version. There is so much life and energy and lightness in this film that I can, easily, have it on as soothing cheering background for my life.

Emma Thompson is radiant as Beatrice and Branagh the perfect witty ass that Benedict needs.

Makes me want to watch Dead Again.

I think nearly every performance is perfect. This is how light fluffy Elizabethan should be.

A special aside for the Keaton/Fillion Dogberry parts. The clown-show that the constable storyline requires is so far outside of the mood of the rest of the play that it could feel like a failing or at least a pitfall. I’ve never seen it played as anything other than slapstick. I don’t think it could work any other way.

Keaton can be so super schtick and Fillion so thick that they just breeze through it. In both movies I have my favorites for every part, but not for Dogberry. They are both just great!

Much Ado About Nothing - 4.5 stars

Mom score - 0 no moms

 

Mariam-King Lear ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I was really not looking forward to King Lear. In fact, I'm not really looking forward to any of the tragedies, because well...they're tragic. And yet, they're so undeniably compelling when you begin to watch...

I started off this one with the audiobook again. It turns out Folger Shakespeare Library has not dramatized all of the plays into audiobooks. I hope they change this because Hamlet's audiobook was nearly as good as watching it. So instead, I listened to the version in which Geoffrey Giuliano, Emmy Award nominee played King Lear.

It was terrible. If he read his part well, which I suspect he did, it did not overcome the fact that almost everyone else read their parts in a deadpan. I had only a very rough idea of the story by the end, very rough. 

I will say Shakespeare did play a role in this. Edgar and Edmund. Good and bad brother. Oh, alliteration! There's at least three people spouting literal nonsense, sometimes all at once: The Fool, Tom O' Bedlam who it turns out isn't even another character, but Edgar pretending to be insane, and then King Lear, actually going mad. There's too many people giving weird snail metaphors and talking to foot stools for it to make sense until you see it. I think Tom O' Bedlam was a bit generous when he blessed King Lear's "five wits."

I also listened to the Great Courses and the lecture that stood out to me the most was about love. How love may be enough but it may not overcome. 

We watched the Anthony Hopkins version which takes place in a militarized modern version of Britain. The Hopkins casting had me leery. He gives me creepy vibes because of Hannibal. But no, he didn't play it like Hannibal speaking Old English.

By the way, I again watched this movie on a small screen and mostly in daylight. What stuck out to me was how dark they made the lighting and then it got progressively darker until it was sepia and then almost black and white. 

The character I liked most was Edgar played by Andrew Scott. I silently cheered when I saw him first because I knew he'd do a good job. Also it was easy to like him. He wasn't complex, but he was sincerely good. The kind of character I tend to gravitate to like Horatio in Hamlet. He did an amazing job of playing mad while showing his real emotions. He had the only scene that made me laugh when he showed up in a dress and King Lear says compassionately, madman to madman, I know you think you're wearing Persian attire, but let's get you something else to wear. He had another great scene in which Lear thinks dogs are barking at him and Edgar, fake madman to madman, pretends to shoo them. It was a little funny, but a little touching.

A couple of points of discussion. This is only my second play of Shakespeare's and I am struck by how male his worlds are. And I don't mean that he is misogynist but rather this is a very male perspective we get. It's how I feel when reading male authors where the world feels just a bit unfamiliar, sometimes uncomfortable. Also, sometimes I can tell that certain scenes were just written for men to enjoy. When the soldiers were whooping and howling during the last fight scene, I thought I know a man or two that would love this movie if they didn't know it was Shakespeare. 

The way the movie was made, it gave some very strong interpretations or context to certain ambiguities. Goneril possibly was abused by her father. Both Goneril and Regan started off more just annoyed at having to take care of an older parent and his one hundred guests rather than power hunger, scheming, and conniving. I mean it did quickly descend into a power grab. And Lear's madness as senility rather than that ambiguous "madness" that I discussed in my last post. 

Here I am discussing madness again, but I thought it was interesting that Edmund and Lear had parallel egos that were leading them down the paths of their destructions. Lear's ego was almost immediately identified as madness and yet Edmund's wasn't. Why, so? Ultimately, both resulted in poor decisions that led to their deaths. In a way, I am presenting the opposite of what I did in Hamlet. There I said that I needed a clear pathology to explain to me someone's madness. But here, I wonder if there isn't a little madness in ego, vengeance, fragility, jealousy, even humor. The line can sometimes become fine between certifiable and not. 

Oh, Missy and I had another discussion about how media, especially government sponsored, is propaganda. I do wonder, you think old James told Shakespeare to write a play in which everyone dies if the king steps down, or Shakespeare took a hint? *takes notes for my future writing aspirations in these interesting times*

The movie lies heavily on me. I had planned on watching Ran, a Japanese version of King Lear, that Missy said was one of the best movies ever made (!!) but I think perhaps, I cannot take that right now. Since I've finished the movie, I've been seeking out my parents and dawdling aimlessly in their vicinity to some odd looks from them.

I've been surprisingly finding a lot of relatability in Shakespeare. A friend shares some crazy in-law story and I think "Gertrude would have done that".  The line I've been thinking about in Lear is Edgar's last line:

"The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, and not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long."

Maybe I'm not taking his exact meaning from it, but close enough. 

Well after that monster, we're on to Much Ado About Nothing. Missy and I could do with a comedy. 

We have not chosen which one yet, but our options are:

or:

By these trailers, I assume these two are actually dying to get together. Give me climbing ivy and romantic tension. I'm ready. 

Missy - King Lear ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

I think I’m glad we did Lear so early. There are a few plays that hurt my feelings enough that I don’t watch them, and this is one. 

King Lear is a morality play done by a nihilist. No one (Edgar notwithstanding) is lovable. Cordelia is right and Kent is loyal but the ugly humanity and worser natures on display in this story make it hard to swallow. 

That being said: this is the best Lear I’ve ever seen and I’m giving it 5 stars. 

I’m more than mildly surprised by that score but as a production it’s just about perfect. 

The casting, settings, sound design and cinematography are outstanding. 

Every delivery is believable, comprehensible, and sincere.

I was talking to my daughter about why I don’t like watching Lear and found myself describing him as both a diva and a little bitch. She remarked that I’d just sworn more than she had ever heard at one time. That is not quite, but nearly, true.

The truth is of course that the bleakness and cruelty in Lear makes me uncomfortable and I prefer to be comfortable in my leisure time.

The Hopkins decision, or possibly director Richard Eyre’s decision, to put Lear measurably into dementia or with one foot solidly in the land of senility, makes me much more comfortable.

All the other King Lear’s (plays and stories) told during Shakespeare’s  time have happy endings. I certainly sympathize with the impulse. Lear’s last line about looking at Cordelia’s lips, as if she might still be breathing, allows for that hard to smother hope. It’s not a happy play though, and it’s easier to imagine that he is still out of his mind than that she somehow survived her own assassination. 

Special shout out here to Edmund (John MacMillan) for making a potentially cartoon villain completely buyable. I love how much is shortcutted here by portraying the bastard son as nonwhite. The culturally saturated offhand dismissal of a bastard son in Shakespeares time and the casual racism of our own having a powerful overlap.

He is pissed off and vengeful for a lifetime of abuse and disregard as his subtext works exactly. 

Plus I’m not familiar with Macmillan’s work but anyone who can hold their own with Hopkins and Thompson in the room is top notch. That dude has chops!

I’m going to try to watch some of his stuff.

I am also going to watch RAN (the Kurosawa Lear adaptation) and maybe do a supplemental blog post here.

King Lear - 5 stars for production and decision making

Mom score - 0 for no moms at all

Mariam-Hamlet ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I began Hamlet by listening to the Folger audio dramatization and it was a very good introduction. I understood almost all of it and prior to this, I wouldn't have said that Shakespeare is very clear to me. It's the line breaks of the iambic pentameter more than the language that gets me. Much of it is Yoda speak which I can decipher if I could get over the pause in my head when the line breaks.

I listened to the Great Courses next which I also enjoyed more than I'd imagined. I was introduced to them on DVD back in the ye olde days of high school and they were a snooze fest back then. The lectures break down a few themes and theories of each play and I felt engaged by all of it. 

The movie was best of all, of course. It felt really blast of the past, 90s historical action movie. 

The strongest character for me was Gertrude even though I barely noticed her in the text. She doesn't have many lines so it's up to the actor to fill in the blanks and she did really well, in that I really disliked her. She's one of those women who uses flirtation as her sole power including on her son and then is sTuNnEd when there are repercussions. Let's be honest, if Ophelia hadn't been driven mad by her father's death, Gertrude would have taken her there anyway, by virtue of MIL trauma. If a rishta with Hamlet's mom ever came along, I'd have rejected him just because the mom's more toxic than whatever that pearl thingie the king put in her drink was. If she was alive today, Madison Humphrey would make a parody of her. 

By the way, I watched this on a small screen with the lights on, because I wasn't sure how graphic it was going to be or if there were going to be any jump scares. It was alright. 

Here are Thing 1 and Thing 2. I found them amusing for the reason that they really were only just this side of Dumb and Dumber and are constantly aghast by the consequences of their choices. To their fatal end, unfortunately. 

Horatio did really well emoting wholesome, good guy without saying a word. I'm not even sure he said anything after the first scene with the ghost. 

Ugh, Ophelia. I did want to pathologize her, because it just doesn't make SENSE. One does not turn barking mad overnight! I did recognize it as a contemporary obsession with pathologizing psychology and I think I have something to think about around this impulse. But Missy and I had some good conversations around lead in wine, nervous breakdowns, mental fragility, and just pure plot device. For that time, perhaps such a quick descent into insanity was not as farfetched as modern science as well as modern understanding of what insanity is, makes it to be today. I am aware there is more madness in Shakespeare ahead, but I think I understand its place a lot better now. 

Hamlet...good. No better, no worse than I'd hoped him to be. He made these faces that made me laugh but probably weren't supposed to. He also made me laugh when he wanted me to. The movie demonstrated to me what I'd missed in the audio: the soliloquies are a little like what we call info-dumping in books now. They're really good pieces of prose though and I enjoyed them more in the audio as a result. I was taken aback to realize that the whole "To be or not to be" speech is a contemplation of suicide. 

 A question Missy answered for me was why iambic pentameter? I finally got around to that question because I hadn't understood until now that Shakespeare was meant on some level for the masses. If it was for very learned people as it felt due to how much it is studied now, I would assume they like the linguistic challenge. But the average person would not care about that. So it turns out, it was a fad back then. The best example Missy gave was how in the early 2000s, songs with a female pop singer and a male rapper were popular. Also, all the best playwrights did it and so Shakespeare did too. 

 It was good entertainment. I can see how it would have been the best entertainment before we had special effects, sewing machines, and access to all media at our fingertips. I think at the very least I shall continue to listen to the audio, the Great Lectures where available and watch the movie, with accessories thrown in. Thug lectures have been brought to my attention. 

We go to pre-Christian Britain next where I hear someone's eyes are to be plucked. *shudders*  

(Ha! Just read Missy's Hamlet post and we ARE looking forward to King Lear, aren't we?)

Score: 4

Next: King Lear

Missy - Hamlet ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 It’s been a minute since I watched the Gibson Hamlet. When I first saw this movie, in a theater, the year was 1990 and I was in my youth (high school). I LOVED it. It was the first Shakespeare that made me laugh and made me mad and it had a great sword fight. 

After I’d seen it I thought of myself as a Shakespeare fan. I’d seen Shakespeare plays before, and because of my King James Bible-centric education, and church going, I didn’t have nearly the barrier to entry that I find most people struggle with. 

I’ve seen it a few times but not again since my kids were born. That’s 16 plus years absence and a world of experience. 

I’m happy to report that I’m still into this movie. I don’t love it the way I did but I enjoyed it and am happy to have revisited it. I have rated it 4 stars. 

I’d forgotten just how much the Zeffirelli leaned into the Freudian interpretation of the play. I don’t find myself as compelled by that reading but I certainly see where it comes from.

The newest thing for me had to do with Gertrude. In the final everybody-dies-part of the play I teared up a little at the farewell between mother and son. 

I haven’t thought much about Shakespearean mothers before. His plays tend to be very father-daughter. He himself being father to daughters levins these relationships I imagine, but me, I’m a mom.

I’m going to score the Shakespearean moms in this blog. So I’ll start with Gertrude. I find Gertrude to be a very meh mom. She clearly cares tremendously for her son but can’t seem to keep her head straight enough to be helpful to him or even reasonable. I feel like if your husband, the king, dies unexpectedly the next move is to get your fully adult offspring onto the throne. Her move was to get into a new relationship and pawn off responsibility. Then not let her son leave to deal with his obvious angst, which he was trying to do. Self centered and/or dumb Gertrude gets a C+. When it was obvious, she tried to do the right thing, but she sure wasn’t looking for the right thing to do.

Anyway…

While watching bits of Hamlet this week, in fits and starts, (life/kids/work/etc)  I also read the Bill Bryson Shakespeare book. A Fantastic book! I’m such a fan of Bryson.

And I’ve started listening to a Great Courses Lecture that I’ve enjoyed in the past. It is  called  William Shakespeare: Comedies,Histories, and Tragedies, I assume named after the First Folio. 

I’m a massive fan of the Great Courses and this one has some nice reflections broken down play by play that are going to be helpful, I hope, in organizing my thoughts. 

Here are my thoughts therefore. 

Discussing the characters and their motivations with Mariam I am stuck by the contemporary desire to pathologize. I find remarkable also how great Shakespeare was at comic relief. 

Comic relief was a new or at least relatively new literary technique in the theater and he was just so good at it. Hamlets asides and 4th wall breaking, snide jibes, and backtalk land with fantastic punch to my modern ear. 

I enjoy the dark medieval feel of the Zeffirelli setting and almost entirely agree with his editing. I like the casting, particularly the Close as ditzy blonde Gertrude and the action hero that was Gibson of that era.  I found the performances rewarding and human. 

I think there isn’t much to be done with Ophelia. She either works as mad or as pre mad but I’ve not seen a convincing version of her as both. I think Bonnam Carter playing her off as fragile and innocent is as good a choice as can be made but she really shines as a mad giver of Rue. 

A special shout out here to Nathaniel Parker as Laertes. I remember being impressed by him each time I’ve seen this Hamlet and was again this time. It’s a tricky part to play (which one isn’t with Hamlet?!) but he made someone who could have been mere plot device or incomprehensible waffler into an appealing and sympathetic figure. 

I’m running through Shakespeare as pure audience for this project and had a solid enjoyable audience experience with this one. 

Hamlet - 4 star for enjoyability and setting

Mom score - Gertrude C+ mom for truly loving her son but also for being deleteriously oblivious. 

 

Onward to Lear. 

Dread

Missy - Heck yeah Shakespeare or All the Worlds a Stage

 Despite Mariam’s generous description I am entirely an enthusiast and not a scholar. Case in point, our first selection provides ample evidence of the exceptions to my generalizations, that Elizabethan plays are light and fluffy. 

The list that we are following starts with Hamlet. Hamlet is anything but light and fluffy and it is Elizabethan. 

This monster of a play (clocking in at over 4 hours its Shakespeare's longest) is the uber Burbage, carpet chewing, philosophically drenched, power house that survived, and world toured, and kept on giving, up to this very day. 

Everyone gets a chance to see Hamlet if they are at all Shakespeare inclined and even, frequently, if they aren’t. It’s one of the plays you are likely to be assigned if you take a theater class in high school or college, it’s right up there with Much Ado. Its also a school and community theater staple. I've seen some very good and some really should have skipped it versions.

I love Hamlet and our guide must too as it’s first on his list. 

However, he has selected the Branagh Hamlet and that opulent spectacle really is  the FULL 4 hour chonky boi. 

Here is the Branagh trailer.

I think it’s too much for a diving off point, though I have recommended to Mariam that if she likes the Zeffirelli/ Gibson version (my recommended starter Hamlet) she should go back and watch the Branagh. 

The Hamlet Wikipedia article puts our fist selection in some context: “ In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as "sensual rather than cerebral",^[256] cast Mel Gibson—then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies—in the title role of his 1990 version; Glenn Close—then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction—played Gertrude, and Paul Scofield played Hamlet's father.^[257] “

I like this version, and I think it will give us an introduction to the plays as blockbusters rather than an intellectual exercises  

We are going to be audiences and not analyzers here. I think that people tend to forget or maybe gloss

over the fact that Shakespeare is fun, that his work has lasted not merely for his stunning command of 

the language but because his characters speak to us. 

Here is the Zeffirelli trailer (you will see quite a difference in mood).

I’m super excited about this project. I’ve roped some of my family into watching with me and I can’t wait to get into that headspace of Shakespearean language and wit. 

Onward to Denmark. 

Mariam-In which we decide to watch all of Shakespeare's plays on film

Every year, the night summer turns to fall, I feel the nostalgia of school days, walking to school crunching leaves in a freshly ironed uniform carrying new crayons and crisp notebooks in my backpack. The irony of this nostalgia is that I am actually in school this year. But the truth is, underneath a thick layer of science armor, I have a humanities core and I had a yearning for pens, lined paper, and literature.

In an entirely unrelated event, I happened to watch a performance of The Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival in Frederick this year and as I was telling Missy all about it, she had the greatest idea. Let's watch all the plays on film, together!

For treating back-to-school nostalgia, it was perfect.

We are a good pair. Missy is actually an informal Shakespeare scholar and I am easily excitable and know how to read.

We went back and forth on the order in which to read them then decided against chronological order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Shakespeare%27s_plays) because that either starts with Titus (gory according to Missy) or the Henrys (intimidating, suspiciously boring sounding according to me).

We have decided to go roughly with this guy's suggestions: https://benjaminmcevoy.com/read-complete-works-shakespeare-year-recommended-reading-order/ but will try to keep the Elizabethan and Jacobean ones sort of together. 

There's my first Shakespeare lesson by Missy. Shakespeare worked for and during two monarchs' time. The first was Elizabeth who lived almost forever (not to be confused with the recent Elizabeth that also lived almost forever) and liked comedies and romances. The second was James, her heir and nephew who was paranoid and morose and an altogether gloomy sounding man. He's the one Shakespeare wrote all the tragedies for. HIS era is called Jacobean. Why, those of you like me who have no European culture, may ask? Because Jacobus is Latin for James. They might footnote things like that when they're teaching us in school. I'd always wondered who the Jacob dude was and I had vaguely concluded that a Jacob was some type of a Christian. 

Today, Missy and I went to Wonder Book and searched for Arden versions of Shakespeare, the Riverside collection, and the Asimov commentary. I came away with the Asimov, a Shakespeare biography and as many Folger's as I could find. Missy placed some orders. 

(I am losing my millennial zeal with age. There are not many pictures of this occasion but it was a wonderful afternoon. We had falafel and shawarma.)

We shall begin with Mel Gibson's Hamlet. 

By the way, it turns out that Bollywood is a little obsessed with Shakespeare. The Bollywood adaptation of Hamlet is called Haider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haider_(film). 

And we're off to Denmark where it seems something is rotten.