ophelia by alexander cabanel; ophelia by friedrich wilhelm theodor heyser; ophelia by jean baptiste bertrand; detail from ophelia by john everett millais
im tired of minimalist shakespeare productions. I want maximalist shakespeare productions. I wanna see a truly fucking bonkers number of props, maybe more than are strictly necessary, and I want them all to be Large and Ornate to the point of tacky.
This coming Saturday is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death! Not sure what Shakespeare play you should see or read to commemorate the occasion? No worries! I’ve put together a little flowchart to help you make up your mind.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we doknow why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
a glooming peace this morning with it brings, the sun for sorrow will not show his head. go hence to have more talk of these sad things; some will be pardoned, and some punishèd: for never was a story of more woe than this of juliet and her romeo.
On April 5, 1973, Vincent Price ushered us into the… “Theatre of Blood!” This coal-black comedy features priceless Vincent as a ham who likes his critics well-cooked! Featuring a cast of distinguished British actors, Price picks ‘em off with methods ripped straight from the plays of Shakespeare. Witty, wild, and wicked, “Theatre of Blood” is Bard brutality at its barbaric best! The SLAY’s the thing!
The best joke ever translated into Spanish is the translation of “Much Ado About Nothing” by Shakespeare
Because in Spanish, the title is Mucho ruido y pocas nueces
This translation excellently preserves the double entendre in the English. In English, “Much ado about nothing” on the surface means what you’d expect, “making a big deal out of nothing”. But in Shakespeare’s time, “nothing” was slang for female genitals… the idea being they had “nothing” there.
So the English double entendre is that it could mean “a lot of fuss about nothing important” or “a lot of fuss about/over women”
The Spanish translation is mucho ruido y pocas nueces which translates literally as “a lot of noise and few nuts”. The general meaning would be implied as “you’re trying to get the nuts to fall off the tree so you hit it a lot”, aka “a lot of effort and little reward” which captures the first meaning.
And of course, “a lot of noise and no nuts” has dual meanings in Spanish. Because la nuez could be “nut” (specifically “walnut”), or also testicle, AND la nuez could also mean “Adam’s apple”
In that case it’s, “a lot of noise and no nuts” or “a lot of noise and no Adam’s apples”, referring to women.
And so both meanings of the joke get translated pretty equally well
[a passage from a book. underlined portions indicated in bold, italics preserved. ID: …he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son’ but more along the lines of ‘See you in hell, punk.’ end ID.]
