A lot of people here don’t understand that ‘Shakespeare created beautiful and profound art’ and ‘Shakespeare made a lot of dick jokes’ aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s the thing about Shakespeare and why he’s so lasting: we get both worlds together. We’re captivated by the language, moved by the plights of complex characters…and we get a good laugh out of the rude humour. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
some fun facts about the production of hamlet i’m in right now:
the ghost never appears physically
ghost scenes take place in complete darkness, lit only by the guards’ flashlights
rosencrantz and guildenstern’s first entrance involves a tango choreographed to beyoncé’s “crazy in love”
other transition music includes “applause” by lady gaga, “loveless” by lorde, “only angel” by harry styles, and “a little party never killed nobody”
gertrude is either drunk or hungover for the entire play
when polonius encounters hamlet to find the cause of his madness, hamlet is reading a copy of “infinite jest”
rosencrantz and guildenstern try to seduce hamlet into a threesome
they also try to seduce claudius
at intermission laertes goes onstage to practice his swordplay and flirt with the audience members in french. osric watches him from behind the curtain and takes notes
the pirates who deliver letters to horatio are dressed in trench coats, sunglasses, and fedoras
fortinbras is a thirteen-year-old boy
and finally:
hamlet doesn’t give the “to be or not to be” speech. horatio does. at the end of the play. over hamlet’s body
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 do know 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
Not just an actual bear. A polar bear cub.
Imagine a fully grown man running offstage to be “killed” by a baby polar bear.
I want to see the specific interests of the Shakespeare fandom! Mine are Julius Caesar, Richard III, and weirdly, my absolute favorite is Macbeth, but I hardly ever post about it. Maybe it’s because I’ve never directed it, and I have the other two. I also love Twelfth Night.
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