podcasts

Review: Ye Try Guys Try Romeo and Juliet

| astronut1

I was excited from the beginning to hear that the Try guys were going to bring Shakespeare to YouTube in a way that was fun and accessible. My expectations were that they would make fun of the play with care; I was hoping that they wouldn’t mock Shakespeare, (or mock people who like Shakespeare). I was also hoping that they would critique the characters without outright mocking them and find ways to make the play connect to modern audiences. I think they achieved all those things and more!

Zach Kornfield, Eugene Yang, and Keith Habersberger known collectively as “The Try Guys” are a group of friends who seek out new experiences and share them with the world. They thrive on taking themselves out of their comfort zone and learning about the world through experiencing it firsthand in a funny, lighthearted way. As I said before, what could be more adventurous, daring, informative, and out of YouTube’s comfort zone than doing Shakespeare?

In a series of videos they explored Elizabethan clothing, stage combat, learning how to speak Shakespearean verse, and finally on August 10th, 2023, they performed “Romeo and Juliet” live on Youtube, with suggestions from the audience! With this post, I will discuss the evolution from these three videos, to the final show, which I got to see live on YouTube. I will discuss what I think worked, what didn’t, and how this production might influence future Shakespeare productions going forward!

Podcast About the SHow:

My Top Ten Moments:

Background on the Show

The original pitch for the play made it sound like a live YouTube event, but they made it even better by including a voting option where viewers could change some of the action and chose for instance, if they fought with swords or some other object, thus engaging the audience the whole time. This is what made this experience unique, (perhaps more than any other production), and I think in many ways this production could be an inspiration to educators and theater practitioners! My main critcism of the show is that, though it can be enjoyed by almost anybody, it is definitely not suitable for children, and nobody could get away with showing it in a classroom environment.

Costumes and Sets

The set for “Romeo and Juliet,” seems like an ordinary YouTube TV studio, in that it’s fairly small and it does not suggest any particular period. It kind of suggests somewhat of a dream-like environment; there are cardboard cut outs with some clouds, the lighting is warm with a few pink colors . Most of all it reminds me of a fractured fairytale more than classic tragedy, (which I suppose is clever in itself because it sets up that the Try Guys are going to fracture Shakespeare the same way people like the Muppets fractured fairy tales.

The costumes don’t seem as elaborate or historically accurate as the ones in the previous video, which is a shame because it would’ve been really nice to see the Try Guys walk, fight, and dance in the same costumes that they experimented with in the previous video. That said, the costumes certainly are functional within the story. Eugene as Mercutio has a stylish striking black outfit that certainly suggests somebody you don’t want to mess with. Zach as Romeo has an amusing long wig (romantically disheveled of course) and a blue doublet (though I miss the pumpkin pants in the previous video). As in other productions, the Montegues wear blue and the Capulets mostly wear red. I would be surprised if the director had seen the famous Franco Zephirelli film (or at least Gnomio and Juliet).

The director Keith Habersberger also keeps the best costumes for himself both as the Prince and Juliet; he’s wearing a beautiful ordinate gold costume as the Prince and Juliet herself has lovely rose-colored gowns. Even her shift in Act Four is it’s tasteful. I’ll talk more about Keith’s portrayal of Juliet later, but let’s just say that the clothes do not make him look like a man in women’s garb, they make him look like Juliet.

Stage Combat

The stage combat episode is great, and as a Stage Combat junkie myself, I watch a lot of channels like Skalgrim, Forged In Fire, HEMA videos, and of course my own stage combat videos. Consuming this combat content, I know that there are lots of avenues for education and for entertainment watching these 3 guys who have never done sage combat before, try out swords. I was very delighted to see them putter around with swords and then learn a short stage combat scene in which they then put on put their own spin on by improvising a scene where Romeo & Juliet sword fight with a guy who cut the cut in front of them while they were trying to get ice Cream. The video is fun, ludicrous, but also it’s just as informative as videos from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Unfortunately, The Try Guys didn’t make much use of the swordplay they learned in this video during the final performance. Imagine my disappointment when, during the climactic duel between Tybalt and Mercutio, the audience voted to replace the swords with…something that was definitely NSFW. I’ll discuss this choice in depth later on my podcast but let’s just say it made the training they did in the previous episode seem like a waste of time.

The Cameos

Did you hear about this guy Romeo? He’s the talk of the town

Link Neal from Good Mythical Morning

One aspect of the production that I deeply loved was that instead of doing the whole play, The Try Guys did a 90-minute abridged version using multiple narrators to fill in with bits of exposition and commentary. The Reduced Shakespeare Company did this before in their show, but since The Try Guys are very popular in the YouTube Community, they got a bunch of their fellow Youtubers to be their narrators like Rhett and Link, Smosh Games, Rosario Pansino from Nerdy Nummies, and Mat Pat from Game Theory. It was absolutely delightful to hear more of my favorite YouTubers talk about my favorite writer, each one telling the story with their own brand of humor!

Romeo runs to Friar Laurence, mascara all smeared!

Manny Mua

The Performances:

Finally, let’s talk about the acting in the final performance and how the Try Guys succeded in bringing Shakespeare to You Tube.

Keith Habensburger as Juliet

Keith carries the show as Juliet. As he mentions in the video above, he has performed in Shakespeare before, and his passion for performing shines. It’s actually a bit shocking to see him drop his usual persona as an easy-going funny guy and become a tragic heroine! In addition, he has a clear vision for the character- I suspected that he would probably exploit the comedy of him being a man playing a woman and being taller than Zach and he does in the earlier scenes, but once Tybalt dies, Keith plays Juliet absolutely straight- he is absolutely committed to playing Juliet’s anguish and desperation and it’s really moving to watch!

Eugene As The Nurse/ Mercutio

Eugene was a natural choice for Mercutio- his Try Guys persona is very much the wild card, sometimes friendly and sometimes fierce and he clearly loves Shakespearean language as you can see in the earlier video where he plays Edmund from “King Lear.” Honestly, though, I think his performances in the final play are a bit under-dramatized- I don’t quite know what he was going for as either The Nurse or Mercutio, which might be a result of limited time or lack of direction. That said, he does a good job for having never done Shakespeare professionally before.

Zach as Romeo or “A Bro wearing Hose”

Zach admits in the Shakespeare Acadamy video that he doesn’t “get Shakespeare,” and I get the sense that he doesn’t really like Romeo, so his performance seems like an intentional parody of romantic leading men. Honestly, this is fine. Romeo isn’t my favorite Shakespearean character either, and yes, The Try Guys are treating this as a real show, but at the same time it is still an experiment; they are trying something they wouldn’t normally do, so Zach is dealing with the awkwardness of playing Romeo with the same self-deprecating sense of humor that he uses when baking without a recipe or trying ballet. He knows that he would never get cast as Romeo in real life, so he’s having a laugh while he does it onstage, all the while being the best Romeo he can be.

The Format

One of the biggest challenges any Shakespeare practitioner has to face with a modern audience is the problem of engagement. The age of social media has changed how we consume content- we don’t passively watch anymore, we engage with it, comment on it, share it, and sometimes even manipulate it for ourselves. In Shakespeare’s day, there was no division between actors and audiences so in a way, his plays work well for this kind of live choose-the-outcome YouTube Event and I’m interested to see if it influences future performances going forward. In any case, I’m grateful that I was able to see this fun-frenetic, once-in-a-lifetime evening of live theater!

If you would like to learn Shakespeare like the Try Guys, I have a series of online clases in acting, stage combat, Shakespearean comedies, tragedies, and of course, “Romeo and Juliet.” You can enroll in one of these classes now or schedule one with me by visiting my Outschool.com page:

My Top 10 Favorite Shakespeare/ Harry Potter Actors

| astronut1

This list is not about skill or the talent of the actor. This is to honor the contributions of Shakespearean actors who also appeared in one of my favorite film and book franchises of all time: Harry Potter. Accordingly, some of the actors who weren’t essential to either Harry Potter or Shakespeare or both are placed lower on the list even if I personally love the actor or the character they portrayed.

#10: Richard Harris- Albus Dumbledore

The Irish-born actor has been a veteran of stage and screen for decades before his death in 2002, after the second Harry Potter film. Here is him on Johnny Carson, telling a funny story about a production of Macbeth he did early in his career:

#9: Kenneth Branaugh- Gilderoy Lockheart

If you visit this website regularly, you know I’m a fan of Kenneth Branaugh– I’ve reviewed three of his Shakespeare movies and he’s my all-time favorite Hamlet. I’m also aware that he has a reputation of being a bit of an egotist and a womanizer, (since he had affairs with two women on this list), so even though he was a bit too old to play the part, it was nice to see him have a laugh at his own expense as the attention-hogging Gilderoy Lockheart. The humbug professor’s name actually Gilderoy (as in a man painted with false gold), gives away the twist that he takes credit for other witches and wizards’ work and Branaugh shamelessly mugs to the camera whenever he’s on screen. My favorite scene of his though, is the one serious scene where he teaches dueling with the help of the much more competent Professor Snape:

Kenneth Branaugh and Alan Rickman in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, (2002).

If you saw my post on the duel at the end of Hamlet, you can see that the way wizards duel is directly inspired by the way fencers fought in Hamlet, right down to the flashy salute and bow beforehand, and it’s neat to see two legendary Hamlets fight in it.

#8: Jim Broadbent (Horace Slughorn) / Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew [aka ‘Wormtail’]

I couldn’t decide between these fabulous actors, so I grouped them together. After seeing Timothy Spall as the cowardly, foolish incompetent spy and traitor Rosencrantz in Hamlet, I knew that the only Harry Potter role for him would be as Lord Voldemort’s toady and pathetic rat, Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail.

Broadbent on the other hand, is completely different and unrecognizable during his excellent portrayal of Lord Buckingham in Ian McKellen’s 1995 film version of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Unlike the meek and easily broken Horace Slughorn, Broadbent as Buckingham is an oily politician who very nearly sells his soul to McKellen’s diabolical Richard:

What unites these two portrayals is that both characters are corrupted by a figure of pure evil, but both have a breaking point- Buckingham, (as you see in the clip above), refuses to be a party to child murder, while Slughorn eventually helps Harry Potter destroy Voldemort. In a way, they’re two sides of a very flawed coin.

#7 Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore 2)

Like Richard Harris, Michael Gambon, (who passed away in September of 2023) was an accomplished stage and screen actor, famous for playing King Lear multiple times, including a famous performance with Antony Sher at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here are some highlights of his stage work:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2015/feb/09/michael-gambon-on-stage-from-king-lear-to-krapp-in-pictures

#6: Fiona Shaw (Petunia Dursley)

I feel I have to give Fiona Shaw a good spot on this list, though I think her talent was wasted in the role of Petunia Dursley. She is an icon of British theater and her work in Shakespeare is superb. She famously played Richard II back in 1995, and in the short film below, she talks about her amazing interpretation of Measure For Measure, with fellow Harry Potter alumn, David Tennant.

I’d also like to include the best-deleted scene from Deathly Hallows with Shaw in it, where she admits to Harry for the first time that she misses her sister Lilly.

#5: Ralph Fiennes (Lord Voldemort)

In a way, Lord Voldemort was a role that Fiennes had trained for all his life. He has played smarmy, serpentine characters before in films like Red Dragon and Schindler’s List. But Fiennes’ Shakespeare training allowed him to tap into the evil megalomaniac at the heart of Voldemort when he played roles like Richard III, (another deformed autocrat), and Coriolanus, the Roman general who is himself compared to a dragon. In the video above, YouTube critic Kyle Kalgren analyzes how Fiennes’ past roles and experience with Shakespeare translated well in his performance and his direction of the 2011 film Coriolanus.

#4 Imelda Stanton (Delores Umbridge)

By contrast, I give more credit to Imelda Stanton, who mainly plays sweet mom-like characters (or nurse-like in the case of Shakespeare In Love), for embodying the utterly loathsome Delores Umbridge. Reportedly, the role made Stanton feel physically ill and unlike Richard III, people hate her character with a passion. By contrast, look at her sweet and charming portrayal of Maria in the 1996 film Twelfth Night, (which also starred Helena Bonham Carter):

#3 Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange)/ Emma Thompson (Sybyl Trelawney)

Again, I had to give credit to both of these women for the startling transformations they did for their Harry Potter characters, as well as their stellar work in Shakespeare. Helena Bonham Carter mainly plays apealing aristocratic characters such as Olivia in Twelfth Night, and Ophelia in Hamlet:

Seeing Ms. Carter as the demented Bellatrix Lestrange was quite a shock for me, yet the performance was no less impressive. I especially love this scene in Deathly Hallows where she has to act like a 17 year old girl, TRYING TO BE BELLATRIX LESTRANGE

#2: Alan Rickman (Severus Snape)

I already wrote a tribute to Alan Rickman after his death in 2016, so I don’t wish to repeat myself. Suffice it to say that Mr. Rickman was always a consummate professional, and his iconic portrayal of Severus Snape was the performance of a lifetime.

    Alan Rickman as Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, Royal Shakespeare Company.

    Honorable Mention: David Tennent (Barty Crouch)

    To be honest, I thought Tennant was miscast in Harry Potter- he can play villains, (as Good Omens fans know well), but he just isn’t great at being maniacal and evil. That said, Tennant is a rising Shakespearean star and has created many memorable performances from Richard II, to Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, to Hamlet.

    #1: Dame  Maggie Smith (Professor McGonigal)

    Say it with me… you probably saw this coming. No one can deny that Dame Maggie’s contributions to Shakespeare, as well as her ubiquitous portrayal of Hogwarts’ current Headmistress Minerva McGonigal, stand the test of time as strongly as the animated chess pieces she placed in the school basement. Let’s look at some of her greatest Shakespearean moments.

    Plug for my Acting Class

    If you enjoyed this list, you might want to sign up for my Intro to Acting class or my extended acting course, where I delve into Shakespearean acting techniques, and answer the big question, “WHY DO SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS KEEP GETTING CAST AS WITCHES AND WIZARDS?” To sign up, click the link below: https://outschool.com/classes/609658d1-3f9f-4371-8af2-4fe81ad13d8c

    Cover art for my Outschool Beginning Acting Class.

    Thanks for reading!

    The Fashion Is The Fashion: Ye Try Guys

    | astronut1

    I’m so excited! One of my favorite Youtube channels is doing a series of videos where they try Shakespeare for the first time! Zach Kornfield, Eugene Yang, and Keith Habersberger known collectively as “The Try Guys” are a group of friends who seek out new experiences and share them with the world. They thrive on taking themselves out of their comfort zone and learning about the world through experiencing it firsthand in a funny, lighthearted way.

    So, what could be more adventurous, daring, informative, and out of YouTube’s comfort zone than doing Shakespeare? So in a series of videos they are going to explore Elizabethan clothing, stage combat, learning how to speak Shakespearean verse, and finally on August 10th, 2023, they will perform “Romeo and Juliet” live on Youtube, with suggestions from the audience!

    This post will be a reaction to the humor and information on Elizabethan clothing from part one of the series with my notes on Elizabethan fashion, and the costumes worn by Shakespeare’s company

    Background on Elizabethan Clothing

    I’ve written a series of posts about Elizabethan fashions. If you’re unfamiliar with the period, Queen Elizabeth reigned from 1558 to 1603. This was one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan times in English history and the fashions of the time reflected this.

    Report of fashions in proud Italy,
    Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
    Limps after in base imitation.

    Richard II, Act II, Scene i

    Clothing of this period was very hierarchical- if you were lower class, the garments had drab colors, were functional rather than fashionable, and were not tailored for individual people. On the other hand, upper-class people literally wore their wealth and status on their sleeves- clothes were tailor-made, colors were bright and hard to produce, and fashion styles represented the far reach and sophistication of the English court. One way the court proclaimed this was by importing fashions from Italy, as the quote above indicates. This might be one reason why so many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy; the public wanted to see the exotic upper-class fashions in this play set in romantic, sophisticated Italy. In a way, Shakespearean plays were sort of a fashion show in the 16th century.

    If they [Elizabethans] saw a onesie, their heads would explode!

    Keith

    Keith’s remark is referencing the fact that nowadays our clothes are stitched together on the spot by machines. If you buy pants or a shirt, it comes as one complete garment, but this is a luxury the Elizabethans did not have. Costumes came in pieces like ruffled collars, sleeves, skirts, kirtles, foreskirts, etc. All these pieces would need to be assembled by a patient lady or gentleman in waiting, which is why Elizabethan nobles couldn’t get dressed by themselves, as you can see in this graduate thesis video by my friend Anna Gonzales:

    Keith Habensburger as Juliet

    One of the best parts of the video is Keith trying on various upper-class Elizabethan ladies’ garments from dresses to skirts. The Try Guys have a long history of trying on female garments so in a way, they’re perfectly suited to try Shakespearean costumes.

    Keith’s favorite Elizabethan costume piece is the famous neck ruff- a piece of rolled linen that goes around the neck worn by men and women. Ruffs were very popular in the Tudor court, so it became a symbol of Elizabethan fashion.

    “A Shirt and a Smock”

    In Anna’s thesis, she points out how Elizabethan undergarments came in the form of long shirts for men and a long linen one called a smock for women. In the video, Keith is puzzled by the garments and wonders if it would be at all erotic to see an Elizabethan in their not-at-all revealing shirts or smocks. As Anna points out in her thesis, these garments were worn close to the body, coming into contact with all the sweat and grime of daily life. So NO Keith, it wasn’t sexy to see an Elizabethan in his or her shirt or smock.

    “THe Devil Himself Could Invent such stuff”- Elizabethan Corsets.


    Every age has a new definition of the ‘ideal silhouette,’ that is, the figure that is most appealing in women that the clothes either create or accentuate. Elizabethan women were expected to have slim waists, small chests and wide hips. This look was accomplished through the use of a corset, which tightened the waist and compressed the chest.

    Under the Hood- Farthingale, bum rolls, and petticoats

    To create the wider hip look of Elizabethan women, bum rolls tied around the waist, and wooden farthingales created a bell shape for the hips and skirt. On top of that went the petticoat, kirtle, and skirt.

    Eugene wears a petticoat on top of his corset and bum roll that is done up with red bows.

    Zach wears a lace collar that partly covers his head. Eugene’s sleeves were added separately.

    Eugene As THe Nurse

    Eugene’s clothing as The Nurse, reflects the fact that lower-class people had fewer and fewer fancy options in terms of fabrics, styles, and colors. The costume is a simple linen shirt, a basic corset, and grey clothes. I suspect that The Nurse was also helping Juliet get dressed, like the ladies in this video:

    Men’s fashion- Zach as Romeo or “Bros wearing Hose”

    Men in this period also wore custom garments- the sleeves were added separately and the pants had to be attached at the points. Unlike women, young men didn’t cover their stockings (hose) and enjoyed showing off the shape of their legs. Stockings were often brightly colored and sometimes padded to make the man wearing it look more muscular.

    Review: “Star Wars-  the Empire Striketh Back.” by Ian Doescher

    | astronut1

    As I was writing William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back, I was surprised to realize I had made more references to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing than any other play. Much Ado is a comedy—probably my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies—so it was strange that lines from it kept popping up in the darkest of the original Star Wars® trilogy.

    Ian Doescher, https://iandoescher.com/

    Introduction

    What Is William Shakespeare’s Star Wars?

    William Shakespeare’s Star Wars is a series of parody plays written by Ian Doescher that takes the prose screenplays of the Star Wars story and transforms them into Elizabethan verse. Last time I mentioned how much I loved the cheeky references to Shakespeare and Star Wars, and how Doescher adapts the cinematic quality into Elizabethan drama very well. In my podcast, I also emphasized the way Doescher gives each character verbose Shakespearan language that works very well for radio and theater:

    My podcast episode where I do dramatic readings of “Verily A New Hope.”

    What I want to do with this post, (and the accompanying podcast), is to see whether this edition captures the fun, the clever wordplay, and the Shakespearean storytelling of “A New Hope,” with the second installment of the series, and if it helps to capture the shift in tone between the two movies, as Luke is tempted by the dark side and Han is betrayed and frozen by Lando.

    Notes about the play

    1. The first play in the series, “Verily, A New Hope,” took plot and structure inspiration from Henry V; it tells the story as an epic heroic story of Luke’s heroic deeds, much like how Henry V is about a king who grows from boy to man.
    2. By the playwright’s own admission, the dialogue is stuffed with lots of re-purposed quotes from Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s comedy of a womanizing, self-centered soldier who becomes a devoted husband. This is appropriate since the Leia/ Han plot within the play and movie starts out with them bickering like Beatrice and Benedick. Doescher says this was an accident, but I think he might have subconsciously taken inspiration from their love affair to help structure the dialogue. In the accompanying podcast episode, I talk more about how the use of Much Ado quotes helped to flesh out the characters of Luke, Leia, and especially Han.

    Structure

    Movies and plays follow a similar structure where the action starts at a static place, tension rises, and finally, things get resolved at the end. A lot of the same elements are in both issues. The main difference is how they are arranged. Let’s see how Doescher translated the three-act structure of a screenplay, to the five-act structure of an Elizabethan tragedy.

    As you can see, films have a 3 act structure

    Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

    Elements to Watch for:

    1. The Language
      1. Choruses
      • A Chorus is a short speech where a character who is not part of the action of the play introduces the plot.  It functions the same way as the famous title crawl at the beginning of Star Wars.
    1. I mentioned last time that “Verily: A New Hope” uses choruses liberally, which is appropriate because the tone of this story is so much darker, and since the action follows the journeys of Han and Luke so closely Ian doesn’t use choruses as much. I suspect this is partly because unlike The Empire Strikes Back, A New Hope jumped around more between planets and locations and used wipes and other transitions heavily:

    Below is a link to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Learning Zone, where you can learn about the language of the Henry V chorus.

    https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeare-learning-zone/henry-v/language/facts#

    2. Repeated lines/ Half lines

    The literary technique of stichomythia has characters who speak at more or less the same time, using slightly different forms of dialogue. Doescher uses this well as a staging device by having Vader and Luke speak similar lines as Luke plummets down the shaft after losing his lightsaber duel:

    These similar lines highlight the connection these two have (no spoilers), and also emphasize that, though the actors might be physically close onstage, their characters are meant to be far apart; they wouldn’t be saying this to each other.

    In Romeo and Juliet, there’s an excellent example of stichomythia in Act IV, Scene iv, right after Juliet’s parents and Nurse discovers her, apparently dead. There is a long series of laments by her parents and nurse where they are shocked and horrified at her sudden death:

    Lady Capulet. Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day! 2702
    Most miserable hour that e’er time saw
    In lasting labour of his pilgrimage!
    But one, poor one, one poor and loving child,
    But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
    And cruel death hath catch’d it from my sight!
    Nurse. O woe! O woful, woful, woful day!
    Most lamentable day, most woful day,
    That ever, ever, I did yet behold!2710
    O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!
    Never was seen so black a day as this:
    O woful day, O woful day!
    Paris. Beguiled, divorced, wronged, spited, slain!
    Most detestable death, by thee beguil’d,2715
    By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown!
    O love! O life! not life, but love in death!
    Capulet. Despised, distressed, hated, martyr’d, kill’d!
    Uncomfortable time, why camest thou now
    To murder, murder our solemnity?2720
    O child! O child! my soul, and not my child!
    Dead art thou! Alack! my child is dead;
    And with my child my joys are buried.
    Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene v lines 2702-2723.

    When I played Friar Laurence and the cast and I rehearsed this scene, the actors playing the Nurse and Juliet’s parents were struck by how similar the lines are and worried that these long passages of laments would get tedious to an audience. I realized by looking at the similar lines, the similar words (especially at the ends of lines), and the fact that Friar Laurence interrupts them at the end, led me to believe that these lines are meant to be spoken AT THE SAME TIME. This creates an effect of organized chaos where the actors seem to be wailing and ranting, but are actually speaking a carefully composed quartet of grief. Thus Doescher cleverly mimics Shakespeare’s use of stichomythia to convey Vader and Luke’s physical distance, and complementary feelings at the same time.

    3. Parody Lines

    The biggest appeal of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars is the fact that it is a parody, and I’ve said for many years that parody and gentle riffing on Shakespeare is a great way to get students to overcome their fear of Shakespeare and engage with him. Students who know Star Wars but don’t know Shakespeare will recognize the familiar characters and plots of the movies and then see how Shakespeare’s language tells the story anew. Similarly, people who know Shakespeare will recognize the way Doescher re-tools famous Shakespeare quotes to give to characters in the Star Wars Universe, like here, where he spoofs the intentionally bad speech of Snug the Joiner and gives it to the Wampa from Empire Strikes Back:

    Peter Keavy as Snug the Joyner in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 2017.

    In the Educator’s guide, which I’ve attached below, Doescher tells you exactly which lines he has parodied and the plots of the original plays so the students can learn about Shakespeare through these famous speeches. Orson Wells once said that “We sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations,” and this edition gives us thrilling space battle, wonderful characters, and witty dialogue to keep us entertained while we wait.

    Staged moments

    As Doescher worked his way through all nine installments of Star Wars, he continued to expand and experiment with his storytelling. There are a couple of moments in “Empire” that work only onstage such as the aforementioned moment of stichomythia after the lightsaber duel, and the scene in Act II, Scene ii where the Imperial Walkers known as AT-ATs actually speak to each other onstage. Like the French in Henry V, it’s interesting to see the battle from the enemy’s point of view, albeit a highly biased one. I won’t reprint it here for copyright reasons, but I will put this funny sketch in as a placeholder:

    My Criticism

    Although I loved “Verily, A New Hope,” I feel that Doescher didn’t go far enough to adapt the dialogue in interesting ways and play with the stagecraft of Star Wars to make it more distinct from the film and the first installment. My favorite moment of the play was the Wampa speech which was great because it not only parodies one of my favorite speeches in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it also made the Wampa attack tonally distinct from the film- the film is tense and grim, while the Wampa speech is funny and charming. I wish Doescher had embraced the parody and silly tone he shows in this speech and applied it more to the rest of the play; we already know Empire is the darkest installment of the series, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be played like that the whole time.

    What I think works best in the film is the romantic comedy between Han and Leia; Doescher does a wonderful job pointing out the parallels between Han and Leia and Benedick and Beatrice which is not only fun, but helps Star Wars fans appreciate the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing even more. This is why I’m glad Doescher took painstaking notes on how he parodied Much Ado and other plays in the guide below:

    The Education Guide

    9781594747151Download
    William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Prequel Series
    Doescher’s official website.

    Support My podcast

    If you enjoyed the accompanying podcast episode to this post, please consider subscribing and donating to help me continue making fun and educational content like this!

    Donate

    My Top 10 Favorite Shakespeares

    | astronut1

    Shakespeare’s birthday is coming up! This is the week where I usually stop talking about individual plays, and talk about the man himself. Today I’d like to cover how he’s been portrayed in fiction. As you’ll see, with such a famous and at the same time mysterious figure like Shakespeare, there is a lot of leeway in terms of how you portray him. This list shows multiple interpretations of Shakespeare and at different stages (ages) of his life. Some are comic, some are tragic, but all are fascinating to discuss:

    #10: Rhys Ivans (Anonymous, as The Earl Of Oxford).

    Like I said in my podcast, I don’t believe Oxford was the real Shakespeare, and I have some issues with the character and his lack of humanity. That said, I do like the character they were going for- a tortured genius who has to create, in spite of himself, and it destroys him and his family.

    #9: Hugh Laurie

    I love what they do here- Shakespeare’s a temperamental artist who hates editors, but ultimately accepts that he has to put butts in seats. It’s very true-to-life and Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie do a great job in this sketch!

    #8: Kill Shakespeare Volume 2

    Like I said in my full review, I really like the idea of an aging Shakespeare buckling under the pressures of being an icon. Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare as a literary god, has been a real thing in academic circles for at least the last 200 years and I think it really hampers first-time readers from even attempting to read Shakespeare. Since this comic is very much attempting to get people to do just that, it makes sense that they portray Shakespeare as a deeply flawed human who is trying his best, but not able to live up to his god-like persona.

    #7 Matthew Baynton- Horrible Histories

    Even though this history show for kids is also trying to make Shakespeare accessible for British schoolchildren, it actually takes the opposite approach for Shakespeare- make him cocky, self-assured, silly, and a bit of a schlamaazel, who like his own creation of Mercutio, talks too much and invariably gets himself into trouble.

    #6: King Of Shadows

    Cover of “King Of Shadows,” an excellent Young adult novel for anyone who loves Shakespeare.

    “Nat, say hello to William Shakespeare”. They might as well have said, “Nat, say hello to GOD!”

    -King Of Shadows

    Again, most interpretations of Shakespeare are aware of and try to subvert the god-like status he has in our culture, which is why this YA novel attempts to humanize him, by having him interact with the hero, Nathan, a 20th-century child actor, go back in time and finds himself switching places with another Nathan Field, a real boy actor in Shakespeare’s company. Nathan then meets and befriends Shakespeare and the two form a father-son bond.

    This book takes place just a few years after the death of Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet, so this William Shakespeare has a son-shaped hole in his heart. It’s really heartwarming to see the two broken people form a family bond.

    #5: Hamnet

    As I said before, Shakespeare is not the main character of this novel; he pops in and out of the life of the real main character; his wife Anne, as he visits her at his parents’ home, and later when he sees her on periodic trips home from London. His characterization is entirely indirect. That said, we learn a ton about him through her perceptive eyes. We see his hatred of his abusive father, his frustration with being a glover’s son with no time to make a living in the theater. We see his ambition take hold as he travels to London, and at last, his contrite return to finally become a good husband after the death of his son. This Shakespeare is sort of a prodigal son, who searches for fame and fortune as a young man in the big city, but eventually comes to value his life at home. This solves the mystery of why Shakespeare never moved his family to London, why he retired in the early 1610s, and why his writings have nothing about his relationship with his family, his wife, or especially his son. This Shakespeare is scarred; trying to redeem himself from the sins of his past.

    #3 Kenneth Branaugh- “All Is True”

    This Shakespeare is at the end of the journey he took in “Hamnet.” He’s retired from theater, trying to pick up the pieces of his life in Stratford, and trying to reconcile his feelings for the fair-young-man (played by Ian McKellen), and his wife, (played by Judy Dench). It’s melancholic, but still funny in a dour way.

    #3: Christian Borle- “Something Rotten”

    Like I said in the review of the Broadway musical, Borle is the best part of this show. Like Matthew Baynton, he plays Shakespeare as a cocky young self-assured genius on the outside, but unlike Baynton, we see he has a deeper side underneath. As he sings in the incredibly catchy “Hard To Be the Bard,” Shakespeare is once again dealing with the problem of maintaining his success and is under a tremendous amount of pressure to crank out new and successful plays all the time. Even though he’s the antagonist, he’s more sympathetic than the heroes.

    #2: Jacob Fiennes- “Shakespeare In Love”

    I realize this movie has lost a lot of prestige over the years, thanks to the controversy over its loathsome producer, Harvey Weinstein. I realize that the film Shakespeare In Love might not have deserved best picture over films like Saving Private Ryan. That said, I still think it’s a fantastic movie and every single element from the sets to the costumes to the near-perfect casting, is top-notch, especially the casting of Jacob Fiennes as Shakespeare. This young, heartthrob Shakespeare hasn’t yet become the self-assured genius we see elsewhere on this list. He’s constantly out-classed by Christopher Marlowe, which is a very good choice because it helps us sympathize and root for this man, whom we all know will become a rich, successful genius, but hasn’t yet.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF9JNN-wvqE&t=64s

    Fiennes also gives Shakespeare a very good arc- he’s a selfish dreamer like Bottom at the beginning and a sweet, sensitive man at the end. In the end, he writes for all the right reasons- supporting his family, immortalizing his love Lady Viola, and helping his friends and partners in the Chamberlain’s Men. Most of these Shakespeare are fairly static, but this movie gives him a great hero’s arc which allows us to like him and hope that his play is a success. As you can see in this alternate version of the final scene, Shakespeare makes a tearful goodbye to Viola, and sets about paying tribute to her in a play that will eventually become Twelfth Night. He also begins his lifelong partnership with Richard Burbage, who will go on to play Malvolio in that play, as well as Hamlet, Othello, and many others. It’s a satisfying conclusion to his arch, which like Viola, shows that Shakespeare is ready to take on a “brave new world” with a new sense of purpose.

    #1: Dean Lennox Kelly From Dr. Who: The Shakespeare Code

    Dr. Who (David Tennent) and Dr. Martha Jones ( Freema Agymann), are… disappointed when they meet Shakespeare in person in 1599.

    Though this episode has an inauspicious start, Dean Lennox Kelly from this 2007 episode of Dr. Who finds a way to incorporate every aspect of every other Shakespeare on this list! He’s a cocky, self-assured showman on the outside who knows he’s a genius but is also a middle-class man of the people, playing to the groundlings. On the inside though, he is mourning the loss of his son and yearning for love, which is why he falls in love with Martha and (spoiler alert) makes her the Dark Lady of the sonnets. He also is clever enough to figure out what’s going on as three aliens try to manipulate him into using his gift of words to conjure the end of the world for them. Finally, he is still a hard-working writer and does occasionally doubt his own work:

    Shakespeare: “To be or not to be”. Oh, that’s quite good.

    10th Doctor: You should write that down

    Shakespeare: I dunno… bit pretentious?

    -The Shakespeare Code.

    Again, the best thing about this Shakespeare is his arc- he drops his mask of genius and opens up to Martha and the Doctor, just like how the Doctor confides in Shakespeare how he is mourning the loss of his previous companion, Rose. In the end though, he draws strength in the memory of his son, and actually uses it to save the world!

    Is this a historically accurate biopic? No. Is it a silly cartoon? Also no. The reason I ranked this episode the highest is because they managed to encompass the myth and the man of Shakespeare in a very compressed time, with tons of Shakespeare easter eggs, and historical references, and it was filmed in the real re-creation of Shakespeare’s own theater! Someday I’ll write a full review of this episode, but for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this list, and are hungry for more Shakespeare’s Birthday Week content!

    Help Support my podcast

    | astronut1

    As of right now, if you want to help support the work I do here and my podcast, you can sign up for monthly donations. I have a lot of new ideas for the podcast, but I can’t do them without your support, so please consider being a supporter now!

    If you go to my podcast website, there’s now a button that says “Support this Podcast,” where you can choose your monthly rate of contribution, from $9.99 per month to as low as $1 per month! If enough people support this podcast, I’ll start taking requests and giving out rewards to my generous supporters. In short, if you support me, I’ll create content designed to your interests so you can feel that this is YOUR podcast.

    Thanks for reading, and please consider donating today!

    https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-shakespearean-student/support

    Keep calm and Podcast on: my 2022 wrapup

    | astronut1
    https://wrappedforpodcasters.byspotify.com/?id=fcc82e86773e3f8611e76ba828e412dbe6bbc5bbf613b9600b8fa127d9a62b15&utm_medium=share&utm_source=copy_link

    Thanks to everyone who’s been listening to my podcast over the last two years. I hope to make much more content and continue to write, talk, and teach about Shakespeare for a long time to come. Thanks for a good 2022, and here’s hoping for an even better 2023!