Tag Archives: the plays

Study Guides for TWELFTH NIGHT and ROMEO AND JULIET now available

I’m pleased to announce that the OCS now has Study Guides available for Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. Thanks to the excellent feedback that we get from teachers who use these materials, OCS Education is able to tailor our resources to the activities that are best-suited for active classroom exploration. Here’s a sneak peek at what is included in these brand-new Study Guides:

Twelfth Night

  • Staging Directions: Twinning: In putting twins into several of his plays, Shakespeare breaks all the rules of verisimilitude and classical drama — but how important is it that stage twins actually look alike? In this activity, your students will uncover how much Viola and Sebastian reflect the theatre of the imagination that Shakespeare so loves to play with.
  • Perspectives: Gender and Behavior: Twelfth Night is famously full of gender-bending and confused sexuality — issues which are not just politically “hot”, but which may be crucial to some of your students as they explore their own identities. The activities in this section will help you navigate these considerations in your classroom by looking at ideas of gender presentation on stage.
  • Rhetoric: Corrupter of Words: Feste the Clown is a famous fool — but what is it that puts him into that category? Your students will explore Feste’s wit and wordplay, discovering how he twists words to show off his quick and clever mind.
  • Textual Variants: Embedded Stage Directions: Modern editors frequently move or insert stage directions, based on what they think readers need to know about the scene. But how necessary are these editions? Shakespeare gives clues for action within the dialogue of his plays. Changing an entrance, exit, or action may make a world of difference to the story that a scene tells.
  • Staging Challenges: Gulling Malvolio: The “box-tree scene,” where Maria, Toby, Andrew, and Fabian team up to deceive Malvolio, is frequently one of the funniest scenes in a production of Twelfth Night — but, it has a lot of moving pieces. Your students will actively explore the potential for comedy in this scene, while wrestling with the requirements imposed by the text and Shakespeare’s staging conditions.
  • Perspectives: Music: Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays. In his own time, the tunes played during or before the performance would have resonated with his audiences — they would have been popular and familiar. In this activity, your students will explore ways to recover that touchstone in the modern day.

Romeo and Juliet

  • Metrical Exploration: The Conversational Sonnet: Throughout Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare plays with the familiar form of the sonnet, working it into his prologues as well as into the lovers’ conversation. This activity provides an introduction to the poetic form as well as an exploration of its function in Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting.
  • Staging Challenges: Stage Combat: From the first scene to the last, Romeo and Juliet is full of opportunities for violence. How do fight choreographers determine how to stage these fights based on information in the text? Your students will examine Mercutio and Tybalt’s combat to find out.
  • Rhetoric: Emotional Highs and Lows: Romeo’s wild mood swings and hyperbolic emotions may be familiar to your teenaged students — but how does Shakespeare construct that hormonal rollercoaster? Explore his rhetorical structure to find out.
  • Staging Challenges: Parts and Cues: Theatrical companies in early modern England used “cue scripts” when producing their plays, rolls on which an actor would receive his own lines and only a few cuing words, not the full script of the play. Your students will explore what performance clues may be hidden in those cues.
  • Textual Variants: Quarto and Folio: Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s plays that exists in multiple early modern forms, including an early and much-altered quarto. In this activity, your students will explore the differences between the First Quarto and the play as they probably know it, looking at key differences in speech length, speech prefixes, stage directions, and more.
  • Perspectives: Comedy and Tragedy: Though one of the world’s most famous tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is a play with a surprising amount of comedy in it. Where does that thin line between the genres live, and how does Shakespeare challenge and subvert audience expectations? Your students will find out in this thought-provoking activity.

Additionally, both guides include:

  • The Basics: Getting your students on their feet, working with iambic pentameter, paraphrasing, exploring rhetoric, and turning your classroom into an early modern stage.
  • Line Assignments: A way to give your students ownership over a small section of text, which they will use in further language-based activities and staging explorations.
  • Advice for how to use film in the classroom judiciously and effectively.
  • A guide to producing a 1-hour version of the play in your classroom.
  • Guidelines matching these activities to Virginia SOLs and U.S. Core Curriculum Standards.
  • Full bibliographies for further reading.

Both of these Study Guides are available for purchase at Lulu, along with guides for ten other plays. You can also view 15-page previews of the guides on that site. Coming soon: The Merchant of Venice and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Book Review: I, Iago, by Nicole Galland

I, Iago skillfully retells Shakespeare’s Othello as the Tragedy of Iago, following the famous villain through the course of his career and explaining just how he came to be the mastermind orchestrating the downfall of a proud general and all those connected to him. In doing so, Galland fills in some of the gaps of Shakespeare’s narrative, showing us how Iago came to be who he is and chronicling the circumstances that change him from a loyal friend and subordinate to a scheming, vindictive meddler.

The book divides into “Before” and “After,” meaning before and after the point where the play Othello begins, and each half is quite interesting in its own way. In “Before,” we get the development of Iago as a person. Galland’s research serves her well here — early modern Venice springs to life in vivid detail, particularly with regards to its military and political matters. We meet Iago as a young man, and he explains that he has always been known as “honest Iago” — not a compliment in Venice, where the ability to quibble, to flatter, and to evade has far more value than blunt truth. Iago lacks subtlety, always speaking his mind, and taking decisive action rather than weighing the consequences beforehand. He is boyhood friends with Roderigo, though he disdain’s the other boy’s weakness and lack of gumption; they grow apart as they grow older, with Roderigo following his family’s mercantile endeavors. Though Iago has scholarly leanings, his family’s prerogative forces him into the military, where he excels, first in the artillery, then in the army. Along the way, he woos and wins Emilia, the only woman he’s ever met with whom he can tolerate much conversation, and their marriage is a blissfully happy one. When Iago meets Othello, there is instant camaraderie; they meet at a masked ball during Carnival, and the circumstances echo their characters. Neither man can hide what he is, though Othello more obviously, thanks to his skin tone. Iago, on the other hand, suffers that inability in his character. Throughout the book, we see him incapable of wearing a mask, both literally and figuratively — in every Carnival scene, he ends up discarding his vizor, and his ungoverned tongue and open expression display his blunt opinions at every turn. The two men sense a commonality between them, a lack of patience with the artifice and genteel dishonesty of Venice. Iago comes to think so highly of Othello that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for him, including helping to conceal his epileptic fits from the Venetian Senate. He follows Othello to war, to disastrous ruin on Rhodes, and to the altogether different battleground of patrician dinner tables and courtly galas. There, in the household of Brabantio, Othello meets his undoing: a girl named Desdemona, enraptured with the idea of him. Iago counsels him against the courtship, explaining that no Venetian patrician would ever let his daughter marry outside of that narrow caste; Othello pretends to give up the infatuation, but in fact corresponds with Desdemona in secret and eventually planning an elopement — and since Othello has little more talent for deceit than Iago, Iago has little trouble uncovering the scheme.

In the “After” section, we watch this character, whom Galland has rendered quite likeable, fall. Othello betrays Iago’s trust, giving a coveted lieutenancy to the less-qualified Michele Cassio as a reward for assisting in his covert courtship of Desdemona. Emilia is, to Iago’s eyes, inexplicably supportive of the deceitful romance, and therefore complicit. Feeling wounded and discarded by those he most loved and trusted, Iago’s bitter hurt prompts his plans for revenge.

I call this book the Tragedy of Iago because it tracks his rise and at least partially self-constructed fall in a way that renders him both likeable and pitiable. Galland makes a wise choice, spending the first half of the book on events we never see in the play, because it gives the character a more solid background, particularly in regard to his relationship with Othello. In Shakespeare’s play, the audience hears of their association and implied friendship, but we never truly get to see it; we know from the start that Iago is working to ill ends, because he tells the audience so in barest terms. In I, Iago, the friendship is palpable, heart-warming — and so Othello’s betrayal of Iago has a real emotional effect. When Othello begins to shut Iago out in favor of Cassio, the reader is privilege to Iago’s pain and bewilderment. We also get new motivation for Iago’s actions — jealousy and revenge play their parts, and no mistake, and Iago freely admits that he wants to hurt his friend for hurting him, to disgrace the usurper Cassio, and to remove Desdemona from the picture (though he does not intend to do so through her death). That isn’t the total of what’s going on in Iago’s head, however; when he sees how easily Othello can be roused to dangerous passions, he starts to harbour deep concerns about the general’s ability to serve in the position of honour and responsibility with which the Venetian Senate has placed him. He worries, too, about Othello’s judgment; a man who will pass over more qualified men in order to hand positions to panderers, after all, demonstrates an ethical lapse. Iago never claims to be operating only for the common good, in removing a potentially dangerous commander from his post — but since that lines up neatly with his desire for revenge, why not work for both?

The dual nature of the tragedy is most obvious in the moment when things spin past Iago’s ability to control them. His words have an effect far greater than he expected, as Othello proves so easily inflamed where his wife is concerned.  The subtler tragedy is that turning Iago from honesty to deceit. He has to learn that trait, a talent foreign to him from birth, and it’s terrible to see him do so — to see a good man corrupted by an unfair world. Iago becomes almost drunk on it, overindulging, swept up by his newfound power, pushing limits to see how far he can take his lies before they become too improbable — and astonished when that barrier never seems to impede him. He learns deceit from those who deceived him, and since we have the juxtaposition of his stalwart honesty in the “Before” section, the transformation is all the more calamitous.

The book is best when it’s not trying to out-clever itself. The moments where I grimaced were when Galland was cramming in bits from other Shakespeare plays that didn’t quite belong — having Iago banter with whores and his military comrades by using lines from Measure for Measure and As You Like It, much of his courtship with Emilia coming straight out of Much Ado about Nothing– because they were jarring, discordant. The tenor was so different from the story she’d been telling that it seemed an odd digression. Initially, this made me nervous for the second half of the book, which covers the plot of Othello, but Galland actually handled the dialogue there quite smoothly. We hit the major points and get the biggest quotes without much interference, but most of the conversations are taken out of verse and into more natural prose in a way that doesn’t seem forced or awkward. The story does rather hurtle itself through the climax and denouement, however, and while that is perhaps appropriate, given how circumstances spiral out of Iago’s control, I could have done with a little more fulfillment, since we had so much build-up to the crucial moments.

This book leaves me wanting the story from yet more angles — Emilia’s, for instance. We only ever see her through Iago’s eyes, and though it’s clear she’s an intelligent and independent woman, she remains only an object throughout this novel. Because everything is first-person narrative, we lose her in the moments when Iago’s not there — which are some of her finest moments in the play. We never really get to know what she’s thinking, and as Iago begins on his plot of vengeance, he distances himself from her, both because he wants to protect her and because he no longer quite trusts her — which has the effect of removing her from the reader as well as from himself. This book is definitely the story of men; Emilia and Desdemona are intriguing, but peripheral, and since Iago never understands either of them, the reader doesn’t get that opportunity, either.

Overall, I, Iago is an entertaining and thoughtful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. The prose is well-constructed, the historical research thorough, and the characters well-drawn. Galland explores the story from an intriguing angle and creates a more three-dimensional world, situating Venice and its characters in the larger world. Whereas Shakespeare narrows in, focusing his scope tighter and tighter until it fits in a single bedroom, Galland allows us to see how this tragedy ripples outward. I think most Shakespeare enthusiasts will find a lot to like about this book, and if there are also some points to criticize — well, most of us enjoy that, too.

Julius Caesar: Adventures in Dramaturgy, Pt 1

In my capacity as Academic Resources Manager, I deal with a lot of text. I prepare sides and scripts for workshops and lectures, and I insert the text for relevant scenes into our Study Guides. This process always involves some editorial judgment calls — looking back to the Folio, determining how much of the scene to include, deciding whether to trim some bits out of the middle to narrow an activity’s focus, etc. It’s been a long time since I cut a full script, however. The last time was in 2006, when I directed Romeo and Juliet in undergrad — and I knew far less about textual studies then than I do now. I’m going to be serving as the dramaturg for the 2013 Actors’ Renaissance Season Julius Caesar, and as part of that process, I’ve also taken on the responsibility of cutting the script.

The thing about Julius Caesar is that you don’t have to cut a lot. The play runs 2438 lines in the Folio, the only early modern version that we have (I got off easy, not having to compare to any quarto editions). We aim for about 2300 lines for a show, with the goal of a two-hour production. I knew going in that I was probably going to want to trim slightly more than that, however, for a few reasons. One is that this is going to be the first show in the Ren Season, so it certainly can’t hurt to trim down what the actors have to tackle in those first three days. Another is just to tell a tighter story; there are lots of moments in Julius Caesar that, while certainly not unplayable (particularly with such talented actors as the OCS is fortunate to have), aren’t always as gripping as they might be. Shakespeare spends a lot of time showing off his Plutarch, but some of those references may seem obscure or downright bizarre to a modern audience. My inner Latin geek appreciates them; my practical side can trim them without suffering too great an attack of conscience. Finally, knowing that this is going to be the most-played school matinee of the artistic year, I knew I wanted to streamline the text for maximum appeal, to key in on the relationships that define the play, the overlap and tension of those political friendships.

The trouble, though, is that there’s just so much good stuff in this play. Take Cassius, for example, who talks more than anyone except Brutus (possibly only because he dies before Brutus). At first glance, you would think that the play could do with a lot less of him and not suffer terribly. So much of what he says, however, is such delicious language. He’s a spitfire, choleric and quick-tempered, but no less eloquent for that temper; rather, it seems to fuel and fire him, leading him to cram his speeches with vivid detail, incisive observations, and inventive structure. Cassius is also useful as a contrast to Brutus, not just as a matter of character, but rhetorically as well. Cassius has a complex elegance in his speech which Brutus utterly lacks; in order to get through to Brutus, Cassius has to try different tactics, and it’s always the least sophisticated one that elicits a response. Cassius is, in many ways, far, far cleverer than Brutus; it shows in his political canniness (as in his desire to do away with Antony as well as Caesar, recognizing an inevitable threat, and in his awareness of military realities in Acts 4 and 5), and it also shows in his use of words. Shakespeare’s language clearly juxtaposes Cassius’s political astuteness and practicality with Brutus’s blunt honor and intractable morals. This dynamic is not only interesting but critical to the operation of those relationship dynamics that so interest me — and yet, I know, those long speeches are where attentions will be most likely to wander. So I had a challenge: to balance the need to cut something with the desire to preserve all the character information that the language provides.

Then there are the minor characters. Could I cut that line from Decius Brutus or Metellus Cimber? Well, sure. The play would lose nothing imperative. But then that pretty well excises his reason for being in the scene; I don’t want to make a character extraneous, and I don’t want to rob an actor with a smaller track in this play of a potentially juicy moment (and since Brutus, Cassius, and Antony thoroughly dominate the line count, there are a lot of smaller tracks).  So, how to balance this? How to keep the sensation of a bustling Rome, crammed with ambitious men and craven followers, while still making cuts that will help the production to present a clear and focused story? Or how about a character like Portia? Certainly, I could trim some of her speeches down — but she really only gets the one scene to connect with the audience. I couldn’t bring myself to butcher those moments, but to justify keeping all of that intact, I had to find something else to sacrifice elsewhere.

I ended up taking a very surgical approach to the text, trimming from within speeches rather than hacking out large sections in their entirety. A line here, a line there — it adds up, and eventually, I had cut over two hundred lines, but never more than a few at a time. Occasionally it hurt my rhetorical soul a bit, to excise some repetitions or additions — but that was the choice I had to make. If the rhetorical form was crucial to the moment, to the character’s persuasive approach, I kept it, but if it seemed extraneous, if the character had already made his rhetorical point, I could consider it for the chopping block. Consider the following:

CASSIUS
You are dull, COCSa,
And those sparks of life that should be in a Roman
You do want, or else you use not.
You look pale, and gaze, and put on fear,

And cast yourself in wonder,
To see the strange impatience of the heavens:
But if you would consider the true cause
Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts,
Why birds and beasts from quality and kind,
Why old men fool and children calculate,
Why all these things change from their ordinance,
Their natures and pre-formed faculties,
To monstrous quality; why, you shall find
That heaven hath infus’d them with these spirits,
To make them instruments of fear, and warning
Unto some monstrous state.

That anaphora (repeated beginnings) in the middle is an interesting structure, and there’s no denying that it adds something to this speech. But, this is something Cassius does almost every time he has a speech of more than ten lines, so it’s not as though it is an unusual device or one which makes a unique point; we’ll hear the same device elsewhere, and the audience will still know that Cassius is given to repetition and to over-emphasizing his point. Those lines also have some nice evocative language — but, we’ve had plenty of descriptions of the strange portents in this scene already, and we’ll have more in 2.1 and 2.2. By cutting this, we’re not losing anything we don’t get elsewhere. On the other hand, in the following:

CASSIUS

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf,
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep:
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.

I had initially marked that final line for cutting, but I ended up putting it back in. In some ways, it’s redundant. The audience hears the predator-prey analogy and understands it; why do we need a second iteration? Because, I think, there’s a critical symbolic difference between a wolf and a lion. The second analogy, then, is almost corrective — Cassius grudgingly granting Caesar the association with a nobler animal, but only by comparison to the other craven Romans. The first analogy could then read more like, “I know he would not be a predatory, but that he sees the Romans are but prey,” whereas the second reads more, “He were no great and powerful man, were not Romans weak and yielding.” The connotation is different, and so I retained what originally seemed a redundancy. We also hear about a lion stalking the streets and a lioness whelping in the streets, and so I think it’s important to retain that association of the lion with Caesar.

The largest change I made was for purely practical reasons: our Ren Season has twelve actors in it, and the opening of 3.1 calls for fourteen characters to be on-stage simultaneously. Thirteen enter together, as per the Folio stage direction:

–then, only ten lines in, Publius speaks, though he has no written entrance. So, I struck Lepidus for that scene (he never speaks and no one refers to him) and I combined the characters of Publius and Popilius into one figure. That necessity led to a little creative cutting and line reassignment, but it seems to work. Our actors will still have a challenge to untangle, though, as that still leaves twelve characters entering simultaneously at the top of 3.1, plus someone to conduct the Flourish — and two of them will have to change from having been Portia and Lucius in 2.4.

Before I sent the cut script off to Artistic Director Jim Warren and Associate Artistic Director Jay McClure, I gathered a few of my friends to do a read-around of the text. With only five people in the room, I anticipated we’d be doing a lot of talking to ourselves, but that actually wasn’t the case as frequently as I’d expected. Because Brutus, Cassius, and Antony control so many scenes, most characters end up reacting to one of them rather than to each other. Just doing that read-around taught me a lot about how the various scenes function. Hearing the cut text aloud was helpful; I actually ended up highlighting more lines that I think I could cut, if we needed an even shorter script — if someone wanted to do a 90-minute version, for example, I think I would have no trouble at all getting it there. I gave Cassius a few lines back after this read-around, I snipped a few lines elsewhere to compensate, and I now have some good ideas about what else we could trade off if someone wants other lines back in. I feel quite positive about it, on the whole; I don’t think I slaughtered any sacred cows, and the surgical approach means that, hopefully, most audience members won’t notice the omissions at all.

So, we’ll see how it turns out. Once Jim, Jay, and at least one actor have looked at it, I’ll get the final comments back, and then I’ll start preparing the cue scripts. That process will be a whole other adventure with this play, and one which presents some fOCSinating possibilities (for which I feel I should probably apologize to our eventual Antony in advance). But that, Dear Readers, will be another blog post.

Wandering through Wordles, Part the Second

When I began building last year’s set of Study Guides, I devoted a post to the Wordles which we include as part of the Basics unit. OCS Education uses Wordles as a device to introduce students to the idea that Shakespeare’s language is their language, that the vocabulary is familiar, not alien. Handing students who are new to Shakespeare a block of uninterrupted text can be intimidating, and the so-called “line of terror” at the bottom of many editions only augments the students’ assumptions that they won’t understand without explanation. Breaking the words down through a Wordle, however, demonstrates the accessibility of the language. In most instances, the only completely unfamiliar words will be proper nouns — place names and character names. When students find a challenging word that is not a proper noun, we tell teachers to move back to the text itself; usually, the word’s meaning is apparent in context. This method is an easy introduction to Shakespeare’s language and can help remove some of the fear that many students experience when first engaging with the text.

Last year, I discovered that Wordles of the first 100 lines can also illuminate something about the plays themselves, as well as what Shakespeare seems to be calling attention to in the first five minutes of a show. As I begin working on the 2012-2013 set — Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona — I’ve started constructing a new series of Wordles. So, as a bit of a teaser for these upcoming Study Guides, I thought I would share the discoveries I’ve made in these new examples.

To begin, here’s Twelfth Night:

The first 100 lines of Twelfth Night stretch over almost two full scenes: Orsino lamenting to his court about Olivia’s persistent rejection, and Viola the Illyrian shore, mourning her supposedly drowned brother. The biggest words here are “love” and “brother”, and those clues wrap up the relationship dynamics of the play pretty succinctly. Both have a focus in both of the opening scenes; Olivia has recently lost her brother, and uses that as the basis for rejecting Orsino’s suit, and Viola thinks her brother Sebastian has drowned. The other words that stand out to me are “may” and “perchance.” There’s an emphasis on the subjunctive mood, which, in a strange way, sort of highlights the impermeability and the uncertainty that dominates this play. The subjunctive mood is one of desire and doubt, wishes and maybes. Everything is “perchance;” everything exists on unstable ground when we start, and the lines of certainty only become more blurred as the play goes on.

Next up, Romeo and Juliet:

I think, from this Wordle, you get a sense of the challenging atmosphere in the first 100 lines of this play. We see a lot of address happening — “sir,” “thou,” “thee” — so we know, right off, that characters are speaking to each other and that they are, judging by the pronouns, being informal. We also see a lot of active verbs, such as “bite,” “draw,” “stand,” and “strike,” as well as other words indicative of a fight — “sword,” “quarrel,” “hate.” The first 100 lines of Romeo and Juliet set a mood of combat and aggression, and that much is evident in the vocabulary Shakespeare uses. We also get the names of the factions involved, the Capulets and Montagues.

Next, The Merchant of Venice, and I’ll confess, this one cracked me up:

Why did this crack me up? Well, as I’d been looking over these first 100 lines, I turned to Sarah and said, “It feels like all anyone does in the first scene of this play is walk up to Antonio and say, ‘Hey, man, you look terrible, what’s wrong?’ Seriously, it just keeps happening.” And then I did this Wordle, and lo and behold, our largest words? “Sad” and “Antonio.” The Wordle verifies my perception of what’s going on in this opening scene. Apart from that, we see a lot of other words related to emotions — “laugh,” “merry,” “love,” “like,” “wearies,” “melancholy,” — as well as some words introducing the mercantile aspect of the play: “worth,” “ventures,” “merchandise,” “fortune.” It’s interesting to me that Shakespeare foregrounds both of those spheres in these first five minutes, demonstrating the complicated links between love and fortune (and between personal merit and financial worth) right from the start.

Finally, the Wordle for the first 100 lines of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is interesting in a rather different way from the others:

At first glance, this one is rather weird, and might have you thinking that Two Gents is some kind of pastoral comedy. Why on earth would “sheep” and “shepherd” appear so large? I love this example, because the Wordle actually points at the rhetoric. Those words appear in repetition in the following exchange:

SPEED
Sir Proteus, save you! Saw you my master?

PROTEUS
But now he parted hence, to embark for Milan.

SPEED
Twenty to one then he is shipp’d already,
And I have play’d the sheep in losing him.

PROTEUS
Indeed, a sheep doth very often stray,
An if the shepherd be a while away.

SPEED
You conclude that my master is a shepherd, then,
and I a sheep?

PROTEUS
I do.

SPEED
Why then, my horns are his horns, whether I wake or sleep.

PROTEUS
A silly answer and fitting well a sheep.

SPEED
This proves me still a sheep.

PROTEUS
True; and thy master a shepherd.

SPEED
Nay, that I can deny by a circumstance.

PROTEUS
It shall go hard but I’ll prove it by another.

SPEED
The shepherd seeks the sheep, and not the sheep the
shepherd; but I seek my master, and my master seeks
not me: therefore I am no sheep.

PROTEUS
The sheep for fodder follow the shepherd; the
shepherd for food follows not the sheep: thou for
wages followest thy master; thy master for wages
follows not thee: therefore thou art a sheep.

SPEED
Such another proof will make me cry ‘baa.’

Proteus and Speed engage in stichomythia, the rapid exchange of lines (as do Sampson and Gregory in the beginning of Romeo and Juliet), and they layer this with punning and repetitions, including antimetabole, the repetition of words in inverted (A-B-B-A) order. The prominence of those terms in the Wordle, then, doesn’t introduce us to a large overarching concept of the play, but it does hint at what the tenor of the play will be. This sort of bantering humor continues throughout the text, between many different characters.

The biggest word in this example, though, is “love” — right from the beginning, that’s what Valentine and Proteus are talking about, and that’s what they’ll keep talking about throughout the entire play. The tensions between romantic love, friendly love, and self-love are what drive this play, and Shakespeare opens by having his two male protagonists discuss when love is real and when it isn’t, during which they repeat the word “love” seventeen times.

Since OCS Education began using Wordles as a tool in our Study Guides, we’ve had great responses to them. These are a great way for a teacher to begin the class discussion of the play on an accessible level, easing students away from their fear and into a discussion of the text. For more information, check out our Study Guides, available as PDF downloads or print-on-demand hard copies through lulu.com.

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: And Our Champion Is…

After a month of competitions, with 31 combatants felled across 5 rounds of voting, we can now crown the winner of the 2012 Shakespearean March Madness bracket, and her name is….

Miriam Donald Burrows as Beatrice in the 2012 Actors' Renaissance Season MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING; photo by Tommy Thompson

Beatrice!

Against all odds, Beatrice of Much Ado about Nothing takes the title, narrowly besting Lady Macbeth in the final round, 28-25. What a Cinderella story! I was fully expecting Lady Macbeth’s ruthless nature to put a decisive end to Beatrice’s aspirations, but no — you, the voters, placed your confidence in Beatrice’s wit, and perhaps saw a strength in her heart fit to defeat the fiendish Scottish queen.

Our bracket ended thus:

Beatrice’s win also means that, for the second year, a female character from one of the plays currently on-stage at the Blackfriars Playhouse wins the title. Does this visibility provide an essential winning boost? Perhaps we’ll find out if the pattern holds in 2013. I hear thigh-stabbing, fire-swallowing Portia, daughter of Cato and wife of Brutus, might throw her palla and stola into the ring…

Thanks to everyone who participated this year! I had a great time running the bracket, and I hope you all enjoyed following the battles. Did anyone have Beatrice pegged for the win? Who was your biggest upset?

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: The Finals!

Our Final Four matches have yielded our finalists, and I confess, I’m surprised by them both — but pleasantly surprised! Ladies and gentlemen, we have two ladies contending for the title of Shakespeare’s Ultimate Fighting Champion. Beatrice easily put down Macbeth (45-22), with a strong show of support on her side. His partner-in-crime fared better, however; Lady Macbeth took down Iago, 19-9.

So. Our bracket stands thus:

And our final match: Beatrice vs Lady Macbeth:

  • Beatrice
  • Lady Macbeth

Who should win the title? The wit possessed of a fury, or the fiendish queen of Scotland? A woman who would eat a man’s heart in the marketplace, or one who drugs guards and smears them with a king’s blood? You tell us — Show your support for your favorite of these incredible ladies, argue your case, and rally your supporters.

This poll will remain open through the weekend, and we’ll crown our winner on Monday. Let the game begin!

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: Final Four, Part 2

With yesterday’s match off and rolling, here is the second Final Four combat: Iago vs. Lady Macbeth, a true battle of will, guile, deceit, and pure malice. Which of these two formidable contenders should move on to the finals? You decide — Tell us who you think has the upper hand and what in the text leads you to believe that.

Final Four, Match 2: Iago vs Lady Macbeth

  • Iago
  • Lady Macbeth

Don’t forget to vote in yesterday’s match — and on Friday, we’ll reveal the two finalists!

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: The Final Four

We’re coming down to it, and our Elite 8 matches saw some surprising upsets! In an unexpected turn of events, witty Beatrice overcomes last year’s second-place winner Henry V, 26-17. In the closest match of the round, Macbeth is the one who finally knocks The Bear out of contention (22-21). Well-fought, bear; if you have to go out, it may as well be to one who smacks of every sin that has a name. Iago ends the winning streak of everyone’s favorite shrew, Katharina, using his cunning and deceit to overpower her feminine ferocity (23-11). And finally, Tybalt and his Spanish blade can’t defeat the guile and ruthlessness of Lady Macbeth, who puts him down 27-7.

The bracket stands thus:

So that gives us our Final Four: On opposite sides of the bracket, Shakespeare’s most gleefully malicious couple, scheming and stabbing their way to the top; perhaps the wittiest of all the comic heroines, whose cheerful nature masks a ferocious heart and righteous fury; and the devious villain whose jealous machinations create a whirlwind of destruction. Match 1 begins today; Match 2 tomorrow. Who deserves a spot in the Finals? Let us know what you think!

Final Four, Match 1: Beatrice vs Macbeth

  • Beatrice
  • Macbeth

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: Elite 8, Pt 2

With yesterday’s matches off to a rollicking start, it’s time to welcome the rest of the competitors in the Elite 8 to the field. Today: Iago vs Katharina and Lady Macbeth vs Tybalt. The conniving killer or the cursed shrew? The ambitious wife or the hotheaded cousin? Who has what it takes to advance?

Elite 8, Match 3:

Elite 8, Match 4:

Who wins the battle?

  • Lady Macbeth
  • Tybalt

Acepolls

Which of these fearsome competitors should move on to the Final Four? You decide! Get your votes in by early next week, and rally supporters to help your favorites to victory. And don’t forget to vote in Part 1 of the Elite 8 as well.

Shakespearean March Madness 2012: Elite 8, Pt 1

Welcome back to another week of Shakespearean March Madness! This week: The Elite 8 take the field, battling it out for spots in the Final Four. But who are those lucky combatants? Here are the winners from the first matches of the Round of 16:

Eminent conqueror Henry V takes a respectable 28-19 victory over Titus Andronicus; a plethora of expendable sons proves no match for the power of pure rhetorical inspiration. Crafty Iago knocks magical Prospero out of contention, 31-17. In an upset rematch, Lady Macbeth dominates over Richard III; his habit of underestimating women finally gets the better of him, it would seem. This match was hotly contested, with a final score of 36-26. The Bear continues his Cinderella story, with a 43-19 victory over Mark Antony — but will his prowess lead him into the Final Four? It’s been another good week for our ladies from the comedies — Beatrice edges out Hotspur, 17-15, and Katharina easily bowls over Jack Falstaff, 29-7. Things didn’t go so well for Doll Tearsheet, however, whose tavern brawling ways couldn’t defeat Tybalt‘s skilled rapier (26-13). Finally, Macbeth knocks Philip the Bastard out of contention (33-8); sorry, Philip, but we actually meet your mom on stage, so we know you’re of woman born.

So, here’s the bracket for the Elite 8 (click to expand):

Today, we welcome four competitors back to the field: Henry V vs Beatrice and The Bear vs Macbeth.

Elite 8, Match 1:

  • Henry V
  • Beatrice

Elite 8, Match 2:

  • The Bear
  • Macbeth

Who deserves a coveted slot in the Final Four? Let us know what you think! Defend your favorites with evidence from the text and win other voters to your cause. These polls will be open until early next week, so you have plenty of time to rally support! My picks will, as usual, be in a comment.