a game called “hamlet, kanye west, or dril” in which you are given a quote without context and subsequently must determine whether or not it originates from shakespeare’s extremely well-known tragedy hamlet, highly influential rapper/fashion mogul kanye west, or noted Weird Twitter account dril. it may sound easy but i have a feeling it’d be at least a little bit harder than it sounds
if you think this is easy, please remember drill said “I will face god and walk backwards into hell” Kanye West said “Nothing in life is promised except death” and Hamlet said “Words! Words. WORDS.”
Apparently I should be checking out this miniseries adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, immediate-style.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG! A black woman playing a white English queen? And I’m not even talking about the armour nonsense. What’s next a native american roman emperor wearing a grass skirt? A white Ghandi wearing ripped jeans and psychedelic shirts?
If you throw reality and historical accuracy out of the window for being PC you’re movie isn’t worth watching because it can have no real message.
Oh quit bullshitting like this isn’t about your racism. Anthony Hopkins did Titus Andronicus as a half-dream half art piece with Saturnius and Bassanius using podiums and 1950′s style microphones to argue which one of them should be king. Kenneth Branagh did Hamlet in the Victorian Era. David Tennant did Hamlet in a fucking t-shirt. “Sons of Anarchy” was based on the story of Hamlet and it was about a motorcycle club running guns to the IRA. Don’t give me any shit about fucking ‘historical accuracy’ you fucking ponce, it’s SHAKESPEARE- it’s literally been done by a dog dressed in little hats and jackets (Wishbone, I never forgot you) and Wednesday and Pugsley Adams. If you have a problem with this you are not only a racist asshat, but you are so damn ignorant of Shakespeare I don’t even fucking know why you bothered to have an opinion except to let people KNOW you are a racist asshat.
And I mean, all good Shakespeare companies blind cast. Shakespeare companies pretty much invented that. An African-American actor was playing King Lear in the 1820s in London, yet yt people still get bent out of shape over actors of color in Shakespeare in the 2010s. It’s a long tradition, unlike the movie and TV tradition of casting people of color mostly in small roles and only “when there’s a reason for it.”
I love you for bringing up Ira Aldridge because now I have an excuse to post portraits of him starring in Shakespeare plays in London:
[Ira Aldridge as Othello; portrait by William Mulready c. 1840]
And 30k notes later, people are acting as if Black actors in Shakespeare plays are brand new. Nice to see we’ve progressed since the frigging 1800s….oh, wait. 😐
Many people may also be surprised that Black actors were performing Shakespeare professionally in New York in the early 1800s, half a century before American slavery was abolished. From Aldridge’s bio on BlackPast.org:
Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York City, New York on July 24, 1807 to free blacks Reverend Daniel and Lurona Aldridge. Although his parents encouraged him to become a pastor, he studied classical education at the African Free School in New York where he was first exposed to the performance arts. While there he became impressed with acting and by age 15 was associating with professional black actors in the city. They encouraged Aldridge to join the prestigious African Grove Theatre, an all-black theatre troupe founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett in 1821. He apprenticed under Hewlett, the first African American Shakespearean actor. Though Aldridge was gainfully employed as an actor in the 1820s, he felt that the United States was not a hospitable place for theatrical performers.
Why was it not hospitable?
Many whites resented the claim to cultural equality that they saw in black performances of Shakespeare and other white-authored texts.
In other words, people complaining about actors of color in Shakespeare (or fantasy, or historical drama, or anything) sound exactly like slave-era whites.
Julie Taymor was the person who made those choices re TitusAndronicus, but otherwise, I agree completely.
I was going to reblog from the source and evade the racist comment, but since it led to fine takedowns and portraits of Ira Aldridge, I’m going for this one. I have never seen a portrait of Aldridge before and I have little hearts in my eyes now.
Since you’ve never seen a portrait of Aldridge before, I want to share my very favorite painting that he ever modeled for. It was a collaborative abolitionist project between Aldridge and John Phillip Simpson, in which Aldridge posed as an enslaved man, entitled The Captive Slave.
It was first displayed in 1827 at the Royal Academy of Arts Along with this poem:
Aldridge’s acting skill is breathtaking here, as is Simpson’s skill at showing it off. I think everyone should look at this painting and think about it as often as possible, to make up for nearly two centuries of neglect.
Honestly, if you’re using the “historically accurate” argument about casting in Shakespeare then, congrats, not only are you a not-at-all thinly veiled racist, but you know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare. “Historical Accuracy” was never the thing he was going for with his historical plays. The above schooling was first rate.
Seriously, Hamlet has been redone and reinterpreted by Disney with lions in Africa. GTFOOH.
Apparently I should be checking out this miniseries adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, immediate-style.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG! A black woman playing a white English queen? And I’m not even talking about the armour nonsense. What’s next a native american roman emperor wearing a grass skirt? A white Ghandi wearing ripped jeans and psychedelic shirts?
If you throw reality and historical accuracy out of the window for being PC you’re movie isn’t worth watching because it can have no real message.
Oh quit bullshitting like this isn’t about your racism. Anthony Hopkins did Titus Andronicus as a half-dream half art piece with Saturnius and Bassanius using podiums and 1950′s style microphones to argue which one of them should be king. Kenneth Branagh did Hamlet in the Victorian Era. David Tennant did Hamlet in a fucking t-shirt. “Sons of Anarchy” was based on the story of Hamlet and it was about a motorcycle club running guns to the IRA. Don’t give me any shit about fucking ‘historical accuracy’ you fucking ponce, it’s SHAKESPEARE- it’s literally been done by a dog dressed in little hats and jackets (Wishbone, I never forgot you) and Wednesday and Pugsley Adams. If you have a problem with this you are not only a racist asshat, but you are so damn ignorant of Shakespeare I don’t even fucking know why you bothered to have an opinion except to let people KNOW you are a racist asshat.
And I mean, all good Shakespeare companies blind cast. Shakespeare companies pretty much invented that. An African-American actor was playing King Lear in the 1820s in London, yet yt people still get bent out of shape over actors of color in Shakespeare in the 2010s. It’s a long tradition, unlike the movie and TV tradition of casting people of color mostly in small roles and only “when there’s a reason for it.”
Imagine My Immortal but written in the style of Shakespeare.
SCENE 1. A MAGIC SCHOOL CALLED HOGWARTS IN ENGLAND
Enter ENOBY
ENOBY
For truth, that which the gods have christened me Has many parts, like these locks, flow’n from my crown. That hellish sound, which forms mine name, sprung from The dusky shades of these roots, so like the stone But broken, rent, mottled; for, like the flames That hie from Hades, the dusk is split with peals Of cold violet, the shade of icy fangs Met with military scarlet; coils not But hangs; not ragged, but lustrous, set off Like a precious jewel made more pure by the Barren winds of silent winter deserts, So are not these jewels of mine own self-crown Brought forth in splendour so close to these eyes Frozen, as glaciers, forged by an artist Who, bereft of artisan tools, gives himself And sculpts his godly business with that Which the muses draw blindly from his vision. Thus sorrow, reflected twice in these mirrors, Casting mine eyes as icy limpid tears.
Imagine Shakespeare but written in the style of My Immortal
Hi my name is Hamlet and I have long blond hair that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like the sun god Apollo (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to him but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. My mother married my uncle after my father died. I have pale white skin. I’m also a student, and I went to a school called Wittenberg in Germany but I just graduated. I’m a prince (in case you couldn’t tell) but I wear mostly black bc I’m in mourning. I For example today I was wearing a black doublet with matching lace around it and a black tights, white undershirt and black boots. I was with my mother and Horatio. We were standing inside Elsinore. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. My uncle Claudius stared at me. I put up my middle finger at him.
Can we talk about how awesome the Shakespeare one is?
This is like the most awesome thing I’ve seen all day
I’m not sure why I was thinking about this subject this morning, but Shakespeare writes teenagers REALLY well and I never really noticed it before.
So, this actually comes from a train of thought I’ve had for a while. I’ve always been frustrated by productions of Hamlet which have a 30+ year old man playnig Hamlet. Hamlet is a college student. That means he’s probably between the ages of 17 to 23-ish, give or take a few years (since I’m not entirely certain when people started university in Shakespeare’s time). So his reactions to the drama in his family/kingdom are very teenaer-esque. He freaks out, he’s confused, he’s stressed.
I ran the lights for a production of Hamlet that my uni last semester. Which meant that Hamlet was played by someone in their early 20s, the correct age. During one of the performances, I was paying closer attention than usual to the scenes between Hamlet and Gertrude (particularly the death of Polonius, but the early scene between the as well) and suddenly it seemed so real to me, that Hamlet would be saying all these terrible things to Gertrude and accusing her so harshly and basically insulting her and yelling at her in a very over-dramatic fashion. Because he’s a teenager, he’s confused, and he’s upset, and he’s doesn’t have the adult experiences to make him sit down and figure out how to deal with things calmly or rationally. He just knows that his mother has done wrong and things are wrong and all the pressure is on him to fix it and he doesn’t really know how. The overly emotional scenes and drama and even Hamlet’s suicidal ideation or rash unthinking attacks make so much more sense when you think “19 year old college student comes home from a semester at school and all this unexpected crazy shit gets dropped on top of him along with the grief of his father’s death and he doesn’t know how to deal” as opposed to seeing Hamlet as a grown man over the age of 25.
Similarly, this morning I was thinking about Romeo And Juliet (a rare occasion for me) and I realized how dumb the fight between Tybalt and Benvolio seems when you see it with grown men. I think it’s general knowledge that Juliet is around the age of 13-15, and generally assumed that Romeo is a few years older, so 16-18. I would assume then that the rest of that generation of characters (Mercution, Benvolio, Tybalt, etc) are around that age as well. So I was just thinking about Tybalt’s entrance at the beginning of the play, in which he immediately threatens Benvolio in the most absurdly violent way possible, and his invitation to duel (Drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word,/ as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee!), which is just so dramatic. It’s so juvenile sounding. It’s the equivalent of a pissed off teenager shoving some kid just cuz he wants to start a fight (albeit with greater consequences in Tybalt’s case). And it sounds sort of silly and overdramatic, again, until you put the words in an angry, probably kinda spoiled, belligerent 16 year old kid’s mouth.
Literally every scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes more sense when you remember that these characters are most likely teenagers around 16-20 and not adults. They seem far less ridiculous when you think of it as teens running around in a forest in this bizarre love triangle/relationship weirdness.
Basically, I just think it’s very interesting that we mostly see Shakespeare plays done with a cast where everyone is over the age of 25, so we think of all the characters as over 25, when really there are a lot of characters that are far younger. And their actions and reactions make so much more sense when you watch them as teenagers or young adults who have been thrust into strange and often stressful or upsetting circumstances. It’s easier, then, to remember how young they are and how little experience they have or how emotional they can become. It makes things more believable and more interesting, I think.
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
‘Twas my intention, upon leaving mine house this eve, to engage in revelry and merriment, but I now, to speak true, feel at this moment as though I am under siege.
– Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet
I came out here to have a good time, and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.
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