Much Ado About Nothing is a play which ends with the line ‘for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion’. Which basically translates as ‘people are dumb, the end.’
If it’s good enough for Shakespeare it’s good enough for me.
ppl who dont even like shakespeare: WOW how DARE you alter the original text these are CLASSICS have you no RESPECT, going around DESECRATING these sacred texts in the name of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!!!!!!!
people who love shakespeare: im going to stage a production of hamlet where all the actors are dogs
it’s what he would have wanted
Okay so the universal law of Shakespeare, as I’ve heard it, is that you can take things out, you can rearrange them, you just cannot add anything in that conflicts with the original texts. So while you cannot have a production of romeo and juliet where the houses get along and they get married, it’s perfectly acceptable to replace all the actors with dogs in hamlet because the characters are never outright stated to not be dogs.
“The characters are never outright stated not to be dogs”
“It was never a part of their journey” but better.
Things I have seen:
Hamlet set in a psychiatric institution where it was heavily implied the whole thing was his imagination
Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues were aliens
Steampunk Hungarian Romeo and Juliet musical with a fleet of rapping white boys
Russian King Lear which was the bleakest thing I have ever seen
Richard III set in the 1930s including fascist iconography
The Tempest in Space
Meiji Era Twelfth Night set in a Kabuki theatre in a fascinating meta examination of the role of women and men who play women (being performed entirely by a company of women)
Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and Hamlet each with a single very drunk performer.
I love seeing what different productions bring to the table, because it’s so much fun! It’s also fun to watch Shakespeare purists pitch a fit about it being wrong. Bitch, stfu. I know for a fact that when Shakespeare’s globe burned down, one of the drunken audience members put out his burning trousers with his pint. This was not high-brow sober art. This was for the people and they loved it.
fun fact, i played the prince in a high school production of The Tempest and looking back it so easily could have been set in space
I would pay very good money for a drunk as balls version of Hamlet.
+ John Mulaney has chosen to opt out of the New Yorker Festival after the announcement that private citizen who is most famous for being fired and openly racist blogger Steve Bannon will be headlining
my favourite thing to do is to tell my friends about the wild things victor hugo did and see the look of shock and horror in their faces bc they only know him as the great author who wrote les mis and hunchback and not as the man who gave his fiancee a live bat in an envelope
rip tumblr 