Book Club

I suggest we start a Shakespeare Book Club in order to brush up on our Bard knowledge.

If we could read a play a week for a month and then discuss it at our weekly meetings (along with other ideas), I think this project would really get off the ground.

What say ye?

More Shakespeare on Dreams

Don't forget Shakespeare's other famous references to dreams... as in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the dream theme is prevalent in many other plays:

Notably:

Hamlet - III, i

"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;"

Hamlet is of course weighing his options in the famous "To be, or not to be" speech. Shall he shuffle off this mortal coil or carry on with his plot of revenge and justice. The "dreams" of death's "sleep", of what's on the other side, tempt him.

And also:

Romeo and Juliet - I, iv

"ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.

MERCUTIO: And so did I.

ROMEO: Well, what was yours?

MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.

ROMEO: In bed asleep, while they do dream things true."

Mercutio sees Romeo's sighing and dreaming as a pithy distraction. Romeo is adamant that his dreams tell him something. Mercutio believes they lead him astray.

And furthermore:

"True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south."

This text is delivered brilliantly by Harold Perrineau in Baz Luhrman's controversial Romeo + Juliet. Mercutio's final point on dreams is not a positive one. "the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy...as thin of substance as the air." Hardly favorable descriptions...but fantastic, vivid imagery.

I propose we title our project (at least tentatively):

THE DREAMS THAT STUFF IS MADE OF

Thoughts?

Such Stuff...

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

Perhaps I'm just a little overly sensitive when it comes to discussions of such ephemera as dreams and stuff, but I've always been a little bit bothered by how "...such stuff as dreams are made on;" is misquoted by generations of starry eyed, slack jawed individuals with a passion for poetics.



As seen above, most commonly, we hear the variant "...the stuff that dreams are made OF." I suppose you could argue that Bogey's famous line from the wonderful "Maltese Falcon" is meant to evoke a completely different feeling. Prospero is speaking of illusion, the illusion of life coupled with the illusion of the play. We see his double meaning especially in the lines:

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

Here Prospero is presenting us with an interesting idea, the play(really the play within a play in Tempest) is an illusion, but guess what, so is the reality that surrounds it(and one can only assume the reality in the actual world. Shakespeare gives us this little subtlety by the simple evocation of the "globe", as it's meaning telescopes, we are meant to understand that Prospero is indeed referring to the characters, but also those watching the show in the Globe Theatre.

Bogey's "stuff" seems to be more a nod to an abstraction, stolen from an ideal world and made real by human hands. It's our entrance to the dream of perfection in many forms: beauty, worth, form and meaning.

The two idea's sit at seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum. On one side, we have Shakespeare's confirmation that no matter how amazing the world is, it will one day unravel as we awake(die), on the other side we have Bogey taking the dream world and making it real, thus creating MORE reality.

How do you bring these two idea's together?

With Punch and Cookies, meaning you punch who ever says the "Dreams are made of" in the cookies if they say it's Shakespeare.

In this case "cookies" means stomach, face, and/or balls.


Or make them listen to this.

Idea

Bardolatry is a term that refers to the excessive adulation of William Shakespeare, combining the words "bard" and "idolatry". Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the nineteenth century.^[1] The term derives from George Bernard Shaw's coinage "Bardolator", in the preface to his play The Devil's Disciple, published in 1901. Shaw professed to dislike Shakespeare's work because it did not engage with social problems, as his own did.^[2] Shaw also compared Shakespeare unfavourably to himself in his late puppet play Shakes Versus Shav.


Totally unrelated...

Question: What two characters from two disparate plays who would be absolutely perfect for each other? I think it would be wonderfully tragic for two characters to be soul mates, but fated to be apart by their circumstances...as in, their absolutely separate narratives. I think that would be a fun game to play with overlapping scenes/splitting up dialogue from different plays. We could play around with monologues in the forms of letters...like online dating...they'll never meet...

Does that make any sense?

I think that might be a neat way to balance out a sort of bitter married couple who are totally disconnected. Maybe it would be cool if we have the two young couples in the woods' stories, interspersed with the worrying parents....that way the disconnected yuppy suburban hateful mother and father could serve as an interesting accent/game without having the pressure of holding up the entire show.

hmm.

Note to self: learn to articulate thoughts.

Chorus

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Do you think it's interesting that at the beginning of Romeo And Juliet, we're told EXACTLY what going to happen to the young lovers, yet somehow by the end we find ourselves cheering for the kids and ultimately shocked by their untimely demise.

I think liberal use of Chorus is interesting in any show.

Lights Up

Be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. - "Twelfth Night", Act 2, Scene 5

Let the greatness commence.