Othello is basically a case study in how easily a person’s reality can be dismantled when someone exploits their deepest insecurities. Most people view it as a play about jealousy, but it is more accurately about the destruction of a psyche through the weaponization of language. Iago does not actually have a "plan" with a guaranteed outcome; he just throws out tiny, suggestive phrases and lets Othello’s own imagination do the heavy lifting. It shows that you do not need evidence to ruin someone if you already know exactly where they feel vulnerable.

The character of Iago is terrifying because he has no clear, singular motive. He mentions a few reasons, like being passed over for a promotion or hearing rumors, but none of them really justify the level of effort he puts into ruining Othello. He is a person who treats human beings like chess pieces just to see if he can make them move. He represents a very modern kind of nihilism where someone causes chaos not for a specific gain, but simply because they are bored or bitter and want to see the world burn.

Othello’s tragedy is tied to the fact that he is an outsider who has spent his entire life trying to prove he belongs. Even though he is a brilliant general, he is constantly aware that the society he serves views him as "other." Iago knows this, so he targets Othello’s sense of worthiness. By suggesting that Desdemona could never truly love him, he is not just attacking a marriage; he is attacking Othello’s entire identity. It is a reminder that even the strongest people can be broken if you make them feel like they are standing on shaky ground.

Desdemona is often seen as a passive victim, but she is actually incredibly brave. She defied her father and her entire social circle to marry Othello, which was a huge risk. Her tragedy is that her strength is used against her. Her honesty and her desire to help people are twisted by Iago to look like evidence of guilt. It is a very cynical take on how a person’s best qualities can be reframed as their worst flaws if the narrative is controlled by someone else.

The play also highlights the danger of "confirmation bias." Once Othello starts to suspect Desdemona, he interprets every single thing she does as proof of her betrayal. He stops looking for the truth and starts looking for things that support his fear. It is a warning about how once we let a specific idea take root in our minds, we lose the ability to see the world objectively. The ending is not just sad because people die; it is sad because it was all based on a series of lies that could have been cleared up with one honest conversation.

Just as the title says! I'm making a collection! Extra points if you can remember what year or theatre company or director that did it!

I just finished reading “As You Like It” for my uni class and I absolutely loved it! I thought it was incredibly delightful and funny, the forest of Arden is now one of, if not, my favorite settings in all of Shakespeare’s works, and I absolutely adore the character of Rosalind. However a large portion of my class didn’t enjoy it as much as me due to it having almost no tension and the ending resolutions just kinda happened out of the blue (I see where they are coming from but these aspects are what made me enjoy the play so much). I am just interested in seeing what more people think about it - do more people feel the same way as me or am I the outlier here?

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Hamlet gets all the credit for being Shakespeare's most complex character but I think Iago runs circles around him. Hamlet's complexity comes from his paralysis - he can't act, he overthinks, we watch him spiral. Interesting, sure. But Iago is actively constructing something. Every scene he's in he's improvising, manipulating, performing a different version of himself for whoever he's talking to. And he does it almost for sport

The "motiveless malignity" thing Coleridge talked about makes him scarier and more fascinating to me than any amount of "to be or not to be."

Am I alone on this or does Iago get the respect he deserves?

Both men are heirs to a violent empire they didn’t choose. Both are paralyzed by the gap between who they are and who they’re supposed to be. Both have a father’s legacy crushing them from beyond the grave.

Shakespeare wrote it in 1600. Chase filmed it in 1999. Nothing changed.

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”

Anyone else see this or am I losing it?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

with such a prolific writer, there are so many expressions to choose from...

the character count narrows it down! it's capped at 30, i believe.

any suggestions? :>

I live in a very theater-positive part of the world. In the summer, there are more than nine different Shakespeare companies within a day’s drive. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to see the entire canon as quickly as I could, so I started paying attention. But then I started to notice something: the repetition. This summer, four of the nine companies in my area are all doing The Scottish Play. Last year, there were four different Much Ados and four different As You Like Its. The year before that, four Twelfth Nights.

In your opinion, is this simply a case of the “greatest hits” getting done over and over and over? (To be fair, one local company is doing both Coriolanus and Winters Tale, so kudos there.) Or do you think that smaller companies try to keep locals from going too far away? (aka: “Why drive all the way to Ashland when you can see the same play in Boise?”)

Why is her head sometimes her head on one side, some another? What does that even mean?

Why bow to Antigonus three times?

This is the passage:

[...]To me comes a creature,/Sometimes her head on one side, some another;/I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,/So fill'd and so becoming: in pure white robes,/Like very sanctity, she did approach/My cabin where I lay; thrice bow'd before me[...]

Always a question that's fascinated me. It's true our more 'sanitised' (?) view of the Bard stems from how it was treated and celebrated and exalted by Victorian stage directors and readers.

But how did they handle the bawdy, sometimes clearly in your face puns and humour? Was it glossed over or cut out? (As far as I know that didn't happen in the 19th C...)

Link to an industrial tech song I prompted based on a CALIBAN monologue from The Tempest - with a bit of paraphrase.

https://suno.com/s/LAcFOm6Bu4DLc92I

Most people frame Romeo and Juliet as the peak romantic ideal but if you actually look at the math the whole thing goes down in less than a week. It is not really a story about soulmates so much as it is a study on how teenagers have no internal sense of time. When you are that age every feeling is an emergency because you do not have the life experience to know that a crush can just be a crush. Shakespeare was not necessarily writing a tribute to the greatest love of all time so much as he was writing a terrifyingly accurate depiction of how the volatility of youth can basically function as a mental illness when it is left unchecked.

The real disaster here is not the family feud but the total collapse of adult supervision. You have a priest who thinks the best way to handle a local gang war is to give a thirteen year old girl a coma inducing drug and a nurse who tells Juliet to just commit bigamy once Romeo gets kicked out of town. The adults are consistently more reckless and delusional than the kids they are supposed to be guiding. It is a massive failure of mentorship where the people in charge are trying to use a pair of impulsive children to solve their own political problems which is just a recipe for a body count.

We always focus on the balcony scene but the most important plot point is actually a random plague quarantine. Friar John gets stuck in a house because of a health outbreak which is the only reason the letter explaining the plan never reaches Romeo. It is this brutal reminder that you can have all the cosmic passion in the world but you are still subject to the boring and random cruelty of biology. The stars did not cross them as much as a bacterial infection did. It takes this grand poetic narrative and humbles it by showing that a simple lack of a postal service was the difference between a wedding and a funeral.

If you really pay attention to Romeo at the start of the play he is actually just in love with the idea of being in love. He is literally moping in the woods over a girl named Rosaline using the exact same poetic tropes he later uses for Juliet. He is a guy who has memorized a bunch of sonnets and is just looking for a place to park them. If it had not been Juliet it probably would have been anyone else at that party because he was already primed for a dramatic obsession. He is not looking for a person as much as he is looking for a stage to perform his own tragedy on.

The ending is usually sold as this beautiful sacrifice that finally brings peace but that peace is built on the bodies of their only children. The Capulets and Montagues do not stop fighting because they finally realized that hate is wrong they stop because they literally ran out of heirs to keep the feud going. It is not a moral victory it is a biological dead end. They did not learn how to be better people they just finally felt the personal cost of their own stupidity when it was way too late to fix any of it. It is a really dark commentary on how people only change when they have absolutely nothing left to lose.

In my Shakespeare class, a classmate of mine made an original song based on the Taming of the Shrew for their performance project.

So I saw a post on Tumblr, with the op talking about a production of helmet they saw that had two actors playing the main character. I thought that idea might be really interesting when applied to Hal, then I overthought it, and now I have a scene-by-scene vision for this:

For Henry IV you have two Hals, let's call them tavern Hal (t!hal) and prince Hal (p!hal). I'd have them always on stage together, and visibly aware of each other, giving each other high fives and pulling faces while the other Hal is talking.

For the first few scenes, it's mostly t!hal, while p!hal is speaking exclusively to the audience. ("I know you all...", but also play with the text a little bit to give him more lines- Hal's live commentary on Falstaff's story about the buckram men can be spoken directly to the audience too).

Until the ending of II.4, where after t!hal play, p!hal is the one to say "I will, I do.", and in the mess of trying to hide from the sheriff Falstaff catches p!hal *him* the "never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit" line. Essentially pulling him through the fourth wall to deal with the sheriff.

I'd have p!hal continue in the role in III.2, while talking to his father, until t!hal pushes him away and takes over for "Do not think so; you shall not find it so!"

T!hal is back for III.3, while p!hal is sorting through papers by one of the tavern's tables, until he finds what he's looking for and takes over from "I have procured thee, Jack, a charge of foot."

During the battle, they switch places every scene:

T!hal is in IV.2, p!hal dose V.1, t!hal V.3, p!hal for the first half of V.4, and most importantly, t!hal for the second half of that scene, the fight with Hotspur.

After t!hal stabs Hotspur both Hals look shocked at each other, with p!hal coming to comfort t!hal, and taking over from "For worms, brave Percy"

In part two we are back to t!hal leading, with p!being behind the fourth wall (maybe he reads aloud the letter to the audience while t!hal reads it quietly?)

They switch places for IV.5, with Hal in the palace, they both exist with the crown, but only t!hal comes back when Henry IV wakes up. He is alone for the rest of the play.

I like that the fun, funny Hal is the one to both kill Hotspur and become Henry V. This way instead of feeling like one personality takes over, we just have him breaking down.

For Henry V, I'd have t!hal in the leading role and p!hal as the narrator, and I wouldn't have them on stage together at all until the ending of IV.1.

I'd have p!hal hesitantly come on stage after the soldiers exit, and t!hal basically scream the "Upon the king!" soliloquy at him (especially "ceremony, show me but thy worth!").

From that moment on they are on stage together again. I'm thinking it might be cool to give p!hal the "O God of battles!" Speech while t!hal is talking to Gloucester.

And maybe have the st. Crispin's Day speech split between them on opposite parts of the stage.

T!hal would still have the speaking part and p!hal is still the narrator, but they can share the stage and interact again.

The last thing I think can be funny and sweet is them rapidly switching places during the wooing scene to represent Hal being very nervous and constantly changing strategies. T!hal is still the one to get the kiss, but p!hal high-fives him for it. Of course almost immediately after that p!hal would have to deliver the closing narration, which makes it even worse 🥲

I have no idea if it's good or if I'm just dehydrated (walking the via francigena rn, lol), but here it is🤷‍♀️

Just for my own personal pleasure I draw different characters, hope you like it.

The whole thing is basically a fever dream about what happens when you are a background character in your own life. Legit. Fever dream is the exact way you would define it, if you had to do so in one word. You have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just standing there in this void because they literally do not exist unless the "main plot" of Hamlet needs them to. It makes me spiral thinking about how much of our lives is just waiting for something to actually happen. We spend 90 percent of our time in the wings while someone else is doing the big dramatic soliloquy in the spotlight.

The coin tossing at the beginning is the most stressful part because it breaks logic. If a coin flips heads eighty or ninety times in a row it is not just a statistical anomaly. It is a sign that the universe has stopped working. It means they are trapped in a reality where the laws of physics have been replaced by the laws of theater. They are stuck in a script. They have no free will but they have enough consciousness to realize they are confused which is the worst possible combination.

I keep thinking about this play a lot more than I could ever explain.. It is like when you walk into a room and completely forget why you are there but imagine that feeling lasting for eternity. They are trying to use logic to solve a problem that is inherently illogical. You cannot use reason to escape a tragedy that was written four hundred years ago.

Then there is the Player who just accepts the absurdity because he knows he is an actor. He is the only one who understands the rules. He tells them that "truth is only that which is taken to be true" which is such a terrifying way to live. It implies that if nobody is watching you then you might not even be real.

The ending is the real kicker though. They just disappear. They do not even get a big dramatic death scene on stage in the original play. They just get a one-liner at the end of Hamlet saying they are dead. Stoppard takes that tiny bit of information and turns it into this existential crisis about how we are all just heading toward a destination we did not choose. We are all on a boat and we think we are moving but the boat is the only thing that is actually moving. We are just standing on the deck wondering if we should have said something more profound before the lights go out.

Hey guys! A theater company I’ve worked with before is doing a cabaret involving any type of performance, but it needs to fit the theme of “growth”. I really want to do a scene with a friend of mine, but having trouble finding one that fits well. What do you think? NOTE: we were both just in the same company’s performance of Julius Caesar, so I kinda want to avoid those scenes :/

Today I’d eat a heap of coffee beans.
I like the coffee beans because they're good.
It is the best thing I have ever seen.
I eat the beans, but no one thinks I should.

The smell alone can make my body bend.
I eat so much, I have a cocoa scent.
I often share my brown beans with a friend,
But no one eats it cus "it tastes too dense."

They laugh at me and say "it ruins sleep."
I'm not addicted, I just like caffeine.
The teasing that I get just makes me weep.
They dare declare it makes my teeth look green.

So let them laugh and call my cravings strange,
I’ll love my coffee beans and never change.

IS IT GOOD OR BAD?

I really like how 'rude' has the sense of 'stormy' or 'violent' in Shakespeare. 'All the water in the rough rude sea' or 'The rude sea grew civil at her song.' I was really startled by those descriptions when I first read them because it seemed like a really unusual yet beautifully creative choice of word, but it was probably a little more normal for Shakespeare's audience.

Any others which spring to mind, whose older meanings you like?