This semester I am going with a new sequence of plays in my Shakespeare class and I thought I would share it.

I don't believe in proceeding through the plays chronologically (its a fool's quest anyway). Rather I do them karoke style. Before I had always relied heavily on my experience of seeing rock shows at the Hampton, VA Coliseum, most especially the Stones in 1981, and the Dead on several occasions. Now I am pivoting off a recent visit to Disney World. Before the thrust was aural, but this time out, I am focused on the visual, and the spectacular in particular.

I open with Comedy of Errors and flow into 12th Night. The BBC Errors features a set remarkably like a theme park. 12th Night is an attempt to transport the audiece into a celebrational mindset (compare with Disney's "the happiest place on earth" slogan).

Next a triplet of plays: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Ceasar, and A+C. I am fascinated by this transition: A+C is a perfect synthesis of the previous 2.

At this point it is time to buy a T-Shirt. Coriolanus. The first test of the students: a confrontation with a seriously twisted unpopular play. If they get bored and go visit the concession stand I don’t care.

At the same time though I point out that we have spent the most of the first half of the semester in Shakespeare’s Italy which is remarkably like Disney’s Italy in Epcot: demented, funny and far from reality.

Fall Break / Mid terms

Let’s face it: Like Disney, you come to Shakespeare for the dark stuff, the stuff that is so dark, your parents tell themselves its not there. Oh, honey, Junior is reading Shakespeare / Disney how sweet. Time to go dark. Que up Night on Bald Mountain crossed with the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In other words, the Disney Show Fantasmic, which is, though I wonder how many in the audience know it: a blending of two key bits from Fantasia.

The Second set kicks off with Macbeth:

Since pretty much all self respecting English majors think they know something about the Scottish play we dig deep into its horror. Discussion will center on Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609) and Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch (1616?) and William Davenant’s 1673 Adaptation of the 1623 Folio Macbeth.

Listen up people: The only Macbeth we have that we can attribute to Shakespeare is the late adaptation that made it into the Folio. There are no quartos and all critics agree that the Hacate material (with the songs) are lifted from Middleton's Witch. Therefore, the inescapable conclusion is that Macbeth as we know it is a late adaptation done by Middleton when it was revived circa 1616 or later.

It seems reasonable to posit that Shakespeare’s troupe staged some version as early as 1603 (if one assumes that the ascension of James to the Throne is a reasonable occasion for the play). Be that as it may, the Macbeth text we have was clearly written/revised to exploit the props that Inigo Jones had made for Jonson’s Royal Mask (and they spent a king's ransom on it). Moreover, some of those props where also used four or five years later in Middleton’s The Witch. My hunch is that the Witch was shut down because it traded too clearly on a court scandel (more details to come). So they quickly staged Macbeth as its replacement. The bottom line is that Middleton shaped the text passed down to us to maximize the props and effects the troupe had courtesy of The Witch, spectacle that had come to be because of Jonson's Masque of Queens with its antimasque of hags.

Disney once again looms large: Macbeth as a murderer dissolves psychologically into spectacle. To me the trajectory is very similar to the Disney Park Show Fantasmic where Mickey triumphs over the Witch from Snow White. (Gender patterns are also starkly parallel between Disney and Shakespeare.)

Then its on to Hamlet, because the University is staging it. David Garrick, the greatest actor Samuel Johnson saw in the part wowed audiences with his wig rigged so that the hair could rise when Hamlet sees his father’s ghost: the direct precedent for so much Haunted Mansion stuff.

Then a final triplet to round it all off: first Measure for Measure with Much Ado About Nothing. MfM--my favorite problem comedy (which was probably staged initially in Italy before Middleton (who adapted this one too) shifted it to Vienna to spruce it up) and a comic gem to close on—Much Ado. Because Shakespeare knows how to get away with simulated sex on stage better than anyone.

Then for an encore students nominate and vote on two plays and the MA bound read William Davenant’s bizarre adaptation The Law Against Lovers which sticks Beatrice and Benedict (the Much Ado plot) into the world of the Angelo/Isabella plot (from Measure).

I’m excited.

***

Notes

1. At the same time, I need to finish: a book review, a journal issue for Shakespeare Yearbook on Shakespeare After 9/11, and my share of Shakepeare’s Shit (a book I am co-authoring with Ben Saunders, a professor of English at the University of Oregon).

2. Masque of Queens

TEXT: 

hollowaypages.com/jonson1692fame.htm 

 SELECTION OF IMAGES OF JONES COSTUMES AND MASK SETS: 

http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/early_stuart_10_-_the_caroline_court.asp 

3. MIDDLETON'S THE WITCH, FULL TEXT

 http://www.tech.org/~cleary/witch.html