If I ever finish this meme, it’ll be in chunks. Chunk 3 ahoy.

Day #8: Your favorite comedy

Generally I prefer the tragedies and histories to the comedies. Shakespeare was funny, but the problem is that the humor is often played so broadly and physically that the language gets lost. I do have some fondness for As You Like It, mostly because I enjoy the wordplay and the whole courting-in-drag homoerotic subtext at play there.
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy

If Hamlet’s my favorite play, then Lear has to be my favorite tragedy. I resisted Lear for many years, because I actually saw Kurosawa’s Ran before I managed to see a staging of Lear. When I finally saw it on stage, something clicked; this is the saddest play of all, but it’s also about finding one’s humanity, the most universal theme of all.
Day #10: Your favorite history

The Henry IV plays — although like everything else Shakespeare wrote they’re not historically accurate — probably have the most bang for your buck of all of the histories. When I was a kid and really fascinated by Joan of Arc, I was horrified to read Shakespeare’s version of her in Henry VI, but that trilogy was written really early in his career, and he was more of a propagandist at that point.
Day #11: Your least favorite play

Nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear that it’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fuck fucking Midsummer.
Day #12: Your favorite scene

This is where this meme starts to annoy me again. First it asks for favorite scene, then favorite romantic scene, then favorite fight scene. People, please. What about favorite person-in-drag scene? Favorite statue-coming-to-life scene? Anyway… favorite scene, ever, of all time? When Hamlet walks in on a praying Claudius and realizes he can’t stab him because Claudius would then go to heaven (although we as the audience know there’s no way God would want Claudius around). Moral complexity, great monologues, two characters interacting without being aware of one another.
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene

Much of the romance in Shakespeare’s plays is rather unconvincing, frankly. People get married for  all the wrong reasons, we’re supposed to root for couples who would never work out in the long run (for instance, when the Duke proposes to the nun in Measure for Measure and we all go… ewwww…). I think it’s in AW Nuttal’s Shakespeare the Thinker that he proposes that Lady and Mrs Maccers are the only hetero couple that actually have a sexual, functional relationship before it all goes to hell, and the first scene of them together with her reading the letter beforehand is actually pretty sexy… in spite of the series of events it sets off.

Day #14: Your favorite fight scene

Maccers versus Macduff. Damn, that’s a good one.

My essay on Dorothy Day, radical socialist/anarchist, single mother, writer, and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, just went up today at The Fanzine. If you’re interested in what I may or may not be writing about in the book I’m working on, this might give you a few clues.

Thanks as ever to Ben and Casey of the Fanzine for their help. Lots of fab writing at the site for you to peruse.

The next clump of questions all overlap, so let’s just answer them in one fell swoop.

Day #2: Your favorite character

Confusing wording here: “favorite character” vs. “favorite hero/villain/etc”? Anyway, I suppose by “character” you mean someone not heroic or villainous, so I guess I will go with Richard II. He’s rather an antihero, and has some of the best soliloquies in the histories. Also he’s a clear predecessor of Hamlet, and we all know how I feel about Hamlet…

Day #3: Your favorite hero

Well, it’s not Henry V, who’s rather a prick. As was his father, of course. I always saw Falstaff as a heroic figure, actually, and since he isn’t really a clown let’s use him here.
Day #4: Your favorite heroine

Beatrice kicks a lot of ass in Much Ado. I’d like to see a production where she beats she shit out of Benedick, who deserves it.
Day #5: Your favorite villain

Iago’s probably the GRE answer you’re looking for. Or Richard III. Richard III may be a creep. but he’s also funny and damned charming. And that’s enough for me. Richard FTW.
Day #6: Your favorite villainess

I was taking an acting class a few years ago with L. Peter Callendar, and he had one of the students do Constance’s monologue from King John. She immediately headed to the top of the lady villain list, where she sits comfortably beside Lear’s rotten daughters.
Day #7: Your favorite clown

I’m going with the clown in Lear. The early clowns are mostly annoying. I prefer the Robert Armin era fools (Touchstone, Feste, Lavatch) to the broader Will Kemp fools. Armin probably played the Fool in Lear, who is not really “funny” but more of a wry and occasionally sympathetic observer.

For a big chunk of the month thus far, I was on a silent retreat, meditating, writing, reading, walking, and eating a lot. I was gone when the Mesherle verdict came down, which may be a good thing; although my hometown didn’t burn, it did smolder a little. Dread the sentencing; the guy is maybe going to do two years max.

Am now roughly around the halfway point of the BiPcsP (book in progress currently sans publisher) and just finished another essay on top of it. I seem to have inadvertently become a kind of amateur feminist theologian, a line of inquiry with pretty awesome creative rewards and very minimal financial ones. Then again, indie don’t pay either. I’m broke as hell but banking soul points.

I am shit when it comes to completing memes but this one was right up my intellectual/summer job alley.

30 Days of Shakespeare

1. Your favorite play

This is an awful cliche, but I don’t think I’ve gone more than a day since I first read it (probably about age 12) without hearing some line from Hamlet whiz through my head. Just yesterday, it was “eyes purging thick amber and plum tree gum” when I saw my morning warped visage in the mirror; a few days before I was quoting Claudius: “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” In the show Slings and Arrows, Geoffrey tells the nervous cast that he considers Hamlet to be the “greatest work of Western civilization… so at least we’ve got that going for us.” I wouldn’t disagree.

For some reason Hamlet is rarely performed in the Bay Area while we’re gagging on Midsummer (fun fact from my research for Cal Shakes: last year there were 36 productions of Midsummer in the Bay Area alone; we need a moratorium on that play immediately), Twelfth Night (so…over…it…) and R&J (ugh), so I’ve actually only seen it on stage twice in my life. But I must have seen the Laurence Olivier film version a dozen or more times, and I’ll even sit through the Branaugh  though his mustache pains me. The recent BBC version with Doctor Who as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart (so sexy) as Claudius was quite good too. But, hey, Bay Area theatres… let’s have a kick ass Hamlet sometime soon, okay?

Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you’ve never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line