2.7 "He's Not Bad at Writing": Thoughts on Shakespeare with Laurence
Welcome back to The Community Library! This week, keeping in theme with the idea of “classics”, my friend Laurence and I are talking all things Shakespeare. Laurence is a self-confessed Shakespeare nerd (or “Bardophile”, as he likes to be called), so I was very excited to have him on the podcast to talk about his old friend Billy Shakes. We chat about making Shakespeare more accessible, what England was like 400 years ago, and why Taylor Swift’s song Love Story is the best adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Enjoy!
December’s discussion pick was chosen by you, the listeners! The most suggested book was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. We’ll be discussing that next week, on the 15th of December, so make sure you read along and tune in!
Listen to the episode here
Plays and sonnets mentioned
Timon of Athens
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
Twelfth Night
A Merchant of Venice
Titus Andronicus
Hamlet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Taming of the Shrew
Henry IV
Henry V
Measure for Measure
Sonnet 18 – “Shall I compare thee …”
Adaptations mentioned
True adaptations
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1999
David Tennant’s filmed version of Hamlet, 2009
Twelfth Night, 1996
Modern adaptations
Romeo + Juliet, 1996 (Romeo and Juliet)
West Side Story, 1961 (Romeo and Juliet)
Love Story by Taylor Swift (Romeo and Juliet)
The Lion King, 1994 (Hamlet)
10 Things I Hate About You, 1999 (The Taming of the Shrew)
She’s the Man, 2006 (Twelfth Night)
Warm Bodies, 2013 (Romeo and Juliet)
My Own Private Idaho, 1991 (Henry IV)
Measure for Measure, 2019 (Measure for Measure)
Quotes
The the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.
Hamlet (2.2.375-79
Screw your courage to the sticking place.
Macbeth (1.7.60)
To be, or not to be? That is the question –
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
Hamlet (3.1.57-8)
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar.
Julius Caesar (3.2.73-6)
Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
Romeo and Juliet (1.1.39)
What, you egg?
Macbeth (4.2.78)
I do desire we may be better strangers.
As You Like It (3.2.236)
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable financial rogue; one trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service; and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
King Lear (2.2.13-23)
This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behaviour – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
King Lear (1.2.442-55)
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite my sicken, and so die.
Twelfth Night (1.1.1-3)
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage
Romeo and Juliet (Prologue, line 12)