butchhamlet

[butchhamlet]

thinking about shakespeare's margaret. rereading 2h6 i was struck by how uninterested he seems in demonizing her for having an affair--like, of course there's a certain level of in-text and cultural misogyny inherent in her depiction (particularly because she's not just the power-hungry queen but the FRENCH power-hungry queen), but also, margaret and suffolk have some of the most beautiful exchanges in the tetralogy. in 1h6 they match each other's asides, and what is stichomythia in shakespeare if not chemistry. unless i'm missing something, there's no indication that any of the misfortunes that befall margaret are because of her adultery, or even really because of her crimes--she's just on the wrong side of the war. maybe i'm just underestimating how much elizabethan audiences would have hated a french woman, but shakespeare gives her so much time to speak and spends so few lines on "ooooooooh woman having affair... like a WHORE"

[butchhamlet]

how could i have completely forgotten about Live Jack Cade Reaction. how did this escape me for years

[butchhamlet]

After we kill our father but before we leave the island, we argue. Cal doesn’t want to go; he’s afraid of the water. Even after the rest of us outvote him two to one, he refuses to move, crouching on the ground, pressing the ruined side of his face into the earth, snarling whenever we try to touch him. In the end Ari has to sit down with him and say something in a quiet soothing susurrus, like they do, and the whole time Mir is pacing in the waves at the very edge of the water, where it barely comes up to her ankles. She is moving back and forth and back and forth, with her eyes on the horizon, and when this is happening Father’s blood is still on all of our hands but mostly on hers.

new max short story dropped. (+ an audio version!)

[butchhamlet]

granting myself a completely unnecessary quest

[butchhamlet]

how does it feel to be correct all the time

about as good as it feels to have followers and mutuals who are also geniuses and leave good tags on my posts

[butchhamlet]

you all know how i feel about freudian/oedipal hamlet (short version: hamlet is about the rot at the center of a family and exploring incest in the play could be fascinating but i don’t agree with freud’s reading or think the play implies it and i haven’t seen it done well; i am personally partial to a hamlet who has sexual intrusive thoughts and is horrified by them) but--for better or worse--this litmus test doesn’t actually forbid oedipal hamlet. you just have to do it interesting. i have not seen it done interesting yet

my latest litmus test for productions and adaptations of hamlet is whether the creator(s) make any thoughtful choices about gertrude at all. they don’t have to do a completely radical against-the-grain gertrude; they just have to do Something. everybody has thoughts and feelings about ophelia, but do you have thoughts and feelings about a woman who’s older and more opaque and ambiguous, who has more power in the play and who doesn’t necessarily look virginal and beautiful, a woman who isn’t so innocent? have you thought at all about what she knows, when she knows it, how she feels about it? when did she know about king hamlet’s murder? does she love claudius? does she drink the poisoned wine on purpose? or does she simply stand there, woman-shaped, and say words

[butchhamlet]

my latest litmus test for productions and adaptations of hamlet is whether the creator(s) make any thoughtful choices about gertrude at all. they don’t have to do a completely radical against-the-grain gertrude; they just have to do Something. everybody has thoughts and feelings about ophelia, but do you have thoughts and feelings about a woman who’s older and more opaque and ambiguous, who has more power in the play and who doesn’t necessarily look virginal and beautiful, a woman who isn’t so innocent? have you thought at all about what she knows, when she knows it, how she feels about it? when did she know about king hamlet’s murder? does she love claudius? does she drink the poisoned wine on purpose? or does she simply stand there, woman-shaped, and say words

[butchhamlet]

I'm obsessed with the Dido and Cleopatra piece, and have since shared it with my partner who is equal parts Obsessed because its so fucking good. The puppetry and pageantry of Cleopatra as the Fucking Director—just,,,,, "you sign on the dotted line, and you take whatever comes." "I dont care how good I look burning, i want to stop being on fire" *the whole you aren't real and I am* Hhhhhhh I'm going FERAL, I'm OBSESSED, I have FEELINGS!!!! I don't have coherent thoughts, just AHHHHHHH!!!! It does not help the fact that this piece has also unexpectedly slammed me in the face with the intense vibes of my own ocs, so just. Hhhhhhhhh.

In conclusion: I read your Cleopatra/Dido play with a very normal level of enjoyment.

THANK YOU SO MUCH BWAH??? ;--; THANK YOU FOR READING AND SENDING ME YOUR THOUGHTS... and i hope the OC vibes are inspiring. chain reaction of thinking about fictional people with problems let's GO

[butchhamlet]

sorry for twogentsposting again but i am thinking about how valentine views his love for other people as essential to his sense of self. his love for silvia but also his love for proteus. they're so intertwined that he can't separate their identities.

vs how proteus views love as a threat to his sense of self. firstly his love for julia but then later especially his love for valentine, which he has to destroy at all cost in order to preserve the identity he wants to have.

just. valentine as unable to know himself without his love for proteus and proteus as terrified that the sense of himself that he's clinging to is incompatible with his love for valentine. i'm so unwell.

[butchhamlet]

this is how shakespeare wrote two gentlemen of verona

[butchhamlet]

Hello I just found your Macbeth sex playlist and it has completely rewired my brain. Thank you for your service I think.

pov: you are my high school castmates in macbeth when i forced them to look at it

[butchhamlet]

butch 90s rii anon: here is a link to the company’s website! https://bardtheatresf.com/past-shows/richard-ii

OH YES. SICKOS YES. HOLY SHIT THIS ROCKS

[butchhamlet]

nothing will ever be as transcendentally bad as "of hotspur coldspur" but i forgot how much "o were mine eyeballs into bullets turned / that i in rage might shoot them at your faces" makes me WHEEZE. i love when one of the best writers of all time can't write <3

[butchhamlet]

2nd Henriad + textposts

[butchhamlet]

this was the intro paragraph for that paper (which. was 25 pages long. i can share more of what it was about but it is 25 pages long just be warned) and skimming back over it. wow. the dido/cleopatra parallels really did go crazy there are like direct line references even within the aeneid linking them. this was also the paper that made me realize antony is the one who dies like dido (with a sword, badly, kind of botching it and dying in pain), which. okay. gnc af

On September 2nd, 31 BC, Octavius Caesar defeated the combined fleets of Marc Antony and Cleopatra in the battle of Actium, signaling the final death knell of the Roman Republic and ushering in the Roman Empire. A decade later, that empire saw the posthumous publication of Vergil’s Aeneid, an epic poem haunted by the shadow of Antony and Cleopatra. The two lovers—a Roman soldier turned to revelry and a powerful foreign queen—appear in the text as Rome’s exotic enemies, who must be eliminated for the empire to find steady ground. Yet they also lurk unnamed in the first third of the poem as eerie echoes of the love between Aeneas and Dido—a Trojan soldier turned to wandering and a powerful foreign queen. Sixteen hundred years later, in Jacobean England, Shakespeare brought the cycle full circle: as the Aeneid is underlaid by Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is underlaid by the literary history of Dido and Aeneas. This essay explores the parallels between the two pairs of lovers and the ways in which Shakespeare has transformed the myth, placing a specific emphasis on gender roles and genre constraints. Aeneas and Dido are complex and well-drawn figures; even so, they are clearly heroic, and both have been analyzed for centuries as models of virtuous character. By contrast, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Antony and Cleopatra is tangled and frequently unflattering. Yet Shakespeare’s play retains an ability to enchant that is dependent, in part, on its rejection of the Aeneas and Dido story, a rejection inherent in the transferment of the story from propagandistic epic to boundary-breaking theater.

finished reading your thesis and then the didocleopatra epilogue. I'm insane now i think. rotating the thoughts of what immortal longings could've been and all the gender that it could've had. if calla turned out to have been a princess being played by a village boy instead or something... the nightmare of performing the pinnacle of femininity because you're surrounded by danger of being seen for the real you... rotating the way you talked about how cleopatra (shakespeare) is haunted by dido is haunted by cleopatra, like dido's this angled mirror reflecting cleopatra onto a different time. the way they talk about this nebulous masculine A... anyway can't wait for the library to let me read the stars undying. thank you for sharing and congrats on your degree !!!!

OUGH..... WAIT THAT GOES SO FUCKING HARD??? HELLO. PERFORMING GENDER AS IN LITERALLY PERFORMING AND WALKING ON A KNIFE'S EDGE TRYING TO DO IT RIGHT. which is of course how gender works too innit but the extra stakes and the literalization of that theatricality that goes with "i have to do this role right or i will get Caught and then i will be hurt." during the research for the thesis, i found a photography piece (that i cannot find again now i'm so sorry) starring a trans woman dressed as cleopatra, with all of her iconography around her, and the commentary was about how cleopatra is seen as the peak of femininity in a way that is sometimes aspirational rather than solely degrading or alluring. and i do think about that. i do. particularly the way that trans women have to perform femininity to an extreme level or risk very real danger + something something cleopatra's performance of being almost superhumanly beautiful and clever is a performance that shores up her position against a vast empire that is ready to crush her and eventually does

AND YEAHHHHH THE DIDO AND CLEOPATRA PARALLELS! my sophomore year, the program had me write a shorter paper on a topic i was interested in (sort of a test-drive thesis) and i wrote about dido//cleopatra and aeneas//antony parallels in the aeneid and shakespeare :P which others have written about much more extensively before (most notably janet adelman. if you're into cleopatra, it's worth reading The Common Liar even though i don't agree with everything; it's just brilliant and formative), but i specifically focused on 1. the fact that cleopatra and antony are sooooooo genderweird compared to aeneas and dido (who are both pretty respectable men/women by roman sensibilities) and 2. the fact that characters who exist in theater, rather than epic, sooort of have more room to be morally messy, because vergilian epic is (at least in this case) about creating a grand hero for nationalism, but shakespeare was making money for entertainment lmfao. nobody wants to see aeneas on stage he's boring as hell. i mean i want to see aeneas on stage but,

[butchhamlet]

finished reading your thesis and then the didocleopatra epilogue. I'm insane now i think. rotating the thoughts of what immortal longings could've been and all the gender that it could've had. if calla turned out to have been a princess being played by a village boy instead or something... the nightmare of performing the pinnacle of femininity because you're surrounded by danger of being seen for the real you... rotating the way you talked about how cleopatra (shakespeare) is haunted by dido is haunted by cleopatra, like dido's this angled mirror reflecting cleopatra onto a different time. the way they talk about this nebulous masculine A... anyway can't wait for the library to let me read the stars undying. thank you for sharing and congrats on your degree !!!!

OUGH..... WAIT THAT GOES SO FUCKING HARD??? HELLO. PERFORMING GENDER AS IN LITERALLY PERFORMING AND WALKING ON A KNIFE'S EDGE TRYING TO DO IT RIGHT. which is of course how gender works too innit but the extra stakes and the literalization of that theatricality that goes with "i have to do this role right or i will get Caught and then i will be hurt." during the research for the thesis, i found a photography piece (that i cannot find again now i'm so sorry) starring a trans woman dressed as cleopatra, with all of her iconography around her, and the commentary was about how cleopatra is seen as the peak of femininity in a way that is sometimes aspirational rather than solely degrading or alluring. and i do think about that. i do. particularly the way that trans women have to perform femininity to an extreme level or risk very real danger + something something cleopatra's performance of being almost superhumanly beautiful and clever is a performance that shores up her position against a vast empire that is ready to crush her and eventually does

AND YEAHHHHH THE DIDO AND CLEOPATRA PARALLELS! my sophomore year, the program had me write a shorter paper on a topic i was interested in (sort of a test-drive thesis) and i wrote about dido//cleopatra and aeneas//antony parallels in the aeneid and shakespeare :P which others have written about much more extensively before (most notably janet adelman. if you're into cleopatra, it's worth reading The Common Liar even though i don't agree with everything; it's just brilliant and formative), but i specifically focused on 1. the fact that cleopatra and antony are sooooooo genderweird compared to aeneas and dido (who are both pretty respectable men/women by roman sensibilities) and 2. the fact that characters who exist in theater, rather than epic, sooort of have more room to be morally messy, because vergilian epic is (at least in this case) about creating a grand hero for nationalism, but shakespeare was making money for entertainment lmfao. nobody wants to see aeneas on stage he's boring as hell. i mean i want to see aeneas on stage but,

[butchhamlet]

really enjoyed reading your thesis; thanks for posting it!

:D THANK YOU FOR READING & TAKING THE TIME TO SEND THIS!