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William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago this month and my local library is celebrating the anniversary. It sounds a bit macabre when you put it that way, of course, so they are billing it as a celebration of Shakespeare’s legacy. I took this celebratory occasion to talk with my students about Shakespeare’s linguistic legacy.

The post Shakespeare’s linguistic legacy appeared first on OUPblog.

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Inspired by Stanley Wells' recent book on Great Shakespeare Actors, we asked OUP staff members to remember a time when a theatrical production of a Shakespeare play shocked them. We discovered that some Shakespeare plays have the ability to surprise even the hardiest of Oxford University Press employees. Grab an ice-cream on your way in, take a seat, and enjoy the descriptions of shocking Shakespeare productions.

The post Which Shakespeare performance shocked you the most? appeared first on OUPblog.

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After all the skipping about the woods with the fairies - which is, of course, the bulk of the play - Act V finds us back in the daytime with Theseus and Hippolyta, who are about to celebrate their nuptials.

HIPPOLYTA

'Tis strange my Theseus, that these
lovers speak of.

THESEUS

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

HIPPOLYTA

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

First, some swooning over Theseus's words

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact". That's right - crazy people, lovers and poets are not in their right minds, but have an overabundance of imagination. Especially funny words for Shakespeare, fine poet that he is, to poke fun at poets. And take note: He asserts in brief that lunatics see devils where there are none, the lovers see beauty where there is none (or little), and then he waxes poetic (I know - I kill me!) about how crazy poets are - they imagine things out of thin air and make them real through their words!

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

I cannot help, reading this, to think of how very often I stare into space or out a window while writing poems. Or thinking about Billy Collins's poem, "Monday", which begins "The birds are in their trees,/ the toast is in the toaster,/ and the poets are at their windows . . . "

He manages to have Theseus disparage poets for being overly imaginative at the same time that he accurately describes what poets do and manages to exalt poets. Tricksy.

Second, a point about Hippolyta, who has very few lines in this play. Hippolyta, as queen of the Amazons, did battle with Theseus, who defeated her. He is now set on marrying her - in Shakespeare's play, not necessarily in a "spoils of war" way, either, and certainly not in the "kidnap and rape" way presented in myth.

On the one hand, Hippolyta is almost a nonentity within this play, although many in Shakespeare's audience might have been familiar with her story from other sources. On the other, Hippolyta's closing comment to Theseus here - you will notice that she gets the last word in - was a bit unusual. It was common in Shakespeare's time (and, indeed, into the early 20th century, really) for wives (or fiancées) to openly contradict their actual or intended spouses. And yet here is Hippolyta, who has listened to Theseus's carefully crafted speech about how the lovers probably all hallucinated, telling him that he is wrong. He is wrong, she says, because they all have such a similar account of what transpired that it must be true. Were Theseus correct, she argues, they'd

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Last year, I put up a post with a brilliant short version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And no, I'm not crowing about my own work - this short version was created by Becky Levine's son, who wrote it for his seventh-grade English class. It was as if the whole world (or at least her son's class at school) had gotten the message that it was time to brush up one's Shakespeare.

Here again is the extremely condensed version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, arranged in what I am assured is called a Humorous Nonalogue, reproduced with permission of its author, , who is, in my opinion, effing brilliant.

When Shakespeare wrote his plays, they hadn't invented a language that anyone could understand. In fact, the definition of "comedy," I'm not kidding, straight out of the theatre dictionary, was a happy ending. . . . Here's "A Midsummer's Night Dream," condensed and the way Shakespeare meant to write it, if he hadn't been shackled by Olde English:

LYSANDER: I love Hermia.

HERMIA'S DAD: You're a son of a biscuit.

HERMIA: (running away with Lysander) L8ter, Dad-io!

TITANIA: I like this kid we kidnapped.

OBERON: Too bad. Puck, dose her.

PUCK: Oops, Bottom's an ass. Okay, sir, your wife loves a donkey!

DEMETRIUS: Hey, Helena, let's go find my would-be girlfriend, I say as I'm standing right next to you.

OBERON: I feel sorry for Helena. Let's dose her boyfriend.

PUCK: "Oops," wrong dude. Uh, "sorry."

OBERON: You're "forgiven."

PUCK: GULP.

THESEUS: Yo, Hippolyta, I almost killed you, your name reminds me of the fat thing in that swamp, let's get married.

LYSANDER: Even though I loved Hermia so much we ran away, I now love Helena, for no apparent reason.

OBERON: If you want anything done in this play, you have to do it yourself.

DEMETRIUS: Hey, that's funny, now I love Helena.

HELENA: Both of you shut up.

OBERON: What the hey. I think I'll just snap my fingers and impossibly achieve the happy ending that "comedy" is all about. There, everyone's happy...except for Hermia's dad, who I'll completely forget about.

SNOUT: I am a wall.

EVERYONE: YAY! There's so many loose ends that no one knows what happens next, but everything's just DUCKY and UBER! Yipee!

                    FIN
                 (that means end)

I'll be back later in the day with more about A Midsummer Night's Dream and, of course, to announce the winner of last week's contest. But first, I am off for some real-life lunch with a good friend that involves more driving time than face time.

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