tiger-in-the-flightdeck:

smallest-feeblest-boggart:

amuseoffyre:

nerdyblogname:

shesafunnyshoney:

pettybitchcatullus:

foxhounders:

ppl who dont even like shakespeare: WOW how DARE you alter the original text these are CLASSICS have you no RESPECT, going around DESECRATING these sacred texts in the name of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!!!!!!!

people who love shakespeare: im going to stage a production of hamlet where all the actors are dogs

it’s what he would have wanted 

Okay so the universal law of Shakespeare, as I’ve heard it, is that you can take things out, you can rearrange them, you just cannot add anything in that conflicts with the original texts. So while you cannot have a production of romeo and juliet where the houses get along and they get married, it’s perfectly acceptable to replace all the actors with dogs in hamlet because the characters are never outright stated to not be dogs.

“The characters are never outright stated not to be dogs”

“It was never a part of their journey” but better.

Things I have seen:

• Hamlet set in a psychiatric institution where it was heavily implied the whole thing was his imagination
• Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues were aliens
• Steampunk Hungarian Romeo and Juliet musical with a fleet of rapping white boys
• Russian King Lear which was the bleakest thing I have ever seen
• Richard III set in the 1930s including fascist iconography
• The Tempest in Space
• Meiji Era Twelfth Night set in a Kabuki theatre in a fascinating meta examination of the role of women and men who play women (being performed entirely by a company of women)
• Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and Hamlet each with a single very drunk performer.

I love seeing what different productions bring to the table, because it’s so much fun! It’s also fun to watch Shakespeare purists pitch a fit about it being wrong. Bitch, stfu. I know for a fact that when Shakespeare’s globe burned down, one of the drunken audience members put out his burning trousers with his pint. This was not high-brow sober art. This was for the people and they loved it.

fun fact, i played the prince in a high school production of The Tempest and looking back it so easily could have been set in space

I was once in a film noir gangster style version of Romeo and Juliet. Where I played Romeo in a pinstripe suit and a fedora.