Shakespeare Challenge: Six Settings

6. Setting [1] The Winter’s Tale

The setting of The Winter’s Tale beautifully conveys a sense of rejuvenation. The first half takes place in Sicily’s winter and covers what is essentially a tragedy. Sixteen years later, the second half happens mostly in Bohemia’s summer, a time of harvests, festivals, dancing, and singing, of humor, love, and forgiveness. What better way to depict the thawing out of old men’s hearts and the magic of redemption?

6. Setting [2] King Lear

King Lear is set in pre-Christain Britain, an ageless place, bereft of tangible society and context. The setting is as dark and chaotic as Lear’s mind. Even though several countries are mentioned, the play could take place in the absence of space. This emptiness directly reflects Lear’s and humanity’s absurd position at the hands of insensitive fate. Our protagonist howls into the abyss. But is there any response?

6. Setting [3] Macbeth

Macbeth’s tale of ambition and bloodshed can be set anywhere, including the 1970s (like in the hilarious Scotland, PA) or a postapocalyptic battleground. But there’s little question as to where the original is set. It is even referred to as the Scottish Play starring the Scottish King, due to theScottish Curse that brings harm when “Macbeth” is uttered in a theatre. Supposedly based on real king, Medieval Scotland is a perfect gothic setting for witches and warring factions.

6. Setting [4] A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The woods play a huge part in Shakespeare’s works. They represent magic and moral chaos, a place away from society. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fairies reign in Athens’ ancient forests. Spells are cast, people are transformed, and couples fall in and out of love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often one of Shakespeare’s most visually beautiful plays due to the setting’s fantastical possibilities.

6. Setting [5] The Tempest

(Sue Doggett)

The Tempest is a rare Shakespearean play that follows Aristotle’s “unities” theory: unity of action, time, and place. The Tempest happens in one day on one island. The setting is of utmost importance as the magician Prospero and his daughter have been stuck on this island for more than a decade. Prospero creates a storm that shipwrecks a passing boat which carries his wicked brother. Now they are on his land, as Prospero has mastered the island and its spirits. The setting illuminates themes of colonization and the human fear of something untamed and wild.

6. Setting [6] War of the Roses

The War of the Roses tetralogy, which includes Henry VI parts one, two, and three, and Richard III, covers several decades in 15th century England. The plays are an epic retelling of political maneuvering and slaughter. The tetralogy portrays an essential part of English history, and is intriguingly complex historical propoganda.

Shakespeare Challenge: Five Minor Characters

5. Minor character [1] Lucio

Lucio lies in order to stir up trouble, but he tells some serious truths about society and humanity. A mischievous knave, a flippant rascal, and a helper and a hinderer, Lucio frequently skewers puritanical laws against sexuality and other human “sins.”

5. Minor character [2] Barnardine

Barnardine (right), a prisoner of nine years, says only a few lines, yet he is highly memorable. The characters in Measure for Measure describe him best:

Provost: A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal. 

Duke: He wants advice.

Provost: He will hear none. He hath evermore had the liberty of the prison: give him leave to escape hence, he would not: drunk many times a day, if not many days entirely drunk. We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it: it hath not moved him at all.

He appears in a hilarious exchange in which he is threatened with execution, which he refuses, due to being too drunk. Amazingly, this excuse works, as he marches right back into his cell to live and drink another day.

5. Minor character [3] Mercutio

(Arden Ellen Nixon)

In the above painting, the aptly named Mercutio is shown with fairy midwife Queen Mab. She appears in a detailed speech that displays Mercutio’s imagination. He also possesses a bawdy sense of humor, which makes him delightful if sometimes overbearing company. However, he can quickly lose his temper or sink into melancholy. Mercutio is both avid entertainer and haunted, tragic figure. Shakespeare supposedly said “he was forced to kill him in the third act, to prevent being killed by him.” Check out Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet for John McEnery’s beautiful interpretation of the character.

5. Minor character [4] Caliban

If the spirit Ariel is protagonist Prospero’s ethereal superego, Caliban is his id. Born to a witch, is he man or monster? A crude portrait of an indigenous, Irish, or African slave? A sympathetic underdog or a base creature? Though ignorant and subversive, Caliban can be achingly poetic. One of Shakespeare’s most debated characters, Caliban is one to fear, laugh at, and cry for.

5. Minor character [5] Octavius

Octavius appeared briefly in Julius Caesar, but Mark Antony was the young manipulator who made an impression in his rise to power. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is older, and Octavius is the up-and-coming threat. When others celebrate and drink, Octavius abstains and observes. His icy calculation is frightening, but his motives might actually be loftier than our hedonistic protagonists’.

Shakespeare Challenge: Three Quotes

3. Quote [1]

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockl’d snails;
Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste:
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair:
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world:
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.

(Berowne, Love’s Labour’s Lost)

This whole monologue is gorgeous, and David Tennant’s delivery of this speech in the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company's production made me feel as though I was watching a young Shakespeare stand before me.

3. Quote [2]

Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

(Lear to his daughter Cordelia in King Lear)

The description of my blog features a quote from this speech. Almost nothing is more heartbreaking than the end of King Lear. All too late, Lear wants to reconnect with his one loving daughter and enjoy life.

3. Quote [3]

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

(Caliban, The Tempest)

Choosing favorite quotes from Shakespeare is ridiculously difficult. Shakespeare contains so many modern phrases and beautiful passages. So for my third choice, I’ll go with Caliban’s speech. That Caliban, “this thing of darkness,” has the most beautiful little monologue in The Tempest is still remarkable to me.