"Double Falsehood" Latest Play to be Credited to Shakespeare

Play discovered nearly 300 years ago said to be a Shakespeare forgery 'was written by the Bard himself,' new research claims 

• Double Falsehood was presented by Lewis Theobald in the 18th century 
• Theatre impresario made it out to be an adaptation of a play by the Bard 
• Claims met with scepticism, including from great poet Alexander Pope 
• But new study of its language identifies playwright as the true author
• Psychological theory and text analysing software lead to conclusion of University of Texas study which claims to model Bard's 'mental world'

+3

 William Shakespeare may indeed have been the 

original author of the play Double Falsehood after all

A play discovered nearly 300 years ago and said to be a Shakespeare forgery was really written by the Bard himself, new research has revealed.

The work titled Double Falsehood was presented by theatre impresario Lewis Theobald in the 18th century as an adaptation of a Shakespeare play about a Spanish nobleman's ignoble pursuit of two women.

Theobald, a known scholar of Shakespeare, mounted his play at Drury Lane Theatre in London on December 13, 1727, claiming that it was a re-working of an original by the Bard and that he had three original texts. 

His claims were greeted with widespread scepticism in the eighteenth century, including from the great poet Alexander Pope, who had considerable clout. 

But a new study of its language to build up a psychological profile of the writer 'strongly identifies' the legendary playwright as the true author.

Dr Ryan Boyd of the University of Texas said: 'Research in psychology has shown some of the core features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how they use language.

'With our new study, we show you can actually take a lot of this information and put it all together at once to understand an author like Shakespeare rather deeply.'

The study applied psychological theory and text analysing software and goes beyond confirming authorship by word counts and linguistic regularities.

Mr Boyd explained: 'This research shows it is indeed possible to start modelling peoples' mental worlds in much more complete ways.

Play also known as "Cardenio"

'We do not need a time machine and a survey form to figure out what type of person Shakespeare was - we can determine that very accurately just based on how he wrote using methods that are objective and easy to do.'

Results showed the author of Double Falsehood was likely to be sociable and fairly well educated, findings that do not fit with accounts of Theobald as rigid and abrasive.

Theobald published Double Falsehood in 1728 and claimed it was based on three original Shakespeare manuscripts which have since been lost, presumably destroyed by a library fire.

Yet the authorship of the play has been hotly contested ever since.

To get to the bottom of the mystery 33 plays by the Bard, twelve by Theobald and nine by Shakespeare's collaborator John Fletcher, were examined in the study published in Psychological Science.

+3

+3

Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher (topmost) most likely collaborated with Shakespeare on Double Falsehood (new cover above), which was long thought not to have had anything to do with the Bard 

Software evaluated 'function words' including pronouns, articles and prepositions and words belonging to various content categories such as emotions, family, sensory perception and religion.

They also looked at 'categorical writing' which tends to be heavy on nouns, articles and prepositions and indicates an analytic or formal way of thinking.

People who rate high on this are likely to be emotionally distant, applying problem solving approaches to everyday situations while those who rate low tend to live in the moment and are more focused on social matters.

Research in psychology has shown some of the core features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how they use language. 

                                                                                                                          Dr Ryan Boyd

 

By aggregating dozens of psychological features of each playwright, the researchers were able to create a psychological signature for each individual and compare them with that of the writer of Double Falsehood.

Every measure but one identified Shakespeare as the likely author with Theobald identified as the best match only when it came to his use of content words.

But when the texts were analysed across individual acts, they found a more nuanced picture.

The first three continued to point the finger at Shakespeare, but for the fourth and fifth the measures varied between him and Fletcher.

Again, Theobald's influence appeared to be very minor.

Boyd said: 'Honestly, I was surprised to see such a strong signal for Shakespeare showing through in the results.

'Going into the research without any real background knowledge, I had just kind of assumed it was going to be a pretty cut and dry case of a fake Shakespeare play, which would have been really interesting in and of itself.'

FALSE IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE? 

Plot Summary  of DOUBLE FALSEHOOD

Tangled relationships, women disguised as men, intrigue laced with tragedy and comedy - some might say Double Falsehood has all the hallmarks of Shakespeare. 

Set in the province of Andalusia in Spain, a love rat called Henriquez Angelo courts a beautiful peasant girl, Violante, and forces himself upon her when she rejects his advances. 

Stricken by a guilty conscience he nevertheless seduces Leonora, the future wife of his absent best friend Julio. 

She accepts Henriquez's marriage proposal against her will, because her father Don Bernardo wants a family connection with nobility. 

Leonora writes a letter to Julio who returns to interrupt the wedding, causing her to faint. 

Her father discovers a dagger and suicide note on her person, revealing her determination not to be forced into marriage.

But for the best part of three centuries the play was dismissed as a falsehood in more than just title.

That was until 2010 when Professor Brean Hammond, of the University of Nottingham, put forward his thesis that the play originates from a collaboration between Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher.

He claimed the versification was very similar to other works by Shakespeare and that Double Falsehood contained words never seen before and not previously used by Theobald.

Dr Boyd's new study is the latest to support this revisionist view. 

poppy67, London, United Kingdom, about an hour ago

@Catherine Textual analysis has supported the theory that this is another Shakespeare/Fletcher play. This follows another type of analysis (of the Woody Allen psychologist variety) further supporting the original claim and textual work. Any theory that is supported by not just one study, but another investigative tool altogether is that little bit closer to becoming academic fact. The work done at CERN, particularly on the LHC, needs to be repeated by other experiment designs before the discovery of the Higgs-Boson moves from possible to probable.

Fred, Colony of EUSSR, United Kingdom, about 5 hours ago

Time we checked Shakespeare's hard drive!

Click to rate

Trudi, Worcester, United Kingdom, about 5 hours ago

Many plays attributed to Shakespeare clearly seem to be from a very different hand. Three hundred years ago the Laws of copyright, trade descriptions and data protection did not exist, you could say or claim whatever you wished. This one may or may not be from his hand, but it does affect it's value substantially.

Click to rate

5

Andy Pandy, Margate, about 5 hours ago

That bloke wrote a lotta plays didn't he?

0

12

Click to rate

m. smith, Kingston, Canada, about 5 hours ago

So many people have been trying to prove that Shakespeare did not write the plays accredited to him, so it is amazing to read that he actually wrote a play which has been accredited to someone else

1

36

Click to rate

JeffL, London, about 2 hours ago

If you are talking about the authorship debate they are trying to prove that "Shakespeare" was not the man from Stratford but someone else using the name as a pseudonym.

Click to rate

longarmlaw, leicester, United Kingdom, about 6 hours ago

It could be or it might not to be

Elac, Sutton, United Kingdom, about 6 hours ago

Someone is out to make money!

Hit Irish version of MSND -- set in a nursing home

A Midsummer Night’s Dream review – Bard's comedy moves into a nursing home

4 / 5 stars 
 

Abbey, Dublin

Theseus is a doctor and Puck’s potion is administered by drip in an inventive production that strikes a fine balance between comedy and pathos 

 

 

Possibilities of transformation … Andrew Bennett as Bottom and Des Nealon (Tom Snout) in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Abbey theatre, Dublin. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

Helen Meany

Tuesday 24 February 2015 06.56 EST Last modified on Tuesday 24 February 2015 07.01 EST

The residents of a nursing home may be physically restricted in Gavin Quinn’s inventive production, but their imaginations run free. The cheerily bright care-home setting is an inspired choice for a work that plays with ideas of escapism and the possibilities of transformation. From the opening scene, where doctors, carers and residents dance a conga among the zimmer frames and wheelchairs, the balance between comedy and pathos is finely judged.

With Theseus (Declan Conlon) as the all-powerful doctor in charge of their fate, the possibility of abuse of the elderly residents is hinted at. When Egeus threatens his delicate mother Hermia with death if she doesn’t marry a fellow resident, Demetrius, he is supported by Theseus initially. Here Egeus is in the role of bullying son rather than father, and Hermia’s vulnerability is palpable. Later, when Bottom is reunited with the Rude Mechanicals after his forest escapade, their joy seems mixed with relief that he is still alive. At their age, nothing can be taken for granted.

From a superb ensemble cast of 18 actors, some performances stand out: Gina Moxley’s baffled Helena, fending off the attentions of Lysander, played with irrepressible skittishness by John Kavanagh. Dan Reardon cuts a very cool figure as Puck, David Pearse is deadpan as Peter Quince, and Andrew Bennett’s sunny-tempered Bottom makes the often-tedious play-within-the-play genuinely funny.

 

Gina Moxley (Helena) and Barry McGovern (Demetrius) in Abbey Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

Apart from small adjustments, Quinn takes a faithful approach to the text, adding some dance sequences and sonnets. Rather than deconstructing the play, as he has successfully done for his own Pan Pan theatre company, he incorporates inventive and telling details.

The magic potion dispensed to the lovers by Puck is medication administered by a drip, or with oxygen masks. While Aedín Cosgrove’s striking lighting design – manipulated with x-ray machines by Oberon and Puck – creates abstract moonlit images, the characters never leave the institution, but carry their pillows and duvets around with them. As the effects of the potion wears off, the lovers awake to the sound of canned sitcom laughter and reach for the walking sticks that had mysteriously vanished in their forest frolics. Whatever desires or “most rare vision” they have had will have to wait until the next night’s dream.

MSND by Britain's Shit-faced Shakespeare Coming to Somerville in April-May 2015

    

Shit-faced Shakespeare ®

Shit-faced Shakespeare is the deeply highbrow fusion of an entirely serious Shakespeare play (Midsummer Night's Dream)  with an entirely shit-faced cast member.

Side-splitting, raucous and completely interactive, the show has been running since 2010 and has already entertained over 30,000 eager theatre goers across the UK. Having successfully completed multiple sell-out runs of the Edinburgh and Brighton Fringe festivals. Now the production is coming to Boston!

With a genuinely drunken professional actor selected at random every night, no two shows are ever the same and audiences can even dictate when the actor gets to drink more to prevent unwanted sobriety.

Shit-Faced Shakespeare seeks to introduce a new generation of theatre-goers to the works of the Bard by reviving the raucous, interactive and vibrant nature of Elizabethan theatre with a very modern twist - reminding them as we go to always enjoy Shakespeare responsibly.

 Shit-faced Shakespeare by the numbers:

· 6 Years old and still 0 deaths
· Over 150 professional show performed
· More than 1,400 cans and over 375 bottles of beer consumed on stage
· Times the Dawson's Creek theme tune has been drunkenly sung: 37
· Approximately 4,450 Units of alcohol drank in preparation for shows
· 29 individual nipples displayed on stage ( 62% of them male)
· £179.90 worth of Domino's pizza ordered during a single show (it was 2 for 1 Tuesday...)
· Number of prosthetic limbs used during sword fights: 1

"Genuinely hilarious" - Guardian
"The funniest show at the Fringe" - Daily Star
"Very rock 'n' roll" - Times

“Is this a stagger I see before me?...You’re Bard!” Sun

WHAT:
Shit-faced Shakespeare
by Magnificent Bastard Productions
produced by Gabriel Kuttner and Daniel Berger-Jones, in association with
 Cambridge Historical Tours

Cast:

Lewis Ironside :: Puck / Lysander
Stacey Norris :: Helena / Hermia
John Sebastian Borelli :: Demetrius
Beth-Louise Priestley :: Hermia
Saul Marron :: Lysander / Demetrius


An adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream By William Shakespeare & The Company with additional material by Lewis Ironside;



When:
Previews: April 10th, 11th, 12th, & 14th
Opening: Wednesday, April 15th at 7:30pm
Runs through May 1, 2015; 

Where: Davis Square Theatre
255 Elm Street
Somerville, MA
(617) 684-5335
Tickets: shitfacedshakespeare.eventbrite.com
Facebook :: Twitter
For More Information: www.shit-facedshakespeare.com
* * *
For all publicity related inquiries:
Laura Sullivan at Drive Public Relations + Consulting :: laura@driveprc.com or 617.286.2064

Shakespeare Early and Great Psychologist

Shakespeare: One of the First and Greatest Psychologists

Steven Pinker finds insight into the frailty of human nature within Measure for Measure.

Joe Fassler Jan 7 2015, 8:01 AM ET

Doug McLean

Harvard linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker groups social reformers into two broad categories. The moralist condemns one behavior and promotes another; the scientist, on the other hand, tries to understand why human beings do the things they do, hoping self-knowledge will lead to positive change. In our conversation for this series, Pinker chose a favorite passage from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that illustrates both points of view—in its critique of human nature, Isabella’s speech swivels from detached observation to plaintive complaint. We discussed the limits of both science and moral judgments, and his belief that the analytic mindset is humanity’s best hope for a peaceful future.
Pinker’s most recent book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, gives Strunk and White a much-needed OS update—while he acknowledges the merits of The Elements of Style, his book’s insightful introduction explains why a language can’t have one rulebook for two long. (Strunk and White suggested avoiding words like “geek” and “funky,” for instance, claiming they would fall quickly out of fashion.) The Sense of Style applies a linguist’s semantic chops to the questions of prose aesthetics, breathes fresh insight into grammar’s disputed territories, and takes stock of new developments in our ever-shifting American English.
In his previous book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Pinker argued that the years since World War II have been an era of unprecedented peace and stability. The author of many scholarly studies and popular books, including The Language Instinct, Pinker was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2004. He spoke to me by phone.

---

Steven Pinker: In my book The Better Angels of Our Nature, I had two chapters on the psychology and neuroscience of violence. The first, “Inner Demons,” was on the systems in the human brain that cause people to engage in violence, namely revenge, dominance, sadism and exploitation. The other, “Better Angels,” was on the systems in the human brain that allow us to refrain from violence, namely compassion, self-control, reason, and moral norms.
This passage, taken from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, served as the epigraph to “Inner Demons”:

               But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur'd;
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.

Here, the character Isabella pleads for the life of her brother, Claudio, who has been condemned to be beheaded because he had impregnated his fiancée before they were married. Isabella appeals to the mercy and common sense of Angelo, a deputy who has  been temporarily put in charge of Venice.
The play reminds us of the ubiquity of puritanical legal codes and barbaric punishments through much of the history of civilization. It’s a reminder that the horrors of the Islamic State are nothing new: our own cultural tradition has had enough of it that it could serve as the backdrop for this famous play. Of course, by the time Measure for Measure was being performed—1604—theatergoers must have perceived decapitation for the offense of fornication as barbaric; that revulsion is the source of the play’s tension, as we sympathize with Isabella’s appeal to Angelo. In this way, the play is propelled by the kind of moral progress I write about. We witness the triumph of nonviolence over violence: Angelo does not, in fact, carry out the harsh sentence.
The passage itself is a mordant reflection on the flaws of the human moral sense. The subtitle of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a bit of an exaggeration, but it captures the fact that the bard was one of our first and greatest psychologists. Isabella compares the administration of an idealized divine justice with the all-too-fallible human justice. She reminds us that humans are capable of meting out patently cruel and pointless punishment judgments with complete confidence they are doing the right thing.
In the lines that precede the excerpt, we hear how Jove reserves the worst punishments for the hardest-hearted wrongdoers:

                Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man…

Ideal punishments are proportional to the crime and the criminal. The gods would not use lightning to smite a “soft myrtle” but only the “gnarled oak,” the most obdurate kind of harmdoer. But “proud man” is more vengeful than Jupiter. I interpret the line “drest in a little brief authority” as referring not just to the fact that Angelo has only temporarily been put in charge by the absent Duke, but that all human claims to authority are, despite our pretensions to wise leadership, contingent and fleeting. The authority of rulers is insubstantial, our sense of justice fickle and haphazard.
Worse still, we humans are the last to notice our own limited nature. In seven words, Shakespeare sums up a good portion of the findings of modern psychology: “most ignorant of what he’s most assured.” A recurring discovery of social and cognitive psychology is that human beings are absurdly overconfident in their own knowledge, wisdom, and rectitude. Everyone thinks that he or she is in the right, and that the people they disagree with are stupid, stubborn, and ignorant. People reliably overestimate their own knowledge, and misjudge their own accuracy at making predictions. A common theme of both Shakespeare and modern social psychology is the human species’ overconfidence.
Remarkably, Shakespeare identifies this darker side with what we now know to be our evolutionary ancestry. With “like an angry ape,” he compares us to our primate cousins (an impressive 250 years before Darwin). What a striking simile for human impetuousness and foolishness! We tend to dignify displays of human emotion; presented with a burst of feeling, we seek its cause. But an angry ape we look on with amusement—the rage is infantile, comic, the result of ape’s own limited understanding. The detached amusement at the absurdity of human acts continues in the next line—“plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven.” “Playing a trick” refers to something lighthearted, trivial. Our feeble attempts at wisdom and justice, our petty exercise of power, appear ridiculous to wiser, celestial onlookers.

Related Story

Then comes the shattering climax. With “as make the angels weep,” we experience an abrupt transition from the comic and absurd to the tragic and pathetic. It’s only at the very last word, “weep,” that the listener or reader is suddenly ripped into a different vantage point. From a detached perspective, the actions of humans laughable—we’re angry apes, we play tricks. But the human costs of human folly are no joke—they are tragic enough to make even the angels weep. What makes this passage so wrenching is that the shift from comic to tragic is concentrated in just two words: “angels weep.” Fittingly, they come at the end of the sentence. It’s a deep principle of style that the most information-rich or newsworthy part of a sentence should come at the end—and here, “weep” tonally trumps the comic antics that precede it. Yes, human beings are ridiculous, deluded, hilariously petty, comically misguided. But ultimately, these foibles have horrendous, lamentable consequences. Isabella’s reflection on the folly of human nature culminates in the tragic appreciation that absurd actions cause great suffering.
Indeed, this passage contrasts the two major perspectives that people adopt when it comes to other people’s behavior. There is the moralist’s perspective: behaviors that cause suffering are acts of pure evil, freely chosen. They are ultimately inexplicable and forever inexcusable. Then, there is the scientist’s perspective. The scientist seeks the cause of behavior. Scientists don’t judge, and they don’t weep; they ask why. Interestingly, the moralist’s perspective aligns with the perspective of the victim: this suffering is needless, inexplicable, avoidable, inexcusable. The scientist’s perspective, on the other hand, aligns with the perspective of the perpetrator: it seeks to rationalize and contextualize evil acts, the better to make sense of them. “I was just doing what anyone in that situation would do,” the perpetrator will often say—and the scientist, in subsuming the perpetrator’s act to some generalization about human behavior, seems to agree. Though the scientist has a different goal than the perpetrator—to understand, rather than to exculpate—their analytic stances overlap.

These two perspectives color every analysis of human behavior.

These two perspectives—that of the perpetrator or scientist, and that of the victim or moralist—color every analysis of human behavior. And here, we see Shakespeare suddenly flipping from one to the other for dramatic effect. It is the detached scientist’s perspective that likens humans to apes, that sees them as merely playing tricks. Suddenly we are yanked back to the perspective of the ultimate moralists: the angels.
Though the scientist’s viewpoint is often seen as cold, detached, amoral, I argue in the book that ultimately it can be more moral than the moralist’s. It is not enough to weep over tragedies, even when weeping is appropriate. We should also apply our analytic powers to explicate the motives that lead humans to do destructive things. And, paradoxically, it’s our moralistic impulses that often lead to the greatest destruction. That’s because, as Isabella observes, we are an ignorant and overconfident species. When we make moral judgments based on our parochial understanding of the world, we often do great harm.
Why is Angelo prepared to decapitate Claudio? It’s not for his own gain; he believes he’s implementing justice. He’s putting a law into practice and therefore acting as a moral agent; he firmly believes he’s doing the right thing. It’s his inability to see beyond the narrow framework of the conventions of his time and place, rather than any evil, self-serving motive, that in fact will lead him to commit an evil act.
History is replete with Angelos. If you were to add up the number of killings by people in pursuit of what they think are moral aims, whether it’s personal vengeance, implementing justice, or hastening a utopia or messianic age, the body count would surely be higher than the victims of amoral predation and exploitation.
That’s why pure moralism does more harm than good, and why a legitimate moral concern with human welfare must work together with a scientific drive to understand the causes of wrongdoing. If, as moralists, our responsibility is to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, then the most powerful way to do that is through analytic engagement: moral philosophy, reasoned jurisprudence, legal scholarship, and the sciences of human nature. When we can say what makes us tick, we can rearrange our environments in ways that inhibit aggression and enhance empathy, compassion and reason.
To make the world a better place, we must be conscious of our cognitive and moral limitations. We must remain aware that we’re prone to imposing unreasonable judgments. When we mete out what we think is justice —“drest in a little brief authority”—we should be acutely aware of our fallibility in doing so. We are not angels, though we can imagine how we look to them.

Shakespeare Said It First

21 Phrases You Use Without Realizing You’re Quoting Shakespeare

 

Dana Schwartz

Image credit: 

getty images

William Shakespeare devised new words and countless plot tropes that still appear in everyday life. Famous quotes from his plays are easily recognizable; phrases like “To be or not to be,” “wherefore art thou Romeo,” and “et tu, Brute?” instantly evoke images of wooden stages and Elizabethan costumes. But an incredible number of lines from his plays have become so ingrained into modern vernacular that we no longer recognize them as lines from plays at all. Here are 21 phrases you use but may not have known came from the Bard of Avon.

1. “WILD GOOSE CHASE”: ROMEO AND JULIET, ACT II, SCENE IV

“Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five. Was I with you there for the goose?” — Mercutio
This term didn't originally refer to actual geese, but rather a type of horse race.

2. “GREEN-EYED MONSTER”: Othello, Act III, Scene III

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on." - Iago
Before Shakespeare, the color green was most commonly associated with illness. Shakespeare turned the notion of being sick with jealousy into a metaphor that we still use today.

3. "PURE AS THE DRIVEN SNOW”: HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE I and THE WINTER’S TALE, ACT IV, SCENE IV

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.” — Hamlet,
“Lawn as white as driven snow.” — Autolycus
Though Shakespeare never actually used the full phrase “pure as the driven snow,” both parts of it appear in his work. For the record, this simile works best right after the snow falls, and not a few hours later when tires and footprints turn it into brown slush.

4. "SEEN BETTER DAYS": AS YOU LIKE IT, ACT II, SCENE VII

“True is it that we have seen better days and have with holy bell been knolled to church, and sat at good men’s feasts and wiped our eyes of drops that sacred pity hath engendered.” –Duke Senior
The first recorded use of “seen better days” actually appeared in Sir Thomas More in 1590, but the play was written anonymously, and is often at least partially attributed to Shakespeare. We do know Shakespeare was a fan of the phrase; he uses “seen better days” in As You Like It, and then again in Timon of Athens.

5. "OFF WITH HIS HEAD": RICHARD III, ACT III, SCENE IV

“If? Thou protector of this damnèd strumpet, talk’st thou to me of “ifs”? Thou art a traitor—Off with his head.” – Richard III
The Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland wasn’t the first monarch with a penchant for liberating heads from bodies. Her famous catchphrase came from Shakespeare first.

6. "FOREVER AND A DAY": AS YOU LIKE IT, ACT IV, SCENE I

"Now tell me how long you would have her after you have possessed her.” — Rosalind
“Forever and a day” — Orlando
We have The Bard to thank for this perfect fodder for Valentine’s Day cards and middle school students’ love songs.

7. "GOOD RIDDANCE": TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ACT II, SCENE I

[Thersites exits]
“A good riddance.” — Patroclus
Where would Green Day be without Shakespeare’s riposte? In addition to acoustic ballad titles, “good riddance” also applies well to exes, house pests (both human and insect), and in-laws.

8. "FAIR PLAY": THE TEMPEST, ACT V, SCENE I

“Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, and I would call it fair play.” — Miranda
Prospero’s daughter never would have been able to predict that “fair play” is used more often now in sports than it is for the negotiation of kingdoms.

9. "LIE LOW": MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, ACT V, SCENE I

“If he could right himself with quarreling, some of us would lie low.” — Antonio
Shakespeare’s plays contain brilliant wisdom that still applies today. In “lie low,” he concocted the perfect two-word PR advice for every celebrity embroiled in a scandal.

10. "IT’S GREEK TO ME”: JULIUS CAESAR, ACT I, SCENE II

“Nay, an I tell you that, Ill ne'er look you i' the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me. — Casca
“It’s all Greek to me” might possibly be the most intelligent way of telling someone that you have absolutely no idea what’s going on.

11. "AS GOOD LUCK WOULD HAVE IT": THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, ACT III, SCENE V

“As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's approach; and, in her invention and Ford's wife's distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.” — Falstaff
Determining whether a Shakespeare play is a comedy or a tragedy can largely be boiled down to whether good luck would have anything for the characters.

12. "YOU’VE GOT TO BE CRUEL TO BE KIND": HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE IV

“So, again, good night. I must be cruel only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” — Hamlet
Here’s an idiom that proves just because a character in a Shakespeare play said it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always true. Hamlet probably isn’t the best role model, especially given the whole accidentally-stabbing-someone-behind-a-curtain thing.

13. "LOVE IS BLIND”: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ACT II, SCENE VI

“But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit, for if they could Cupid himself would blush to see me thus transformèd to a boy.” — Jessica
Chaucer actually wrote the phrase (“For loue is blynd alday and may nat see”) in Merchant’s Tale in 1405, but it didn’t become popular, and isn’t seen in print again, until Shakespeare wrote it down. Now, “love is blind” serves as the three-word explanation for any seemingly unlikely couple.

14. “BE-ALL, END-ALL”: MACBETH, ACT I, SCENE VII

“If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we’d jump the life to come.” — Macbeth
Macbeth uses the phrase just as he’s thinking about assassinating King Duncan and, ironically, as anyone who’s familiar with the play knows, the assassination doesn’t turn out to be the “end all” after all.

15. “BREAK THE ICE”: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, ACT I, SCENE II

If it be so, sir, that you are the man must stead us all, and me amongst the rest, and if you break the ice and do this feat, achieve the elder, set the younger free for our access, whose hap shall be to have her will not so graceless be to be ingrate.” — Tranio (as Lucentio)
If you want to really break the ice, the phrase appears to have come from Thomas North, whose translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans provided much of the inspiration for Shakespeare’s ancient word plays. This is a great meta “did you know” fact for getting to know someone at speed dating

16. “HEART OF GOLD”: HENRY V, ACT IV, SCENE I

“The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold, a lad of life, an imp of fame, of parents good, of fist most valiant.” — Pistol
Turns out, the phrase “heart of gold” existed before Douglas Adams used it as the name of the first spaceship to use the Infinite Improbability Drive in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

17. “KILL WITH KINDNESS”: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, ACT IV, SCENE 1

“This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, and thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.” — Petruchio
The Shakespeare canon would contain a lot fewer dead bodies if his characters all believed they should kill their enemies with kindness instead of knives and poison.

18. “KNOCK, KNOCK! WHO’S THERE?”: MACBETH, ACT II, SCENE III

“Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th' other devil’s name?” — Porter
Though high school students suffering through English class may disagree, Shakespeare was a master of humor in his works, writing both slapstick comedy and sophisticated wordplay. And, as the Porter scene in Macbeth illustrates, he’s also the father of the knock-knock joke.

19. “LIVE LONG DAY”; JULIUS CAESAR, ACT I, SCENE I

“To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops, your infants in your arms, and there have sat the livelong day with patient expectation to see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.” — Mureless
Today, the phrase “live long day” is pretty much exclusively reserved for those who have been working on the railroad.

20. “YOU CAN’T HAVE TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING”: AS YOU LIKE IT, ACT IV, SCENE I

“Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?— Come, sister, you shall be the priest and marry us.—Give me your hand, Orlando.—What do you say, sister?” — Rosalind
Modern readers often call Shakespeare a visionary, far ahead of his time. For example: he was able to write about desiring too much of a good thing four hundred years before chocolate-hazelnut spread was widely available.

21. “THE GAME IS AFOOT”: HENRY V, ACT III, SCENE I

“The game's afoot: follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” – King Henry V
Nope! It wasn’t Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes’ most famous catchphrase comes from Henry V, although both characters do often tend to find themselves around dead bodies.

December 2, 2014 - 11:00am

   19.1K   Share

CSC's Shakespeare at Fenway Park

At Fenway, a magical night of Shakespeare

By Terry Byrne

 | Globe Correspondent   September 20, 2014

Brian Snyder/REUTERS

Actors Paul Melendy, left,  and Larry Coen were at a rehearsal at Fenway before Friday’s show.

An all-star lineup took the field — um, make that the stage — at Fenway Park Friday night for an enchanting evening of Shakespeare.

The event, which celebrated the start of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 20th anniversary, brought together an impressive collection of actors — from Seth Gilliam (“The Walking Dead”) and Zuzanna Szadkowski (“Gossip Girl”) to Mike O’Malley (“Glee”) and Maryann Plunkett (“House of Cards”) — for a selection of “greatest hits” from 10 of William Shakespeare’s plays. Artistic director Steven Maler welcomed the crowd of 4,500 and took to opportunity to announce that “King Lear” will be this summer’s production of free Shakespeare on the Boston Common.

After an introduction by Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner, complete with several of Shakespeare’s references to baseball (“Fair is foul and foul is fair”), a motley crew of Rude Mechanicals from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” bounded on stage — a 20-by-40-foot over the Red Sox dugout — to hand out roles in that comedy’s play-within-a-play. The audience seated in the stands above first base not only had a perfect view of the performance, but also a rare peek at Fenway’s beauty without the glare of field lights.

Once the Mechanicals adjourned to study their texts, Christian Coulson (“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”) arrived to offer Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, followed by his “nunnery” scene with Ophelia. Coulson’s intense focus was quite impressive; he never broke character, even when a fire alarm went off in the stands nearby.

The chilly evening was warmed by the smart, passionate performances of Bianca Amato and James Waterston from “Much Ado About Nothing”; the fraught scene between friends Kersti Bryan and Szadkowski from “Othello”; the innocent enthusiasm of Jenna Augen and Rupak Ginn in “Romeo and Juliet”; the playful repartee of Marianna Bassham and Kerry O’Malley in “Twelfth Night”; the fierce passion of Gilliam and cunning of Waterston in “Othello”; the giddy mix of triumph and terror in Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders in “Macbeth”; and the tantalizing battle of wills between Augen and Peter Cambor in “The Taming of the Shrew.” 

Interspersed among scenes were songs inspired by Shakespeare, sung by the extraordinary O’Malley, Max von Essen (who melted the crowd with “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story”), Jason Butler Harner, who accompanied the Mill Town Rounders and delivered a soliloquy from “Richard II,” and Neal McDonough, who performed a sonnet, first lovingly to his wife via cellphone, and then with the darker strains of the heavies he often plays in film.

The evening closed with the entire cast gathered on stage for a hilarious performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “Midsummer’s” play-wihtin-the-play. Local favorites Rick Park, Will LeBow, Paul Melendy, and Larry Coen joined Cambor and Mike O’Malley for a joyous ending to a truly magical evening of theater.

Bollywood Keeps Copying Ideas From Shakespeare

Bollywood hearts Shakespeare... but sadly not everyone can pull off a Haider

Oct 3, 2014 10:24 IST

by Nandan Kini

Shakespeare comes back to Bollywood this week, and it’s his old hand, Vishal Bhardwaj, who brings him back in style in with Haider, a grim adaptation of Hamlet.

Having already made his mark with Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello), Vishal clearly has a nose for the Bard’s works.

However, Bollywood’s obsession with Shakespeare runs deeper than Bhardwaj’s trilogy.
This is not surprising since the Bard may just have been the pioneer of Bollywood’s favourite masala stories, penning girl-meets-boy-and-then-dies love stories on one hand, and maa-kasam-badla-loonga revenge dramas like Hamlet on the other. (Papa-kasam-badla-loonga story, in Hamlet's case, of course.)
More Hindi movies
 than one can imagine have sought inspiration from his works, intentionally or otherwise. We all applaud the good ones, but it's clear that most of the adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were made, wittingly or unwittingly, with the unstated goal of making old Willie turn in his grave.

Sadly, not all Bollywood tributes to the bard are quite Haider: Facebook

Given Bollywood’s fixation on romance, Romeo and Juliet has been a perennial favourite for filmmakers. Everything from Ek Duje Ke Liye to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, to Ram… Wait, Goliyon Ki Rasleela – Ramleela, were apparently inspired from the tragedy. But while some of those films might have hit the mark, quite a few clearly lost the plot altogether.

The most recent example was last year’s Prateik-Amyra Dastur (who??) starrer, Issaq. Director Manish Tiwary has some good work to his name (Dil, Dosti, Etc.), but with Issaq, he seems to have decided to go in a more experimental direction by casting two pieces of cardboard as Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, together, Prateik and Amyra had the combined expressive range of a wooden spoon, and audiences might just have been better off staring at their home cutlery than watching this travesty.
By the numbers, Hindi cinema’s penchant for Shakespeare's comedies is way greater. While Bhardwaj’s mentor Gulzar famously adapted A Comedy of Errors for the silver screen with Angoor, starring Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Verma as a pair of identical twins with a whole lot of confused identities, David Dhawan’s Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan was also a twisted but unintentional take on pretty much the same story.

Nowhere close to Angoor, Dhawan's Shakespearean turn was presented as Amitabh Bachchan’s comeback vehicle, but instead saw Bachchan hamming it up, playing virtual second lead to Govinda, and basically rehashed his dead-on-arrival ‘80s' act with some very crass jokes.

Thankfully, better sense prevailed, and the Big B followed Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan up with roles closer to his actual age. He did take one more stab at Shakespeare, with the desi English language film, The Last Lear. This time, he managed to drive the stake right through Willie’s soul in this painfully contrived adaptation of King Lear. Not exactly Bollywood, but I digress.

If you look down upon Amitabh Bachchan for succumbing to Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan, know that even Bollywood’s biggest production houses couldn’t resist taking a shot at Shakespeare.
Take Yash Raj, for example, which, in 2009, released a bomb called Dil Bole Hadippa, starring the current Mrs Chopra aka Rani Mukherjee and Shahid Kapoor.

Director Anurag Singh probably thought he was plagiarising from an equally terrible Hollywood comedy called She’s The Man when he made his film about Rani dressing up as a sardar, beard and all, to get onto a cricket team.

Perhaps not a sports team, but the earliest version of this cross-dressing confusion was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the Countess Olivia dresses up as a young man Cesario to enter Duke Orsino’s service. That, however, was the end of similarities. Dil Bole Hadippa featured no Shakespearean flourishes and went down without effort at the box office. Perhaps it was the fact that Rani as a sardar looked more butch than Shahid... but then, who knows?

Speaking of butch women and effeminate looking heroes, Rajshri’s 2010 release, Isi Life Mein featured a similar pairing, with two doe-eyed unknowns Akshay Oberoi and Sandeepa Dhar in starring roles.

The film started off as a ham-handed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and even featured the play as a plot device before veering into more familiar, sanskaari, Barjatya territory and sparing the Bard’s soul some terrible torture.

Not every filmmaker is that understanding: filmmaker Sharat Katariya adapted the magical A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a film called 10ml Love back in 2012, and one imagines he must have been hopped up on 30ml of something while making it.

The film was your typical low-budget, arty Bollywood fare, starring regulars like Purab Kohli and Rajat Kapoor. The twist, though, was that the actors were probably not informed that the film was meant to be a comedy, and ended up sleepwalking through it all, turning this dream into an insufferable dozefest instead.

Given his track record with Shakespeare, one can be sure that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider will not disappoint this week. Until then, however, could we please hide those copies of Love’s Labour’s Lost, lest David Dhawan or Sajid Khan find them?

Nandan Kini is a documentary film researcher and journalist based in Mumbai. Also the national president of the Association of the Sartorially Challenged, he tweets at @bombilfry and has booked his face at Facebook.com/nandan.kini.