The Taming Of The Shrew, 1967

The Taming of the Shrew, 1967

saw a production of hamlet recently that had the reason gertrude didn't see the ghost in 3.4 (closet scene) is because she was too focused on hamlet and trying to get through to him and make sure he was okay. at one point hamlet was physically twisting her around to try to point her towards the ghost and she still didn't take her eyes off his face. she doesn't once turn around from the second hamlet starts talking to the empty air. and idk man that did something to me.

bro i hate iago but i always laugh at this exchange

i hate when people criticise hamlet because the character hamlet is a bad person. like first of all he is not real. and what he is is a representation of grief. the whole point is that grief and depression make you angry and annoying and obsessive and self absorbed. they make you feel like you’re the only person in the world who feels the way you do. they make you take it out on others. hamlet is a manifestation of grief taken to the extreme. and not to assume things about the personal life of a guy who died 400 years ago but. shakespeare wrote hamlet after his son died. hamlet’s flaws were likely taken from his own grief. hamlet isn’t supposed to be a good person he’s supposed to show how unaddressed grief makes you fall apart and hurt people and it’s not always pretty

"But there is something particular about Cleopatra and the imaginative escape she offers for white performers. She presents a fantasy of a stately queen with an erotic power that white actresses can inhabit and take pleasure in without facing any of the difficulties faced by Black women. Like white European colonial settlers, they occupy her character though only briefly. And this is nothing new. In the seventeenth century, one aristocratic woman had her portrait painted as Cleopatra—a performative act in which it was possible to pretend to be the kind of woman she could never actually be within the chaste and virtuous bounds of Renaissance white womanhood. The sitter is identified as Lady Anne Clifford. A Jacobean lady in Egyptian regalia, according to seventeenth-century orientalist notion of national costume, holds an asp above her breast, iconically invoking Cleopatra. For a long time, it seems, white women have stepped into the fantasy of the dark queen. It seems odd that Antony and Cleopatra was not always viewed as one of Shakespeare's race plays. That is changing, finally. If theatre directors continue to centralise whiteness in their readings of the play, however, it in many ways replicates Caesar's triumph over Egypt. We relive Cleopatra's defeat every time we watch a white woman play her—due respect to Dames Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, and Eve Best. But we begin to see more clearly the Egyptian Queen's own prophetic vision as she chose to end her life on her own terms. She imagined herself being performed for years to come by actors who do not resemble her in any way—and that is, for the most part, what has happened."

—Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (emphasis mine)