Thomas Ouphe

I think you ought to know, I'm feeling very depressed. As You Like It is Shakespeare doing the equivalent of a clip show. The whole play is filled with the kinds of things that show up in his earlier comedies. We have: • Brothers at odds with each other. • An intelligent female cross-dresser • A clown (Touchstone) making sheep jokes. • Multiple couples in minor confusions. • A Greek god inexplicably showing up. • Lots and lots of weddings. That said, it's much more polished than his earlier plays. The main plot is slow to start and most of the comedy comes from Orlando still be attracted to the woman he loves when she's dressed as a male shepherd. This is also the root of most of the sheep jokes. As You Like It has one thing that's new to Shakespeare, and that's Jaques. Whilst all the bog-standard rom-com stuff is happening, Jaques' only role in the play is to stand back and moan about how rubbish it all is. Jaques is a mixture of Marvin the Paranoi...

Not this clever! I wouldn't be the first person to point out that this play has some things in common with Allo Allo.  Outrageous foreign accents, a plump libidinous protagonist (Falstaff) embroiled in a farce of misunderstandings and unseen comeuppances.   Nor would I be the first person to notice that it's just God awful. There is a list of ardent bardophiles who have condemned the play.  Being a natural contrarian I had been hoping to prove them wrong, but they're right on this one.  It has all the hallmarks of bad Shakespeare comedy (animal jokes, xenophobia, flat characterisation and misogyny) without any of the clever prose. It's the worst. Allo Allo is self-aware, the Brits get as much of a roasting as the Germans and French.  That's not really the case in Merry Wives, which takes more of an It Ain't Half Hot Mum approach (though, it has to be said, nowhere near as offensive).  But, you say, Shakespeare was way ahead of his time doing funny acce...

  The Merchant of Venice The Merchant of Venice has a lot going on, so you’ll have to excuse how long this post is.   Don’t worry though, the next one up is The Merry Wives of Windsor and there’s almost nothing going on in that.    Also, given the sensitivity of the material, I did actually have to do some research into this one. There is a theory called moral self-licensing that suggests doing a good thing gives a person psychological leeway to commit future infractions.   This might explain why after having made it through a Midsummer Night's Dream without a single antisemitic comment Shakespeare then felt he had free rein to give us five full acts of hate crime. Now, it ought to be said that whilst lots of people feel TMV is antisemitic.   Some disagree and say that a few sympathetic moments redeem the play.   It is also worth noting that Hitler wasn't one of them.   He loved it and thought it was the tops. Here is a review of how TMV w...

Imagine this four times over but with letters instead of conversations and Elizabethan hygiene standards. I was quite excited to read Love's Labour's Lost, it starts really well.  The king and his three mates all swear off women for three years to pursue academic interests and higher purposes.  Oh, and the king makes it law that everyone else has to do the same for ease of plot development.  It's all going well until a princess / potential queen shows up with her exactly three friends. There's a lot of potential here, and we see an immediate step up in terms of the quality of writing.  You know those nut jobs who think all Shakespeare's plays were written by different people? Well, I almost thought they had a point for a minute.  Almost every phrase the king utters is profound and well-composed.  This can't be written by the same bloke that wrote Two Gentlemen of Verona, I erroneously posited. Then we get Costard (a clown).  Costard has already broken ...

Fifteen years of thought and reding led me to the conclusion that I drew in the last instalment. Should I ever run into Petunia (from the first instalment) again. And, should we talk long enough for the subject to come up, I will be ready to pounce like a theoretical puma in a forest of hypothetical trees. Unfortunately, I don’t have several years to wait in the hope of bumping into her so about a week ago, in the interest of rounding off this introduction, I looked her up on Facebook. To my absolute horror, I discovered she had become an English teacher. I would have been happier if she was working developing chemical weapons or testing cosmetic products on animals. I would like to elaborate on her Saul-like conversion to literature: explaining in detail how my earlier, much less though out, defence of literature had sparked a passion for literature in her that was only rivalled in intensity by the unending physical pain she felt at the regret of dumping me. However, she ignored my fr...

He wonder'd that your lordship Would suffer him to spend his youth at home,   I have to say, this one almost killed the whole Shakespeare project for me. There is a play called The Yorkshire Tragedy that was originally attributed to Shakespeare.  Critics have generally said The Yorkshire Tragedy has to be knock off Shakespeare because it's just not good enough to be written by him.  I’ve read it, it isn’t this bad.   Now, I didn’t start this project with the intention of saying all Shakey’s plays were rubbish.   But so far, that is how the wind is blowing.   Hopefully, Love’s Labour’s Lost will break the streak. Two Gentlemen of Verona is about two friends, Proteus and Valentine.   Proteus moves to Milan and falls in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia.   Valentine stays in Verona because he’s in love with Julia, who is overplaying her hand with him.   He follows Proteus to Milan, meets Silvia falls in love with her.   But he...

As far back as 1920 in,   Erwin Edman’s Human Traits and Their Social Significance   the definition of what makes a human unique from other animals has been primarily the upright stance and numerous physical peculiarities such as jaw structure and peculiar hair patterns that partially separate us from other great apes. However, minor physical peculiarities are common in most species of most groups of animals. Therefore, social psychology and anthropology have sought to categorise humanity by behavioural traits such as unusually long periods of infancy, which other animals do not share. If you are interested in a long catalogue of what makes us human I suggest you turn to the books of those scientific disciplines (they are actually very interesting) for as I made clear in the first instalment, I am no scientist. What interests me is the one form of behaviour that humanity does not share with any other species on the planet and that unique behaviour is literature. The anthropolo...