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...

Benedick and Beatrice, still work as a comedic device. If you're going to have a bad guy, why not call him Don Jon the Bastard? If he happens to be an actual bastard so much more the better. Much Ado About Nothing isn't as original or entertaining as Midsummer Night's Dream, but it is more consistent.  There's no onerous songs or tedious play within a play stuff, just two straightforward intersecting plots. One is about a rich guy (Don Pedro) who is marrying a perfect rich gal (Hero).  The big obstacle being that his bastard brother (Don John the Bastard) convinces everyone she's having an affair and the marriage falls through and she appears to have killed herself.  It's pretty good, but nowhere near as funny as the suicide gag in Romeo and Juliet.  Anyway, it all works out, and since Hero's hymen is intact she gets the green light for a quicky marriage and an expedient hymen cracking.  Btw, if you're finding all this hymen talk a little gross, you may ...

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...

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 ...

Whilst there is room to debate the issue within the creation of matter, humanity as we know it begins with language. In the beginning, reads   The Bible , was the word and the word was with God. Not only that but the word is so powerful that God only has to use a few more words to create light, the universe and all life as we know it. The Bible holds words in pretty high regard and so it should, the Bible is all just words. Seems like a simple point to make, most books primarily consist of words. However, take a minute to stop and think about the profound effect that one collection of words has had on the world. Think about the wars, the conversions, the cultures lost suppressed and destroyed. Think about the personal sacrifices it inspired, the acts of compassion, of heroism and of generosity. Feel free to stop and make a cup of tea if you want, it always hurts my head to think about it too. The Bible   is only one book in one branch of literature; its influence on the world,...

Behold the shrew in all its wildness! Shakespeare follows up his sloppy first outing into comedy by attempting a cross-genre comedy horror.  The play opens with a framing device that, in a step up from Comedy of Errors, has jokes in it.  Granted, they haven't aged well.  The funny bit here is that a bunch of nobles meet a salesman called Christopher Sly.  For shits and giggles, they get him wasted. Then humiliate him by convincing him that he's a lord.  To facilitate this, they force a young boy to wear drag and flirt with him. Yeah. You're right, I agree. It hasn't aged well. Christopher Sly does throw out a few good one-liners and one very artful monologue that make this whole section, not just tolerable but somewhat entertaining.  The nobles put on a play to distract Sly; namely, The Taming of the Shrew.  None of this first section is related to the rest of the narrative in any meaningful manner, and it all seems a bit pointless. However, as the plo...