I was watching the new Bond movie, and early in the film, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw, and Rory Kinnear were all on screen together. Instinctually, I found myself thinking “Oh, too bad they’re not doing Shakespeare right now.” And then I thought, “Okay, if I had this cast at my disposal, what would I do? How would I cast it?” And, thus, the Film/Shake Challenge was born.

So, here’s my first attempt, casting Cymbeline using the cast of No Time to Die:

CYMBELINE, King of Britain: Ralph Fiennes
Cymbeline’s QUEEN: Lashana Lynch
IMOGEN, daughter to Cymbeline by his former queen: Léa Seydoux
POSTHUMUS LEONATUS, husband to Imogen: Billy Magnussen
CLOTEN, son to the present queen by a former husband: Ben Whishaw
PISANIO, Posthumus’s servant: Daniel Craig
CORNELIUS, a physician in Cymbeline’s court: Jeffrey Wright
PHILARIO, Posthumus’s host in Rome: Christof Waltz
IACHIMO, friend to Philario: Rami Malek
CAIUS LUCIUS, a Roman general: Hugh Dennis
BELARIUS, an exiled nobleman: Rory Kinnear

There’s a lot you could do with that cast, but instead, let me cast King John with the actors from Dune:

JOHN, King of England: Stellan Skarsgård
QUEEN ELEANOR, King John’s mother: Charlotte Rampling
BLANCHE of Spain, niece to King John: Zendaya
CONSTANCE, widow of Geoffrey, King John’s elder brother: Rebecca Ferguson
ARTHUR, Duke of Brittany, her son: Timothée Chalamet
KING PHILIP II of France: Javier Bardem
LOUIS THE DAUPHIN, his son: Oscar Isaac
DUKE OF AUSTRIA (also called LIMOGES): Jason Momoa
The BASTARD, PHILIP FAULCONBRIDGE, illegitimate son of King Richard I: Dave Bautista
HUBERT, supporter of King John: Stephen McKinley Henderson

Get the idea? Feel free to post your own Film/Shake combo in the comments below!

Back when we used to be able to enjoy things like bars and friends, I used to participate in a monthly event held in a bar called Drunken Shakespeare.

Sponsored by the Night Shift Theatre Company, the event invited anybody who wished to participate to come in and sign up for a slot to perform a Shakespeare piece to the crowd. I was a regular since my first attendance in June 2017.

When the pandemic hit, the event was renamed #SequesteredShakespeare and moved to Instagram. We also did a few socially distant meetings in person in Central Park when the weather was nicer.

The most recent Sequestered Shakespeare was held online this past Monday. Here is the video I put together to share with the group.

Enjoy!

Caption: Shakespeare’s Prince Hal envisions his reformation and his future as king.

In the before-times, when social contact was allowed, one of my favorite things to do was to gather with friends and do readings of Shakespeare’s plays. We would choose a play in advance, meet together at an agreed-upon time, divide up the roles, and read the play out loud from beginning to end.

When the world shut down, I was part of four such groups, each of which met on a monthly basis. This seems like it would mean a weekly reading for me, but in practice, the dates tended to cluster, and I often attended several in one week.

Since the COVID shelter-in-place, all four groups have shifted online, and I now participate in regular readings via Zoom. To be clear, this doesn’t come close to replacing getting together with friends and reading live, but it does replace not having a reading at all quite nicely.

And it occurs to me that there may be some folks within the sound of my voice who might be looking for something fun to do with friends from a distance. If a Shakespeare reading sounds like fun for you, I want to show you how easy it can be to put together.

First, find some friends who like Shakespeare and want to do this. One person should have a Zoom account so they can create a room, but if that’s not available, there are alternatives like Google Meet that can also work.

Last year, I put together a resource page for groups who want to meet live to do Shakespeare readings. That’s not an option right now, but the page is just as useful for online readings.

You can choose the play in advance, or wait until everyone has met and choose a play based on the recommendations for the number of readers you have.

There are 24 plays that have sections on the page, and each play section links to the Folger Digital Text for that play, so everyone will be using the same text. Each section also contains divisions to assign roles from the play to 2 to 12 readers.

All that remains is to randomize who is assigned each reader number, which can be quickly done at this website.

So, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with your long-lost Shakespeare-loving friends, online Shakespeare readings just might be the thing to try!

What if the events of Macbeth had taken place in 2020, and the witches were forced to hold their fateful meeting online? It just might look a little something like this:

Today is Sibling’s Day, and I’m pleased to send a shout out to my sister Susan, as well as the honorary brothers and sisters I’ve been lucky to accumulate over the years.

I lost such an adopted brother four years ago today. Larry Cohen and I grew up together throughout childhood and our teenage years. My earliest memories of him are from the second grade play — I was the Scarecrow and he played the Tin Man — though our association must have gone back longer than that since our mothers were best friends. Case in point, I first learned about my mother’s cancer from Larry. She had told Anne Cohen before she told me. A lot of information went through that loop over the years, but none for some time, since I’m the only surviving member of the quartet.

Larry had a sister Lauren, who was Susan’s age, also part of our extended elective family. So when Lauren posted a Facebook request for stories about her brother so her nephew Forest could read about his father, I decided to bring it here, where I could have the space to be as long-winded and self-indulgent as the moment would allow. If that doesn’t interest you today, you can come back on Thursday for the riddle. There won’t be any anagrams or Shakespeare references here. (Well, maybe just one Shakespeare reference towards the end, but that’s it.)

My friendship with Larry spanned well over forty years and through many stages of life, but if I’m being honest, I think of him as my middle-school friend, because that’s about as important as it gets. When you’re as vulnerable as we are at that age, it matters a lot who you choose to trust. Sharing secrets nobody else can know. Co-navigating the social jungle of adolescence. Discovering who you are and who you can help each other become. That’s who Larry and I were to each other. We started out as little boys and we became men together, and we were better men for having done it together. That’s a bond that, once formed, can never be broken, not even now. Not even in death. Because the man I am now came out of that time, and the people who were a part of that will always be a part of me. Period.

We were also part of the same synagogue, and a lot of our social world revolved around events and organizations in the Jewish community. We were observant, but not particularly religious, and services were something we did out of obligation, not devotion. There was one prayer that Larry and I made a little game around. Most Jewish people are very familiar with the commonly recited prayer “Aleinu” (literally “it is upon us”) and its familiar opening line:

The prayer ends with the words u’shemo echad (his name will be one), and in the services I’ve attended, it is sung to a particular tune so that the word u’shemo is repeated three times. Larry and I, as middle-school children, thought it would be funny to point to each other and sing “You schmo” while everyone else was singing u’shemo. So we did, and it was even funnier than we had hoped! What’s more, it got funnier and funnier each time we did it, over the many years we attended services together. I don’t know how two school children in the early 1980’s were able to develop such a sophisticated and wry sense of humor, but you’ll have to trust me — it was comedy gold.

Fast forward through high school and beyond. There are a lot more stories I could tell. Larry and I founded a Students Against Driving Drunk chapter our freshman year of high school, and by our junior year, it had over 100 members. But, for now, I want to push forward to October 2005. My father passed away that month after a year-long battle with cancer. Friends and family — including Larry, Lauren, and Anne — gathered at my mother’s house for the Jewish custom of sitting shiva. For those who haven’t done it, it involves a lot of food, stories about the deceased, and intense community bonding.

At one point, we gathered in the foyer to do prayers, and one of the prayers was the Mourner’s Kaddish. I hadn’t cried for my father’s death before then, but something about saying the Mourner’s Kaddish as an actual mourner brought me to the breaking point. All of the stress that had been building up in my body erupted, and I found myself crying and shaking and pushing my way through a prayer that was overly familiar and yet an entirely new experience for me. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for my father may have been one of the worst moments of my life. And then, just like that, it was over, and we were ready to move on to the next prayer in the book.

From across the crowded room, Larry and I made eye contact with each other. Now, obviously, we weren’t going to do it. But that didn’t mean that we couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to make the other guy laugh at an inappropriate time. Each of us steeled ourselves, prepared for the inevitable moment to come.

Our eyes locked. Neither of us smiled. Neither of us gave a knowing nod. Just a dead stare.

He’s going to break, each of us thought. He’s weak.

The moment had passed without scandal. Each of us turned back to our prayer books. We never spoke of this moment, and I’ve never told this story until now.

But I think it’s worth telling now, because it speaks to a special type of friendship. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for my father may have been one of the worst moments of my life. But then, because my middle-school friend was there, I was able to be transported out of that moment and immerse myself into a juvenile game filled with childish nostalgia. That’s a piece of magic. And while I may have a few other friends that I have that kind of a special relationship with, I will never, ever make another one, and so the loss of one of the few I had was immeasurable.

I hope Forest will read this, today or someday, and to him, I offer some words from the poet Shakespeare:

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.

Sometimes Shakespeare’s lines can be hard to understand, but these aren’t. The friends you make in middle school won’t be your best friends in life. When you’re an adult, you may go years without talking with them. But they hold a special place in your life and should be cherished. You might as well start appreciating them now. And saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for my father was plenty hard for me; I can’t imagine what it will be like for you tomorrow. When you’re older, we’ll get together, and I’ll tell you the real stories.

And one last thing: be respectful during services. Other people around you are trying to pray. Don’t be a knucklehead like your dad was.

From Julius Caesar:

This was the noblest Roman of them all.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Man, Mitt alone shows the fresh ballot.

From Julius Caesar:

And know it now: the senate have concluded
To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Watch democracy’s death: a gang trial with no witness, evidence.

Oh, yank Don out. Vote.

Donald Trump now stands the third impeached president in the history of the United States.

This is not a time for celebration. I supported impeachment because I believed the president’s abuse of power was incompatible with faithful leadership, and for the House to do any less would be a dereliction of duty. But the fact that we as a nation have fallen to the point where we have a president who required impeachment is a disgrace against all of us.

The president’s party continues to vehemently defend him, though there are exceptions. Four prominent Republican pundits published an anti-Trump op-ed in The New York Times. Christianity Today supports removal. Even The National Review has turned on him. But the majority of public-facing Republicans are still in his corner. Mitch McConnell is planning to blow off the trial, while Lindsey Graham won’t even pretend he’s going to be an impartial juror.

When I hear someone defending the president, I want to ask them if they believe the president didn’t do the things he’s accused of, or he did them but was perfectly entitled to do so. Trump was impeached on two very specific charges. He abused the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to announce an embarrassing investigation of his political opponent. He issued a blanket denial of congressional subpoenas for himself, his government branch, and all documents being requested as part of Congressional oversight. So did he not do these things? Are they okay to do? I’m not really sure what the defense is supposed to be here.

Impeachment is a big deal, if for no other reason but that it indelibly records the president’s misdeeds in the history books. But I hope history will also remember the craven Republicans who stood by him when their country needed them to have some integrity and take a stand. Some are saying that Nancy Pelosi should deny sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate. But I’d like to see them take a vote. Let each and every one of them decide what they want the first line of their obituary to be.

From Richard II:

I am disgraced, impeach’d and baffled here

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

An addled chamber hid a spied crime gaffe.

Shakespeare Teacher (and Quincy) got a nice mention in the most recent issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter!

Click the image to read the entire article by Stephanie Cowell, who crafted a lovely write-up of our reading group, now running over ten years.

Or, you can click here to go directly to the resource page referenced in the article.

From Hamlet:

There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

When his father lectures hence, my Laertes-type might respond with a tetchy “OK, Boomer.”