A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
When we last left our heroine Juliet, she was dead.
...OR WAS SHE???????????
Has anyone seen the "poorly timed comic interlude with musicians" bit in performance? I've only seen it once, and based on that particular experience, I have no real complaints about it being habitually cut.
When we last saw Juliet, she had just taken a somewhat dubious temporary coma potion given to her by Friar Laurence. Let's see how that worked out...
I love the musicians in this scene, by the way. They're just out of frame right now, but we'll see them next time...
A reminder that I will be exhibiting at the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (nee Kids Read Comics) this weekend! Stop by the downtown Ann Arbor District Library between 12:00pm and 5:30pm on Saturday and Sunday and say hello! I will be selling the usual t-shirts, posters, and comic books. It's going to be a lot of fun!
Zero hour is rapidly approaching. Let's see how Juliet deals with this...
Confession: I kind of love Juliet's speech where she freaks out about all the things that could go wrong upon taking the Friar's potion. She goes from "death" to "waking up and being all alone in a tomb" to "being driven mad and playing with the corpses of her family" to "bashing her brains out with a bone".
And then she goes and takes the potion anyways. That's badass.
Let's see how Operation Take A Non-FDA Tested Temporary Coma Potion In Order To Get Prematurely Entombed is going...
I've been trying really hard to come up with other punchlines besides "what could possibly go wrong", but that's such a perfect punchline for this play that it's REALLY HARD not to use it as many times as possible.
OK, the pace is picking up now! Romeo has been banished, Capulet is forcing Juliet to marry Paris in two days' time, and Juliet is headed to the last adult she trusts to give her reasonable advice! Let's see how this goes!
Did I say "reasonable advice"? I mean "highly sketchy advice".
So, last month one of my Tumblr followers posed the following question:
jmujaneway asked:
Hiya! Someone at lunch said there's a debate as to which Shakespeare character spends the most time dead on stage. I figured you'd know! Please help?
I offered up my best guesses (Caesar and Desdemona) and then Tumblr took over, with nellololol going to far as to do some in-depth research and provide us with some line counts. This was far too fun to leave alone, though, so I've done my own line-counting and here are the results!
Now, Bassianus and Humphrey are somewhat debatable, as they can conceivably spend part of their "dead" time hidden in a pit or behind bed curtains respectively. However, I have seen both languish on stage in person, so they are included. Conversely, I don't think I've ever seen a Romeo and Juliet production that actually included the "real live body" of Tybalt in the final scene, but I have heard of those that have, and that have similarly had a "real live body" of Caesar in the funeral scene.
If we go by the has-to-be-on-stage-dead-the-entire-time-no-chance-of-being-swapped-out-for-a-dummy matrix, however, the winner is Desdemona. Take a bow Desd-- oh wait, you can't. You're dead.
Parents. Can't live without 'em, but also definitely can't live with 'em.
POP QUIZ! Lord Capulet is:
(a) A jerk
(b) A terrible father
(c) A tyrant
(d) All of the above.
If you guessed "d"... YOU'RE CORRECT! CONGRATULATIONS!
Imagine that your secret husband has just been basnished for murdering your cousin! What could possibly make this situation worse?
Parents. Parents can make it worse.
