A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
One more piece of Stick Figure Iconography before we resume normal service next week. Today we’re looking at the world’s best second banana, Hamlet’s buddy Horatio!
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
Tune in next week when (barring any more crises) I’ll finally get to the SECOND SCENE of Hamlet!
I was beset by crises last week, so I didn’t get a chance to finish this week’s installments of A Stick-Figure Hamlet. To give myself some breathing room, I’ve got a couple more Stick Figure Iconographies for you! We’ve already taken a look at young Hamlet, so this week let’s keep moving down the cast of characters and examine old Hamlet.
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
OoooOOOOoooOOoooo…
Hey! Are we still on the battlements? YOU BET WE ARE!
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
Tune in next week, when we finally move on to the SECOND scene! Boy howdy, we’re going to be with this play for a loooong time….
When we last left our heroes, there was A GHOST.
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
I realize it’s been two installments and we haven’t even finished the first scene. I hope you’re in this for the long haul, people…
Let’s get this show underway with the best opening line in all of Shakespeare!
“Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio" always makes me laugh. Tune in next week to find out what Horatio has to say.
Shortly after I had started Good Tickle Brain, I drew up the Dramatis Personae of Hamlet. That was, incidentally, the very first thing I drew after settling on the “circle on top of a kind of triangle” stick figure template that now forms the very base and pillar of my art.
Now, six years later, I am revisiting that Dramatis Personae ahead of launching into a full scene-by-scene retelling of Hamlet! Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
A moment of silence for Voltemand and Cornelius, who didn’t make this cut.
….
OK, that’s enough silence. Nobody really misses them.
It’s the final installment of Q&A August! I hope you’ve had fun meeting some of my Shakespeare friends. I know I’ve had a lot of fun asking them these questions, and I’m definitely going to do this again some time, as I have SO MANY MORE cool Shakespeare friends for you to meet. But for now, let’s turn to my closers, my last and least, Kevin Condardo and Dan Beaulieu, the bros behind one of my favorite Shakespeare podcasts: No Holds Bard!
I was skeptical about No Holds Bard at first. Launched in 2015, it appeared to be two white dudes yelling about Shakespeare at each other, which did not particularly appeal to me. I didn’t even start listening to it until I met Dan and his partner in crime, Christine Penney, in person at the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in 2016. Tousled and bewhiskered like a pirate, Dan was overwhelmingly brash, loud, unruly, obnoxious, insufferable… and somehow inexplicably charming. After meeting him, I finally started listening to No Holds Bard and found that the podcast was also brash, loud, unruly, obnoxious, insufferable… and somehow inexplicably charming.
Two things are immediately apparent upon listening to No Holds Bard: Dan and Kevin (his slightly less unruly and obnoxious co-host and the brains of the operation) both know their Shakespeare and love their Shakespeare. Their highly entertaining arguments and bro-y banter are backed up with serious knowledge of Shakespearean text and performance, and, in spite of their best efforts to contrary, you can actually learn a lot from them. Also (and this is important) they regularly make me laugh out loud.
In 2017 Kevin and Dan invited me to be their first ever guest on No Holds Bard. With some trepidation, I agreed and discovered that Kevin and Dan in real life are EXACTLY THE SAME as they are on the podcast. Recording with them was a blast, and since then I have thoroughly enjoyed keeping up with the podcast (occasionally falling months behind and then frantically trying to catch up) and interacting with them and other No Holds Bard listeners (a.k.a. Bardflies) on Twitter.
And so, it gives me great pleasure to present that charmingly insufferable duo, the joint top bananas of No Holds Bard, Kevin and Dan!
KEVIN: I’m Kevin Condardo: host of the NO HOLDS BARD podcast (The Shakespeare Podcast Shakespeare Would Have Listened To*), performing arts administrator, Boston sports fan, and lover of all things theater. I’m the managing director of the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company based out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I work on the business end of the Off-Broadway theater industry in New York City.
My first introduction to Shakespeare was a terrible production of Romeo and Juliet that I saw on a school field trip in eighth grade, most notable for everyone being in Elizabethan costumes and having Mercutio thrusting himself seemingly on every other word in a failing effort at convincing school kids that Shakespeare was making dirty jokes and is therefore relatable. I loathed Shx until my sophomore year of college, when I auditioned for Cymbeline in college because it was a shared audition for the play I really wanted to be in (Twelve Angry Men). I was required to prepare a Shakespearian monologue and so I memorized and performed it with a British accent (as a sophomore in college!!), and about ten seconds in my professor Deb Kinghorn stopped me and asked me what the hell I was doing, and I said Shakespeare, and she said no I wasn’t. Somehow I was cast as a boorish, fratty Cloten, and over the course of that production I fell in love with Shakespeare and never looked back.
DAN: Hey! I’m Dan Beaulieu: I’m an avid Shakespeare lover, performer, director, student of the game. I am CO-host and top banana on the aforementioned No Holds Bard podcast with my fellow CO-host Kevin. I am the co-founder and Artistic Director of Seven Stages Shakespeare Company, a former Ambassador for the Shakespeare Society in NYC, member of the internationally renowned Passion in Practice and The Shakespeare Ensemble (both helmed by the incomparable Ben Crystal), and frequent collaborator with the New York City based company Rude Grooms (led by the always lovely Montgomery Sutton).
Why Shagspeare? I deeply admire his sprawling exploration of the human condition, his probing of Magick and Witches, his Timelessness, and perhaps most importantly the fact that it IS in fact for everybody, if you let it be.
KEVIN: It’s more of an incredulous cackle than a laugh, but...after the Richard / Lady Anne scene, after we think we’ve seen the bunch-back’d toad bare his soul in expressing his love for his lady, he tells us “I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long” - cueing the audience to hopefully boo and hiss - after which Shakespeare gives him “What?” to respond to the disgusted audience. What a joy for an actor! (And if you have a Richard that doesn’t elicit at least one gasp on that line and thus has no audience members to give that “What?” to, you know you’re in for a long evening of theater.)
DAN: I think Petruchio’s entrance to the wedding, when costumed properly, is pretty hilarious. I also get a good chuckle out of “That’s a shelled peascod” from King Lear. Something about the phrase “Shelled Peascod” just gets me. Hamlet’s sardonic humor in the scene leading up to The Mousetrap is also stacked up with great laugh lines.
KEVIN: Do you mean country matters?
DAN: As a raging egoist, I’ll share my favorite anecdote from a performance I was in. I was playing Titus and in the scene where I lose my hand I was given a messenger bag to carry around with me. They actually had me carry it for the whole first half of the play so it wouldn’t be weird when I had it in this scene. The dummy hand was stored in there so when the “theater magic” moment happened I’d dip the hand out of the bag and TADA! I’m handless! Well, one night the hand fell out of the bag several moments before it was supposed to be cut off. I jumped on the hand like a fumbled football and took my rant from the floor of the stage. (It was a three quarter thrust, 70 seat black box so there wasn’t anywhere to hide.) After the show, several members of the cast commented on how I was “really feeling that scene”, not realizing I was not feeling it at all...I was simply scattering to figure out a way to justify a random hand lying on the ground moments before the audience would see it again.
KEVIN: When I was a company manager at Shakespeare in the Park in NYC, it was my responsibility to cancel or hold the show in case of inclement weather - which meant my “job” all summer was to sit in the back of the house and watch every performance while refreshing about five different weather apps and calculate if we were going to be able to get the show in. During The Merchant of Venice, we were flirting with a rainstorm all night - the sky looked very ominous from the start but nothing had fallen, even though I and the entire audience knew it was coming. The weather held all evening, up until Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…” at which point, the gentlest rain you ever felt began to droppeth from heaven, allowing Portia to turn her palm up to feel the rain fall and the entire crowd to “ooh” in unison. Goosebump city.
Mya interjects: I would 100% have gone “oooooh”. Magical.
KEVIN: I’m no director, but I’d love to see an As You Like It set around 1910, where the music at the court is all Sousa marches and barber shop (basically The Music Man), and then when they go to the country you have the same musicians and instrumentations playing Jelly Roll Morton and the jazz and dixieland that was exploding at the same moment. (Artistic directors: I’ll be waiting by the phone for my call.)
DAN: I called you to do this several years ago, but...musicians.
I’d like to direct a production of Twelfth Night in a very large warehouse immersive experience where the central design conceit is a House of Mirrors….possibly around Halloween or in Coney Island during the winter. Full creep zone. Similarly, I think it’d be fun to do an As You Like It in a corn maze or a Jacobean influenced pageant production of Midsummer Night’s Dream as a haunted hayride that starts around 6pm and goes til midnight, getting scarier and scarier as the night goes on. Bring the little kids early for fun fairies and come back at 11pm for the weird ones.
DAN: I’m a sucker for the fact that when Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time their exchange is a shared sonnet. It’s not necessarily “hidden” but I love when I see a production that is clearly “going there” with that moment.
KEVIN: I talk about it all the time on the podcast but I LOVE the King of France in All’s Well that Ends Well. So deferential, kind, funny, but also strong and forceful when required - along with some endlessly quotable lines. Perhaps more “underrated” than “hidden gem?”
DAN: I like that we both just couched our answers in “this isn’t exactly what you asked, but it’s the answer we’re going to give anyway”. If you enjoy this kind of response to questions, you’ll love our podcast!
KEVIN: Ironically and annoyingly, the Shakespeare quote I use the most is actually a misquote that got locked into my brain during my only professional gig - a production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Theater at Monmouth. There’s a sequence where Antony is waiting for an update from the field, and when the messenger arrives the actor playing Antony would turn violently to him and spew out “The news from Sicyon, ho!”. I loved the way he delivered the line and started incorporating it into my life every time someone entered a room with information that the rest of us were waiting on. Unfortunately, that line doesn’t exist - either the actor learned it wrong, or the director inverted it - and the actual line, “From Sicyon, ho, the news!”, doesn’t quite have the same allure.
DAN: I suppose I have to go with the two I have tattooed on my body, as they literally stay with me. They are “To Be” and “This above all, to thine own self be true”. I’m grateful that the verb in both lines is Be, which is deceptively simple. As an actor, it’s really what we’re asked to do---just be.
DAN: I used to make Pericles the butt of all of my “Shakespeare made mistakes too you know?!” jokes. Admittedly that was before I ever read it or worked on it. Now it is easily one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and one that I expect to see more and more of in the future. Disney is sleeping on a gold mine, though I hope Pixar beats them to it.
KEVIN: I have to ask: which play is the punchline to that joke now?
DAN: Henry VIII or Measure (come at me Measure lovers!)
KEVIN: For me, it’s the histories. A few summers ago, Seven Stages Shakespeare Company (helmed by Dan, Christine Penney, and myself) did a one-day, fourteen-hour reading of all eight of the linked history plays one after the other. After seeing the way the storylines feed so deeply one into the other (most particularly Margaret’s arc), I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see any one of them individually the same way again.
Mya interjects: The Seven Stages history day is definitely on my list of “productions I’m kicking myself for missing”. If you do it again, boys, let me know. I am available for any bit parts that don’t require replicating actual human emotions.
KEVIN: I feel the deepest connection to the seconds-in-command, but to choose the one that encapsulates that the most I’ll say Gloucester from King Lear. Ever since childhood I’ve always considered myself a second rather than a first - I took pride in Little League being the catcher that served as the psychologist for the pitchers, I relate much more to Tom Hagen than to Michael Corleone, and in Shakespeare I’m much more connected to the person who holds the ear of the person everyone is looking at rather than being the center of attention myself.
DAN: I feel a deep connection to Jaques- especially his description of melancholy and the cynical way he sees the world around him, as witnessed in the Seven Ages speech. I fancy myself a fool and appreciate Jaques function in the play, both as a countervoice to the romanticized experience of Arden so many have, his dismay at the murder of the deer, and his departure from the rest of the group at the end.
KEVIN: I bare my soul weekly* on the NO HOLDS BARD podcast, which Dan frequently appears on as co-host / second banana. The show is available for download on iTunes and Stitcher, and also the full* archive is available on our website at noholdsbard.com. You should also follow us on Twitter @NoHoldsBardCast and on Facebook at Facebook.com SLAAAASSHHHH NoHoldsBardCast!
DAN: If you are the market for stuff about the top banana specifically check out my website at www.danbeauknows.com. Seven Stages has a ton of exciting projects coming up including season eight of ShakesBEERiences in NH and a full production of MacBeth this autumn near Halloween. If you want more luscious No Holds Bard Content, check out our Patreon at www.patreon.com slash noholdsbard. Also, I’ll be touring Japan with several dear friends, including Dylan Kammerer, Tim Jacobs, Andrew Codispoti, Ben Crystal and The Shakespeare Ensemble this September playing Hamlet in Hamlet, Banquo in MacBeth, and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. It’s a dream track with an incredible ensemble so if you are in Japan, come check it out!
Kevin, myself, and Dan. This was taken in 2017, and I believe ownership of the beard has changed since then. (I would not have it grow on MY chin.)
(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Kevin and Dan for answering my questions and helping me out this month! Confession: when I was scheduling my guests for this month, I deliberately penciled Kevin and Dan in for the last slot, not because I thought they’d be a particularly boffo ending (although, obviously, they are) but because I was sure they wouldn’t get their answers in until the very last second. To my shock, they send them in well over a week early, which, I can only assume, involved a great deal of personal sacrifice and discipline on their part. For that, and for constantly entertaining me as I drive around town, I am very grateful to them.
You can listen to me banter with Kevin and Dan on the following episodes of No Holds Bard:
Also, do consider chucking a couple bucks their way each month on Patreon, as I do.
Thanks once again to EVERYONE who helped me out this month: Austin Tichenor, Kate Powers, Sam White, David Prosser, Kate Pitt, Christy Burgess, Kevin Condardo and Dan Beaulieu! I am so lucky in my friends and in my Shakespeare community. My life is still kind of crazy at the moment so I’m taking next week off, but I’ll be back after that (hopefully, and at last) with some new comics!
It’s the final week of Q&A August! Let me take you back to 2016, to my first ever Shakespeare Theatre Association conference, hosted by Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. It was the last day, and the morning’s warm-up session was being conducted by Christy Burgess and the Robinson Shakespeare Company, a community Shakespeare program for school-aged kids. After several rounds of fun theatre games, Christy asked her students if any of them wanted to perform some Shakespeare for this objectively intimidating roomful of seasoned, experienced, and elite Shakespeare practitioners and educators.
Every single hand flew up into the air.
After some negotiation, a tiny girl in a pink dress, probably not more than nine or ten years old, stood up. Awww, this is so cute. Is she going to do Puck’s “If we shadows have offended” epil— NOPE. She narrowed her eyes and spat out Cloten’s “meanest garment” speech from Cymbeline with all the vitriol of a rejected privileged white man. My jaw literally dropped. HOW was this possible?
The answer was Christy Burgess. I’d actually met Christy the year before, when I drove down to South Bend to see a couple shows at the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, and she immediately overwhelmed me (in a good way) with her energy, enthusiasm, and passion not just for teaching kids Shakespeare, but for giving them ownership of Shakespeare. Every single one of her students believes that Shakespeare is theirs. I’ll never forget Christy telling me what her students’ reaction was upon meeting a professional Shakespeare company: “Oh, you do Shakespeare too? That’s cute... WE do Shakespeare.”
On a more personal level, Christy helped shepherd me through the impostor syndrome I suffered from while attending my first conference, giving me the confidence to find my place in the Shakespeare community without constantly apologizing for being “just someone who draws stupid stick figures”. Christy builds people up, and the world is better for it.
My name is Christy Burgess and I am the director of the Robinson Shakespeare Company. I am a teacher, director, and have most recently been christened “Shakespeare Maven” by my friend Julia.
Why Shakespeare? There are so many reasons for “why Shakespeare”. The Robinson Shakespeare Company starts in 3rd grade and the first day of our 3rd-6th grade class is one of my favorite all year. Many of our young actors have waited since kindergarten watching their older siblings or young adults they admire go through the program. The anticipation and excitement on that first day of class is palpable, because they finally get to do Shakespeare. It’s also become something that is a little subversive. There are times when our kids are told “you don’t really like Shakespeare” or “shouldn’t you be playing sports?”, which has the effect of “don’t tell me what I’m supposed to like!”
In a meeting, someone asked one of my students “Why Shakespeare?” She told a story I hadn’t heard before. It was right after her father passed, before she went back to school. She was walking around the track at her high school and passed an elderly white couple. The woman said to her “shouldn’t you be in school?” to which her husband responded “Mary, don’t you know that’s how people get shot?”
This young woman said “when people walk by me, they might think I’m a hood or a thug, but Shakespeare is mine, something no one can take away from me.”
When we study plays from Eugene O’Neil or Arthur Miller, it’s the world through their eyes, but when we play Shakespeare, it’s the world through OUR eyes.
Scene 3.4 in Twelfth Night always cracks me up! There’s something about the most non-threatening duel letter from Sir Andrew to Cesario/Olivia and the forced fight that is always funny.
Mya interjects: “Is’t so saucy?” is one of my favorite lines in Shakespeare. It’s such a stupid joke. I don’t care. I love it.
Every now and then there’s Shakespeare magic.
When I was teaching and directing in Alaska with the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, I had made a comment to my young actors about performing in the rain. I’m pretty sure they prayed for rain, because our last performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor, it POURED. The audience ran for cover, but nothing could erase the looks of glee on the actor’s faces. Falstaff’s line, “let the sky rain potatoes”, pretty much said it all!
In 2017, the Robinson Shakespeare Company (RSC*) was invited, and traveled, to England to perform in Stratford-upon-Avon the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Shakespeare Garden. The New Place recently opened and we discovered that we were the first group to perform there….if the weather held out. There were numerous sunshine dances (involving jazz hands), prayers, and wishes. The day of the performance, there was a storm coming right for us. It was the closest thing to magic I’ve seen. It was as if the storm was around us. In videos, you can see the wind whipping the costume and the slightest drizzle of rain, but we made it!
*I know, I know, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Reduced Shakespeare Company, etc. I like to think of us as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s distant (many times removed), scrappy cousins that will be revealed if we do a deep dive on our genealogy chart.
This memory might be tinged with jet lag, because during the same trip I sat in-between two 12 year olds, who only fell asleep 30 minutes before landing. When we arrived in Stratford, we were met by the incredible Cait Fannin-Peel (my Shakespeare wife and hero). Our bed and breakfasts weren’t ready yet, so she took us on a tour of Shakespeare’s Birthplace. They have an amazing little stage in-between the house and the giftshop where actors were performing bits of Shakespeare. Cait asked if we would like to perform something. Jet lagged, sleep deprived, and thrilled, it took about 30 seconds to plan out the opening to Cymbeline and start performing it. Tourists surrounded us with their cameras and applauded when the scene was done. It felt amazing as a director of young people to see them confident on stage in a setting that was incredibly different from what they were used to. We have video evidence!
Bart Sher’s Cymbeline at Intiman changed me. The set was simple; a red raked stage, but by being so, it didn’t need massive set changes, we were with the story the entire time. The production was funny, moving, and stunning.
I’m frustrated by Shakespeare that tries to distract you from thinking it is Shakespeare. I’ve been in, or seen productions, where it’s like “look at these live animals” or “explosions” or “a fake ice rink that isn’t integral to the plot and is really slick in the rain, but look, people are ice skating for 30 seconds” that are unnecessary. I believe you should be able to wear black clothes on a blank stage and get the story across; everything else is just icing. If not, it’s not good Shakespeare.
Mya interjects: I am broadly in agreement with Christy here, except that I desperately want MORE live animals on stage. Dogs. Goats. Rabbits. Gerbils. I don’t care if they’re not textually supported.
I don’t know if it’s a hidden gem, but I love Henry IV, Part 1 and 2. I think it’s such a loss when they’re combined, because they are both stellar plays for different reasons. Yes, Henry IV, Part 1 has all the action, but Henry IV, Part 2 has phenomenal speeches and you get to see just how devious Falstaff is. Food for powder, anyone?
This quote from Romeo and Juliet is how I feel about teaching. During the school week, I am in 24 classes in the South Bend community, mostly in Title 1 schools. Last year, Tuesdays were long days. I would teach six classes at a middle school, plus an after-school program, then direct the RSC. That was approximately 190 kids and the day lasted from 9 am-9 pm. It wasn’t, however, so bad, because I work with really great kids. I feel what I give to them, they give back and the days don’t feel long.
“the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2
Also “bless you fair shrew” which I say to my dog all the time when she sneezes.
Mya interjects: BLESS YOU FAIR SHREW THAT’S THE BEST I LOVE IT
The first time I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, I was twelve and locked myself in the bathroom and cried. Seriously though, who didn’t? Do you have a heart of stone???
Mya interjects: Yes. :P
During our 2017 trip, we took our RSC to see the REAL RSC’s Titus Andronicus. Blanche McIntyre is a badass director. It’s easy to dismiss, Titus, but she found depth, and urgency. The show made our company better.
My actors still refer to the performance when we talk about high stakes and urgency.
I love Viola. She goes on such a journey and her “make me a willow cabin at your gate” speech moves me every time. We don’t get to pick who we love. I’m really lucky that I have a sweetheart who loves me, Shakespeare nerdiness and all.
If I could be a character? Henry V.
You can find more about us on our Facebook page, Instagram, and our website.
Notre Dame Magazine put together a gorgeous website that chronicled the six months they had a reporter with us as well as our adventures to England!
Click through the photos above for a great look at the Robinson Shakespeare Company in action!
(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Christy for answering my questions, but, even more importantly, for raising the next generation of Shakespeareans. I, for one, welcome our new Shakespearean overlords.
COMING THURSDAY: It’s two-for-one day with the bard bros behind one of my favorite Shakespeare podcasts!
