from Desiree

I decided to watch Shakespeare Uncovered Season 1: Ep.2 Part Two: The Comedies.  It can be found on Netflix!  But here are a few interesting things I learned:

-Shakespeare ran his dad’s glove business

-at 18 he married Anne Hathaway who was 26 and the right age to marry

-Susannah was his 1^st daughter

-Two years later they had twins Hamlet and Judith—he wasn’t even 21!

-He's from Stratford— it only had 2,000 people living there

-He left his family to go to London

-Twins are the central comic device in his 1^st play Comedy of Errors—his twins were on his mind

-In Twelfth Night the twins are male and female like his own twins (written 6-7yrs later)

-In 1596 his son Hamlet died at 11—Twelfth Night had a dark twist to it because of this

-The very bittersweet loss of a brother is central—only written years after his son’s death.  This loss is central to the root of the play.

-Freud’s 1^st stage of mourning is to incorporate the person into the self—Viola dresses as her brother (costume)

-Theme of falling in love with wrong person was one that Shakespeare uses 

            -The story surprises everyone including themselves

-Easy to make jokes about gender and cross-dressing… you have a boy playing a girl dressed up as a boy.  It becomes easier on the actor in Shakespeare's time.  A lot to do with impersonating the voice of the other gender because of this.

-Both Viola and Olivia are analogous to one another and not free herself

-“The woman can only declare her love if she’s pretending to be someone else.”—Vanessa Redgrave …about the ”make me a willow cabin at your gate…” speech

-The plan involving Malvolio is the subplot of Twelfth Night

            -Twelfth Night was filmed silently in 1910 with Charles Kent as Malvolio.  It’s one of the few Shakespeare plays to be done as a silent film.