love-broadway-books

[love-broadway-books]

rewatching lotr, and rewatched the hobbit trilogy like 2 weeks ago, and i must say. i love this franchise for all its “i knew a guy who knew a guy” relations. like to give just one example, gimli presumes for a second, like the whole fellowship, that frodo got injured by the cave troll in moria. but he’s actually just fine! because frodo just happens to be gimli’s dad’s boss’s situationship’s nephew, and therefore has the mithril shirt that gimli’s dad’s boss gave to his situationship right before gimli’s dad’s boss led the company to battle against, among others, legolas’s dad. legolas’s old situationship from like last year (60 years ago) was also there and chose, get this, gimli’s dad’s boss’s nephew over him. i love yall

[love-broadway-books]

While talking with the Hobbits, Tom Bombadil puts on the One Ring. For a moment, all of the Nazgul burst into merry song. It is never discussed among them again.

[love-broadway-books]

[love-broadway-books]

I saw this on another blog and decided to try my hand at it!

How well does your social media know your aesthetic?

My results are pretty accurate. Go to Pinterest and type the following searches:

Animal, place, plant, character, season, hobby, color, and drink!

The first image you see is your answer!

#light academia #romantic aesthetic #booklover #scotland #owl #forest witch #forest aesthetic #pride and prejudice #p&p #elizabeth bennet #jane austen #dark academia #cottagecore #coffee #latte #music #ukulele #autumm #fall aesthetic #cozy aesthetic #teal

[love-broadway-books]

[love-broadway-books]

[love-broadway-books]

Both Pride & Prejudice and Much Ado About Nothing work so well as enemies to lovers because despite surface animosity, it's clear that both end couples really respect each other and for good reasons. I think you could even argue that with Beatrice, she spars with Benedick because she considers him a worthy opponent.

When Hero and Ursuala plot to make Beatrice fall in love, Hero instructs her to speak of Benedick and "praise him more than ever man did merit" and yet when Beatrice finally speaks, she doesn't disagree with their high praise, she says of Benedick:

For others say thou dost deserve, and I Believe it better than reportingly.

Benedick likewise after his eavesdropping on Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio's praise Beatrice says:

They say the lady is fair; 'tis a truth, I can bear them witness; and virtuous; 'tis so, I cannot reprove it; and wise, but for loving me; by my troth, it is no addition to her wit, nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in love with her.

Similarly in Pride & Prejudice, once the misunderstanding about Wickham is cleared away, Elizabeth is able to acknowledge to herself how much she respects and likes Darcy:

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.

Darcy also finds that he admires Elizabeth, after initially dismissing her:

But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

All of these characters also hear and accept criticism of themselves. Both Benedick and Beatrice hear they are too proud to accept love, which they both overcome. Elizabeth learns that she judged Darcy without sufficient information and Darcy that his behaviour was not that of a gentleman. Their mutual acceptance of this criticism and their growth as people leads to their ultimate happiness.

Unfortunately, those who reproduce this trope often forget to build this foundation of respect and the acknowledgement, either personally or publically, that the characters have been wrong. Instead we get characters who mid argument begin ripping each other's clothes off. No growth, no understanding how they have been wrong, it just becomes "thin line between hatred and love" instead of "we grew towards each other".

[love-broadway-books]

In defense of Shakespeare's Daughters

When students find out that:

Shakespeare has no living descendants (and that's why we don't have to ask "Which Shakespeare?" like we do with the Bach family),

That he did have a son, once, but that boy died when he was only ten years old, and

That son was named "Hamnet" (not a typo, BTW)

Those students who go on to become Shakespearean scholars can get a bit obsessed when it comes to themes of fathers, sons, and grief (particularly in that one play about a Prince of Denmark).

So I'd like to take this time to point out that Shakespeare was also the father to two daughters: his firstborn, Susanna, and Judith, Hamnet's twin sister.

And to help me make the point that the Father/Daughter relationship was important to him, and not just a consolation prize, here's a few of the plays that hinge on it (an incomplete list):

The Tempest: a father and daughter as the only humans on a tropical island.

Romeo and Juliet: The tragedy unfolds with exponential speed when Juliet's father decides that she must marry Tybolt immediately.

Much ado About Nothing: The comedy almost becomes a tragedy when Leonato rejects his daughter during the wedding ceremony.

The Winter's Tale: In the first half of the play, the jealous king rejects his infant daughter, wrongly thinking she is a bastard. In the second half of the play, we see the daughter as a teenager, and her relationship with her adoptive father, a shepherd; the play is resolved when she returns home, with her adoptive father, to her birth father.

Hamlet: Let's face it -- the whole play gets mired in schemes, secrets, and second guesses until Ophelia's response to her father's death unleashes a flood of action.

Merry Wives of Windsor: the "B Plot" is all about how the young adult daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Page successfully schemes to marry the young man she actually loves, instead of either of the arranged marriages her parents are hoping for.

[love-broadway-books]

Benedick listing what he considers good qualities in a woman and then saying that there isn't a woman alive who has all of them and therefore he will never fall in love vs Benedick literally five minutes later describing Beatrice by listing all of those exact same qualities like babes you're not even subtle come on

[love-broadway-books]

I'm going to be a Shakespeare nerd for two seconds but I fucking love in the David Tennant/Catherine Tate Much Ado About Nothing how they mess around with the script leading to some genuinely hilarious moments like

okay

in the script, Benedick has the following line:

It seems her affections have their full bent. Love me? Why, it must be requited!

But in the show it's

It seems her affections have their full bent. Love me? Why? It must be requited!

Or to be even more specific it's:

Love me? ...

... ...WHY? ... ... It must be requited!

And I think that's beautiful.

[love-broadway-books]

obsessed with tragedies that were almost comedies and comedies that were almost tragedies and comedies in which the happy ending is actually tragic

[love-broadway-books]

You know what's so devastating to me about "God that I were a man"? It's the way that in this situation, Beatrice is not exceptional. In the first acts, she appears to be exempt from the gender roles that everyone around her complies with: she has avoided marriage so far, and she has license to playfully criticize and reject being "over-master'd with a piece of valiant dust" (2.2.55-56). She even suggests to Hero that she claim some agency over her engagement: "it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy, and say, 'father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say, 'father, as it please me'" (2.1.48-51). Beatrice has carved out an existence for herself that everyone else tolerates; her wit allows her to live outside of people's expectations of womanhood.

But Beatrice is not exempt from being a woman. When it actually matters, when Hero is disgraced by powerful men with no regard for her wellbeing or humanity, Beatrice can't do anything about it. And "God that I were a man" is so painful because it reminds us--and Benedick--that no matter how transcendent Beatrice appears to be, she is still constrained by her role in Messina's society. Back in act one and act two, the reason that she was allowed to poke fun at men wasn't that she couldn't be stopped; it was that it didn't matter. She has no actual power to change the order of things, and so her verbal sparring is not a threat.

(An aside: I think that Benedick is taken aback by "God that I were a man" because this has never really occurred to him. He sees Beatrice as his intellectual equal, and he has watched her carve out space for herself effectively (they know each other of old). In the 2011 production with David Tennant, the costuming and acting choices show how Benedick starts actively performing masculinity only when he accepts Beatrice's request to kill Claudio--when he has to "be a man for [Beatrice's] sake" (4.1.314). In the first acts, he wears tight clothes, a crop top, and a miniskirt. From the wedding on, he wears his military uniform and then a suit. His body language also changes; he abandons physical comedy, stands tall, and emotes less when he speaks to Claudio and Don Pedro. He wields his masculinity as a weapon because he now realizes it's a weapon that Beatrice cannot wield herself.)

The crashing realization of Beatrice's limits is so devastating to me because it's so familiar. I can only speak from experiences I've had, but as a queer woman I know that tolerance is different than empowerment. That having grown up evading dating and romance with made-up excuses to hide my queerness, having realized the extent of the misogyny in an organization I cared about and having grappled with how that misogyny prevented me from effecting change, being allowed to exist is not the same as being able to participate, to make things different. God, that I were a man. I would eat his heart in the marketplace.

[love-broadway-books]

David Tennant and Catherine Tate as Signior Benedick and Beatrice in a production of Much Ado About Nothing in 2011

[source]

[love-broadway-books]

~ ᗰᑌᑕᕼ ᗩᗪO ᗩᗷOᑌT ᑎOTᕼIᑎG (2011) + TE᙭TᑭOSTS [ᑭT. 1] [ᑭT. 2]

[love-broadway-books]

per anon’s request, i present to you THE best version of beatrice’s monologue in much ado about nothing. i thought about cropping this but decided this scene must be watched in its full glory

[love-broadway-books]

Much Ado About Nothing, Wyndhams (2011)

Act 2 Scene 3 aka the paint bit

[love-broadway-books]

i am once again asking you to watch the 2019 shakespeare in the park production of much ado about nothing