The Bicks Pod

Latest Episodes:

Episode 50 - Measure for Measure Mar 23, 2021

Show notes

While many of Shakespeare's plays are talked about as being timeless, most of them are in fact very grounded in the specificities of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the larger European renaissance. Measure for Measure is no different, but because of the topics on display, as well as how little our society has actually changed around those topics, the themes of female sexuality, religion and politics, and moral laxity still feel just as fresh as they did in Shakespeare's time. Join us for a chat about this surprisingly fun and partially subversive play on this episode!

Ancient Bickerings:

Do any of the characters in Measure for Measure get what they deserve?

Notes:

"Measure for Measure: A Modern Perspective" has some salient points regarding the play's modern topics.
Handfasting - read all about it!
Aidan called a Romulan Warbird a "Romulan Bird of Prey" and will happily submit his nerd card to the nearest enforcement officer.

Episode 49 - Shakespeare's Lesser Known Plays Mar 09, 2021

Show notes

In 1996 Joni Mitchell released two compilation albums - Hits and the appropriately contrapuntal Misses - to show how even the most well-regarded of artists occasionally creates something that never really finds the audiences they might deserve. When it comes to Shakespeare, the Bard had a number of stinkers in his repertoire, including ones we've already covered like Henry VI (parts 1 & 3 especially), but also a number of later works that have never captured audiences the way Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night's Dream have.

This episode we're taking a look at some of those lesser known plays and asking the simple question: why? What sets these plays apart from the canonical "great works" and what lessons can we as more modern audiences take from their successes, failures, and experiments? So join us for a talk about Shakespeare's swings that didn't quite land with a resounding thud.

Ancient Bickerings:

This episode we discussed the question: which of the lesser known plays do you think is primed for a comeback in popularity?

Notes:

The Smithsonian Magazine article Lindsay mentioned has a great dive into the shifting understanding of King Lear.
There was no The Winter's Tale film adaptation, Lindsay was probably thinking of the Much Ado About Nothing version done by Joss Whedon in 2012.
Our list of lesser known plays, pulled purely from the ether without hard data or really anything to back them up:
- Merry Wives of Windsor
- As You Like It
- All's Well That Ends Well
- Winter's Tale
- Pericles
- Two Noble Kinsmen
- King John
- Henry VI
- Henry VIII
- Edward III
- Troilus and Cressida
- Coriolanus
- Timon of Athens
- Cymbeline

Episode 48 - Troilus and Cressida Feb 23, 2021

Show notes

Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare's least popular, least performed plays, and there are a multitude of reasons why that might be. None of the characters are particularly likeable. The various plots are mercenary, cruel, and violent. And it's certainly not the easiest play to classify, and it has baffled scholars since Shakespearean scholars first emerged: it is absolutely one of Shakespeare's "problem plays", defying all attempts at categorization.

But does it deserve to be cast aside and ignored as it has been for these reasons?

Today we discuss the various issues in this play and try to discover if there is redemption for one of Shakespeare's most confusing plays. Is it a postmodern masterpiece? Does it have anything to tell us about capitalism? Is our inability to pigeonhole this play one of its strengths?

Ancient Bickerings

Can this play be salvaged? Or does it even need to be salvaged?

Notes:

- Some scholars list The Merchant of Venice as a problem play, so technically Lindsay misspoke when she called this the first problem play we have discussed.
- Troilus and Cressida in quarto form (British Library)
- Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (Project Gutenberg)
- "Troilus and Cressida: A Modern Perspective" by Jonathan Gil Harris
- BBC Troilus and Cressida (1981) listing at IMDb
- Aidan absolutely wrote a screenplay version of Troilus and Cressida around the time the "sword and sandals" genre was taking over theatre screens. He may still have a copy kicking around in an outdated version of Microsoft Word. He may be willing to share it with you if you email him. thebickspod[at]gmail[dot]com.

Episode 47 - The Fictional Shakespeare Feb 09, 2021

Show notes

Shakespeare may have penned some of the most memorable characters, from Shylock to Hamlet to King Lear, but he's also shown up as a character himself over the years. This episode we are looking at a different kind of Shakespeare, the man created for the screen (both big and small), and the various tropes and modes of interpretation that show up over and over again. We look to have fun with a character that many others also have fun with - the legend turned tangible: the fictional Shakespeare.

List of Works Discussed:

Notes:

Kyle Kallgren, aka the Brows Held High YouTube channel, has a great analysis of Roland Emmerich's 2011 Anonymous which we reference several times in the episode.
The Brows Held High video on Shakespeare in Love is also great.
Liza Tarbuck is the actress who plays Anne Hathaway so well in Upstart Crow.
Larry David's WGA award acceptance speech is frankly great.
Aidan was way off - the Globe Theatre was not used in the filming of Shakespeare in Love, but instead a studio set was built to show the Rose Theatre (which would have been the one Romeo & Juliet was performed in, duh).

Ancient Bickerings:

This episode we went for one non-bickering and one bickering in our back and forth discussion. Our two questions were:

If you were to write Shakespeare as a fictional character, what would it look like?
Which of the fictionalized Shakespeare's discussed would you most like to have a beer with?

Episode 46 - Twelfth Night Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

One of Shakespeare's better loved comedies, Twelfth Night brings the gender-bending of Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona together with the love-as-illness of Romeo & Juliet, then stirs everything together with a sense of carnival-esque revelry. Join us for a discussion about love, class, gender, and justice as we look over the characters and conundrums of this thoroughly enjoyable play.

Ancient Bickerings:

This episode we're looking at a simple question: does Malvolio deserve the punishment he receives?

Notes:

We slagged on the Trevor Nunn 1996 filmed adaptation (Aidan called it a stage production once or twice) of Twelfth Night a bit, but it is definitely worth a watch if you have the chance. Helena Bonham Carter is particularly enjoyable as Olivia.
The 2017 Globe production is also available for rental or purchase from the Globe website, and features a bit more comedic tone.

Episode 45 - Mental Health and Shakespeare Jan 12, 2021

Show notes

What do a bunch of 400 year old plays have to tell us about mental health? A surprising bit actually. This episode we're looking at four character - Jaques from As You Like It, Hamlet and Ophelia from Hamlet, and Lady Macbeth from Macbeth - to consider how Shakespeare handled issues of mental health, how his audience would have understood these characters' issues, and how we understand and talk about them today.

Ancient Bickerings:

Which of our four characters selected today would most benefit from being transported to the modern day and receiving the full suite of mental health supports available today?

Notes:

We referred to a number of resources to help inform us about the understanding of mental health in Elizabethan & Jacobean England, including:

John Hall's (Shakespeare's son-in-law) casebook on physical and mental ailments and his (always) successful treatments
A quick summary of the four humours and how Shakespeare would have understood them
The Shakespeare Birth Place, British Library, and the Shakespeare Blog all had good resources for understanding mental health in Elizabethan times and within Shakespeare's plays
Shakespearances hosts the article speaking about personal experience with mental health issues and connecting them with Shakespeare, and also references the play Enter Ophelia, distracted

Episode 44 - Hamlet Dec 29, 2020

Show notes

Hamlet is arguably the first of Shakespeare's "Big Plays" -- the magnificent tragedies, the ones that everyone studies in their English classes, that hold a special place in the canon because of their thematic and dramatic importance. Oh, sure, we've covered Richard III and Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Venice already; no one is denying the importance and vibrancy of these and other earlier plays. But you have to admit that Hamlet (along with King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello) represents some of the grandest of Shakespeare's writing and thinking.

In today's episode, we've once again attempted to break down the play into the biggest umbrella themes. We ask a lot of questions, about the imp[act of grief on a person's mental state, the treatment of gender and sexuality, what does it mean to revenge your murdered father -- typical stuff. We make no pretenses that we have any of the answers to the questions we're raising, and we won't come to any novel understanding of the play or the themes found within (this is, after all, one of the most written about works of drama in the entirety of the English literary canon). But we hope that we are able to ignite a bit of curiosity

Ancient Bickerings:

Is Hamlet truly mad?

Notes:

Hammersmith, James P. “Hamlet and the Myth of Memory.” ELH, vol. 45, no. 4, 1978, pp. 597–605. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2872579. Accessed 27 Dec. 2020.
Also: "Bunghole" is definitely used in the play. Act 5, scene 1. Look it up. We'll wait.
Yes, Virginia, David Tennant did play Hamlet in a 2009 film. We are not able to find a copy of the film to double check the Gertrude-sees-the-Ghost-too bit, though -- if you know if this version does hint that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet's mother (or, if not, if you know where that scene happens) let us know!

Episode 43 - Shakespeare the Influencer Dec 15, 2020

Show notes

Preamble: As mentioned in the episode itself, we recorded this episode using Nvidia's Broadcast app for the first time to try and cut down on background noise. Our first tests went fine but this episode wound up coming across as a bit choppy and digitized. Our apologies - we'll be looking to smooth things out for future episodes!

Have you ever wished you (or someone else) could vanish into thin air? Ever refused to budge an inch? Ever thought the game was up? Then, whether you knew it or not, you've been influenced by Shakespeare.

Today's episode goes into the myriad ways Shakespeare still has an outsized influence on our lives, especially in the realms of the English language and literature. We're accompanied for this trip by Stephen Marche's book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, and we hope you'll join us for the journey down the rabbit hole (not a Shakespearean phrase, to be fair) into how Shakespeare's words continue to change and shape the world today.

Notes:

A quick check in reveals that the English language now has nearly 200,000 words commonly accepted in it, and Shakespeare appears to have used about 32,000, including the 1,700 words he's credited with introducing.
Bernard Levin is the journalist whose quote about Shakespeare's phrase adequately sums up the Bard's influence on everyday speech and idioms. Also available in jpeg form in this handy little graphic.
The Chinese princess Aidan mentions is basically a footnote in the history of the Northern Zhou and Sui dynasties whose story has a bit of a Shakespearean feel to it - her name is Qianjin, and she was married off to the Turkic Khaganate in the sixth century.

Ancient Bickerings:

As we've mentioned many times on this podcast, we are both semi-pro writers who dabble primarily in fiction. So the question this week is: how has Shakespeare influenced you as a writer?

Related to this, we should give a shout out to Ian Doescher, who has done Shakespeare emulation better than anyone! We recently watched a Zoom performance of his Shakespearean adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and loved every minute of it. Most famously he turned Star Wars into Shakespearean plays, with great success.

Episode 42 - As You Like It Dec 01, 2020

Show notes

Sometimes, you really can judge a book by its cover, or even, just by its title. That's the case for this Shakespearean comedy, which tips it's hat in all sorts of directions without ever proceeding down any of them. It's a befuddling, funny, serious, ridiculous, gender-bending and gender-conforming play with a whole lot to say about nothing at all. As You Like It, is open to interpretation and not much else, but it can be a thoroughly enjoyable romp in the right hands.

We focused our discussion on the themes and motifs of the play - gender, love, court vs. country - and wound up circling round and round the same few points, including just how awesome Rosalind is as a character, how odd the structure of the plot is, and the confusing nature of Jaques. All in all, it was a very strange play.

Ancient Bickerings

For a strange play, we picked kind of a strange (and personal) question: if you had to live in one - court, or country - which would it be?

Additional Notes

The Folger Essay, "As You Like It: A Modern Perspective" gives a good overview of some of the difficulty of speaking about the play.

Episode 41 - Shakespeare and Politics Nov 17, 2020

Show notes

We live in a politically-charged age -- how can anyone deny that? But it's likely true that there has never been an age that hasn't been touched by politics at all, whether by the formal politics of our various governmental systems or the personal politics of our daily interactions; Aristotle himself claimed that human beings are inherently political creatures, and the wars and elections of the last two thousand years has yet to prove him wrong. So since our podcast is, in its current incarnation, focused on the world of William Shakespeare, and given the current climate in which we live, it makes sense that we would turn this political focus on the Early Modern period and the Bard himself. How does Shakespeare operate politically? How can we use his works to inform our views of the world today? And should we even bother?

Ancient Bickerings:

Shakespeare's theatre company, The Chamberlain's Men (later The King's Men), were not immune from the politics of their day. They famously found themselves caught up in scandalous treason when they were engaged to perform Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion, all because the conspirators promised to pay a whopping 40 shillings above the normal engagement cost for the troupe to put on that particular play. (Greedy capitalists to the bitter end!) Considering this, what play would Shakespeare and The King’s Men put on to mark 2020?

Notes:

Encyclopedia Britannica entry on English Humanism: https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanism/The-English-humanists
The American Interest: "Shakespeare's Politics"
Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said
"Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" from The West Wing (Season 2.16)
For all your Vine needs: "God and Anime" and other Vines that toast our buns. (Enjoy, and RIP Vine, we hardly knew ye)
Bustle: "14 Things Shakespeare Can Teach You About Politics"
The Guardian: "How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse"
"Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Politics"

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