About Shakespeare’s Tropes
Shakespeare’s Tropes is a chronological companion to the canon. It goes through all of Shakespeare’s plays from The Taming of the Shrew in 1589 through to Cardenio in 1613, charting the narrative development of Shakespeare’s plays and their recurring themes and motifs. On one level it’s an academic textbook exploring how all of Shakespeare’s plays are fundamentally about the dead coming back to life; on another level it’s a fun pop-culture analysis of how the whole canon can be explained by way of The Beatles, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, the Star Wars films and the Mountain Goats. Whether you’re a hardened director or teacher looking for new inspiration or a young student or actor encountering the plays for the first time, this book has something for everyone! except TERFS; those guys can bite my bum.
David Lawrence has been called “the Nick Cave of NZ classical theatre” by Salient and “NZ’s foremost authority on Shakespeare” by Taika Waititi, although he’d like to think of himself as the Don Draper of the scaffolding-reconstructions-of-early-modern-playhouses industry. He was the Artistic Director of The Bacchanals and the Associate Artistic Director of Pop-up Globe. He is a Hunter Fellow of Victoria University, whatever that means. Maybe you’ve seen some of his productions, which include directing over two thirds of the Shakespeare canon; maybe you used to listen to him talking to Kim Hill on Radio NZ about plays and stuff.
Here’s the whole back cover blurb:
Unless you were crazy, you wouldn’t watch The Sopranos or The Wire in a completely random order if you wanted to be able to make sense of the story. So why have we spent 400 years experiencing Shakespeare’s plays with no regard for their chronological sequencing, like syndicated episodes of The Simpsons? When 36 Shakespeare of plays were collected together for the first time in the 1623 Folio, they were sorted into three distinct genres—Comedies, Histories and Tragedies—that have altered forever the way we read narrative throughlines in Shakespeare’s work. When we read or see Othello today, we do so thinking about its relationship to the other great tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, rather than considering how closely its characters and themes are related to Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor, the plays composed immediately alongside it.
No one in the 21st century, unless they’re the victim of some strange sociological experiment, ever experiences Shakespeare’s plays in the order in which they were written. Theatres programme Shakespeare based on which plays will sell tickets; universities proscribe him in accordance with which plays are in academic fashion or best-suit the interests of the people teaching them. To examine the plays in chronological order, however, reveals that Shakespeare’s recurring themes and motifs are part of a complex dramatic strategy rather than just an over-reliance on the easy devices of women-disguised-as-men or Angry Dads disapproving of their daughters’ boyfriends. In Shakespeare’s Tropes, David Lawrence (once called “the Nick Cave of NZ classical theatre”) looks at what happens when you forget everything you know while remembering everything you’ve ever learnt and trace the journey of how Shakespeare’s most commonly-utilised ideas evolve from his very earliest plays through to his last.