Why We Can't Do Plays Like Shakespeare Anymore: The London History Show

Some baseball games do in fact sell beer and food in the stands. Most have concession stands behind the bleachers.

I would love to do King Lear with J. Drapper as the bookholder. I feel that would be a riot. 😄

This seems like something to do at the Edinburgh Fringe or something similar, I can definitely imagine being able to find an audience for this there; afternoon performances, different play each day and all!

I’ve had the opportunity to watch Shakespeare in an open-air amphitheater with audience participation. It was still kinda boring honestly, but definitely cool to experience

The rehearsal process described here really sounds like what it is like to be in a Church/Cathedral choir. I remember one moment where we'd rehearsed a piece once before mass- and it wasn't until the actual mass that I really felt the meaning of 'we sat down and wept bitter tears' ring through the building.
Strangely, it made it more meaningful that I never sang it again. <3

Has anyone contacted you to put on a play in this style?

Yes, beer is usually sold at professional baseball games. Sodas at high school and little league games.

this video delights me!

"Line!".....Draper, "hold my book" 😂

our english teacher had us do something like this in grade 11. we had a proper performance auditorium in the school and he broke us up into groups and gave us just the parts of certain acts of certain plays at random. and we had two classes to practice and we performed by the end of the second so really we had maybe 2 hrs at most? it was actually a lot of fun? some people had to play multiple parts and some had to play different genders because the groups were not divided to accommodate the scripts. we actually had a very big male to female skew in our school, for one guy maybe four or five girls, so it went the other way, a lot of girls had to do "boy" parts. we did costumes sort of? like my group got an act of Hamlet and the girl who played Hamlet dressed in all black that day, that sort of thing. there were no props on stage so we had to figure out like how polonius and claudius would hide when they listened in on Hamlet and Ophelia. we didn't have a guy to feed you lines though, we were allowed to have scrips in our hands for reference. and we were allowed to go pee. small blessings XD
but yea i remember it being a lot of fun and it did make the script sort of "click" for me in a way you don't really get when you're just reading it by yourself or in a classroom.

rices also will be dependent on how many L5 seats hour house holds... as well as how many higher-priced seats. And Shakespeare will probably sell out each show; not always the case with contemporary drama. so...

Surprised how often I had to think about "Life of Brian" here (Not even including the part where you shown a scene)

I love the fact you’re drinking monster lol. You just don’t strike me as a monster energy drink person. I drink massive amount of coffee. I absolutely love all your videos. I’ve always considered myself a bit of an Anglophile. You’re literally the only reason I use TikTok.

I love when I can confirm America facts - we do, in fact, buy snacks and beer at baseball games like in the cartoons. Although, these use to be cheap snacks everyone could afford. Now, they are cheap snacks that nobody can afford.

Shakespeare was a brilliant historical writer Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet are classics

Not much any more. Drunk baseball fans were getting a bit too rowdy through into the 90's when beer vendors were all but eliminated. So now one has to be sober enough to walk all the way to one of the concession stands, buy 4 beers at $14.00 a pop for bottom shelf draft lager, then maintain one's composure, balance & agility to successfully weave through hundreds of other drunks & make it back to....."Um, what section was my seat ?" w/hopefully more than half the contents still in one's cups. It's a self regulating test you see
They do still sell hotdogs, soda pop & cracker jacks by vendor. In some parks they even talk like they're stuck in the 40's !
The coolest thing is the trust that exists in ball parks nation wide; if your far from the aisle, you can still safely pass your cash down to complete strangers & they'll pass your food etc.. all the way back. So we do uphold some etiquette in this country. In places. If you know the words to Sweet Caroline you'd fit right in. (Fenway Paak)

J. Draper---I love you! You're one of the best shows on-line. I want to meet you next time I'm in London.

I'm happy to be corrected but I find it hard to believe that theatres could really lower their prices so easily. They have to make a profit, and a play with very complicated scenery and effects etc. is vastly more expensive than the back-to-basics plays at The Globe. And I suspect, but could be wrong, that The Globe has some very famous and wealthy patrons which enables it to subsidise tickets.

Opera audiences used to be well lit so you could see who was there and what they were wearing, and people would chat with each other, and eat and drink, and go in an out. The man who put an end to that was none other than Richard Wagner, at his sacred theatre in Bayreuth, where are the worshipers sit silently in the dark and experience the Complete Work of Art, and go home enlightened.
P.S. I love opera, including Wagner, but I know its wicked ways all too well.

She forget to list no seats.

'Nacreous' is my new word. I love it. I'm going to work it into every conversation now.

About beer at baseball games: Yes. The Simpsons has a lot of subtle satire, so not everything you see is accurate to American life, but it is true that people carry food and drink around the stadium, selling it to people in the seats.
All stadiums: soda, hot dogs
Nearly all stadiums: beer (but some stadiums sell beer only in a closed biergarten, due to local alcohol laws)
Many stadiums: nachos, peanuts, candy, Cracker Jack (a brand of caramel-covered popcorn)
Some stadiums: hamburgers and cheeseburgers, falafel, sweet tea, miscellaneous other food and drink

Now THIS is the kind of delightful historical nonsense I love to learn. 8D

I'd love to be on stage for that! I hate being on the stage singing songs I've written, but this is pure freedom!

I always noticed that Shakespeare had a lot of exposition as to what the characters were doing despite plays being ostensibly visual, but I never quite understood why until now!

You should do a video about whether Shakespear was just a pen-name for an arisocrat or not. A lot of people argue that one had to have an inight on power-politics to write some of the things he did.

Actually. In my area (Dallas, Texas) we have a Shakespeare company, Shakespeare Everywhere, that may not do the original practice style, but they advertise themselves as "minimally rehearsed", because the cast is made up of all local actors who have other plays or jobs as their main gigs.

They have someone on book, as a backup. And most performances are in a local bar, so they've turned the call for a forgotten line into a drinking game for the audience.

Yes! We're always told the correct way to behave at the theatre is to sit quietly and not engage at all, when audiences at the time would never have done that

After this one I feel I am a learned scholar. Learned more from this than the Doctor Who meets Shakespear series.

things happen when the time is right. Like the enlightenment for example. Why were the best composers german or austrian at that particular time ? Can any composers these days match them ? And the renaissance, who can carve like Michaelangelo, or paint like Botticelli, or Leonardo ? it's just a matter of things sparking off others. Like a jumping jack thrown into a box of fireworks !

Having a bunch of plays in rotation - repertory theatre - is how they work in Hungary, and if wikipedia is to be trusted, all around Eastern and Central Europe. So it's not as crazy as people accustomed to the other way might think.

fascinating to learn that bookholders go that far back- when i was involved in plays in elementary school, we were all constantly forgetting our lines (because we were kids) and they had a lady sitting on the edge of the stage who would say something to hint at what the line was (if i'm not mistaken, i think she was also a narrator that framed the beginning and ending of the plays, so i guess that makes a bit more sense).

good to know they didn't just do that because we were a bunch of little dumbasses

That was fecking fascinating. Thank you!

I went to a show in London by shitfaced shakespeare. It was great, each night a different cast member gets genuinely drunk and all the other actors have to just go with it so every single performance is a bit original even if its the same play over and over. When i went the drunk asked for audience suggestions of fruit to use as an insult and ended up yelling you kumquat at someone, my face hurt from laughing

Baseball games are exactly like the cartoons.

Wonderful movie made about all male acting in Restoration theatre was Stage Beauty, with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes.

Oddly enough I feel like this sort of rehearsal-performance schedule might be more successful in America.

The American Shakespeare Center has what they call an “Actors Renaissance” season every spring where they do an approximation of the original style. They get about 3 days of rehearsal for each show with no director, cue scripts, and the lot. Obviously they aren’t doing the same volume of shows, but they do follow the other conditions as best they can

bravo, I've only watched your short videos before. this was excellent. thank you for creating this for all of us to understand.

and do take in an American baseball game someday.

this was riveting! thank you!

I've done it as an actor....R&J (Claudius), Lear( couple times, but not as King L.), about 20 differant bits alltold...big parts, small..and, when you get the bit in your teeth, as horsey types say, you can go for days.....
Give it a try!!!! The hours just go roaring by in no time.
Best wishes all!!!

You can't do plays like that for many reasons. One of them is because they're very long and we don't use dialogue like that anymore. Like Greek tragedies are forever long too with big random things that don't make sense in today's literary traditions.

My high school had an outdoor amphitheater, so in the summertime they would put on performances of Shakespeare's plays. While it wasn't truly accurate, they did have the lighting, lack of set and curtains, etc., so it gave a little glimpse into how theatre once was. It was really neat!

I feel like the original(ish) schedule could work really well for a summer festival season. Theres a town in Ontario canada, which runs a Shakespeare(ish, 3/10 of their long running shows were Shakespeare this year, and 1/3 of their shorter ones) themed theater festival every summer, with most shows running may to September.

Back of the envelope, If you did all 39 plays that would be 3.3productions per season, for 5months at 6 shows a week. You could increase to 7 shows a week easily(you couldn't do more than one show a day though)by including backups(not understudies because no studying). You might want to curate the playlist slightly (I dont know enough about Shakespeare to know which if any might not make the cut for this) but you could counteract the fact that people (and especially actors)are generally familiar with at least some of the plays by randomising the play that is to be performed at rehearsal each morning.

Honestly that sounds like a really fun project! And works in the summer Festival thing where people come down for a few days and so can see the troupe preform several times and get more comfortable with interaction within each performance, and thus seed the following audiences to be more likely to interact.

With 7months off inbetween seasons you would also be able to keep most of the cast year over year without loosing the charm. The short run and novelty would give you a good chance of attracting famous guest actors for a season. When i was a teenager I got to attend (a normal but abosolutely phenomenal) preformance of The Tempest staring Christopher Plummer (he's Canadian so very exciting to us) at the festival.

Thanks

You should find out who Shakespeare was. There was no burned down in 1618 time. London was a forest back then the building and the dramas shown where not real and to get to the next town you had to travel through the forests. Shakespeare was my Ancestor and his son never died he continued his 14th century coronation global parade. Hamlet was the consolidation of my Ancient Khumbar Kingdom known once as Camlet that turned into Camelot. The story’s go on. The London theatre has a very ancient burned down Chittaranjan Theatre buried underneath that now could be found as charcoal from the many thousands of years of the ice age crushing it to leave it in that condition. V V il iam Shaks Pir = V IVI ཡམ་མེ་ཡོམ་མེ་བྱེད་པ།. Shaks Pir = Mystery Saint. 3 44 3 44 95 Atar 1. He spent allot of time in France and left his coding within the Catholic scriptures. I’ll write about it later. I’m sure you would of worked what the next books where!


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Yes, J. Draper, baseball is played like the Simpson’s show, with concessionaires yelling that they have beer to sell, others yelling they have peanuts, hot dogs, etc.

I'm so grateful to have been able to see many, many plays at the recreation of Shakespeare's Blackfriar's Theatre in Staunton Virginia. They don't do everything according to original practices, but. A lot. As much as they reasonably can, really. It's truly a wonderful experience, especially the plays that were written for that theatre specifically, such as Hamlet.

I should have counted how many times during this video I audibly gasped as I learned something new! Audiences! Drag queens! Light bulbs! Man I love facts. Thanks!