Why One Should Not Go to YouTube After a Day of Working on the Dissertation...

So after a day of some invigorating work on the dissertation, I stumbled onto this clip on YouTube:



Fun, right? Muppets doing Shakespeare!

Oh, Internet, welcome to my world. Long ago, Ben started limiting me to the number of comments I could make after we saw a Shakespeare performance. Now I'm afraid that rule will have to apply to Shakespeare parodies as well.

So let me tell take you on a journey through my brain...

Gonzo appears, dressed in English Elizabethan garb; he is unable to perform, thus setting up an emergency situation in which we will not get to see the Hamlet scene. Although the trapeze reference hints at an experimental production, Gonzo's costume suggests a classic and authoritative interpretation of the play. Scooter suggests that Chris Reeve (a familiarization of Christopher Reeve's name) is available and tells us, colloquially, that he's "real good." For American audiences, Reeve equates to Superman, who, in turn, is the quintessential embodiment of American values and freedoms. This association is played up in the scene as he is sitting near a telephone booth, "just in case there is an emergency" (not to mention his aside about the tights). Instead of emerging from the telephone booth as Superman, Reeve comes out wearing the Elizabethan costume and is transported to Elsinore. When he starts the most famous of Shakespeare's soliloquies, he affects a British accent. Between the English costume and the inflection we are given the feeling that we are witnessing an "authentic" - read classical, elitist, royalist -reading of Shakespeare. Quickly, however, this reading devolves. Reeve's declamatory acting style and hand gestures are nothing but silly, his anger over the janitor's reference to the American coffee break (instead of the English tea) is ridiculous, the skull and the pig start talking with lower to middle-class American drawls - the illusion of a upper-class reading of the text is not only broken but also made the laughing stock. And while the basketball reference may seem out of context, remember that basketball is an American sport, and our all-American hero has just handily scored two points by throwing the most iconic object of the Shakespeare canon across the stage. In short, this scene becomes a metaphor for the long tradition of Americanizing Shakespeare and for our desire to undermine British claims to the poet in order to make him our own. The Muppets seek to perform these tasks in the same way generations of Americans have - by making Shakespeare a democratic figure who is a friend to the common man. The transition into Cole Porter's "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" is, of course, no accident. The musical is an American theatrical form and has a long tradition of appropriating Shakespeare's work for American audiences. Porter's song is a series of pun-filled couplets which Americanize Shakespeare's works by relating them to contemporary colloquialisms. Moreover, the song capitalizes on American dialects, making it impossible for Reeves to maintain his British accent (except for his "thinks thou?" but the momentary switchback now feels more like mockery instead of the reverent imitation we witness at the beginning of the scene). In this manner, the Muppets invite us to "Brush up your Shakespeare." The "your" here is important because it is our Shakespeare they represent - our popular, American construction of the bard who reinforces our American social systems and cultural preoccupations.

Plus it's Muppets, and it's hella cool.

And like all visits to YouTube, I could just watch one clip. I also watched this episode of Monsterpiece Theatre. (Besides Super Grover, Monsterpiece Theatre was. my. favorite. I lived for those sketches. Guess my academic preoccupations are no surprise, huh?) Anyway, I thought this was adorable. (Also, I think they might have recycled the set from The Muppet Show clip.) Elmo's reactions, I think, are the embodiment of my undergraduates' early reactions to Hamlet. That is, of course, until their wonderful instructor brushes up their Shakespeare.



By the way, there are also Monsterpiece Theatre parodies of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice. And a fabulous Guys and Dolls parody that all about gender roles. I could totally lose my whole weekend to these...