Shax in Songs
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb is a small, fancy book with 319 pages. This book was written in attempt to paraphrase many of Shakespeare’s works into more approachable readings. The front cover of the book has a canvas texture and includes an illustration of a lady wearing a red dress, while the back cover has a small, circular illustration of the lady’s face. The text and the border on the front cover are painted in gold. There is also gold paint on the edges of the pages of the book. The inside cover pages contain black and white pen drawings of the lady as well. The book also contains 76 full page illustrations: 6 colour plates with gold accents and 70 half-tone illustrations by W. Paget which are black and white. These illustrations were considered very elaborate for the time that the book was published. The inside pages are relatively thick with a waxy texture, and the illustrated pages are glossy. The text is written in paragraph form in a single column per page. The font is approximately 12-point in size and has serifs. The font choice and paragraph structure helps make this book easy to read, especially in comparison with the typical style of Shakespeare’s plays.
This book was published in London and New York in 1910 by E. P. Dutton & Company. It was printed in Bavaria. After publication, this book was most likely owned and read by a lot of children. The target audience for this type of book appears to be young readers. Although the book was an important and creative adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays, it was probably widely available and, therefore, not too expensive. It is assumed to have been in many households at that time. There were a few pencil notes written on the inside front cover, including the numbers “7.50,” which may have possibly represented an estimated cost of the object at some point in time. The book is now housed in LSU’s Hill Memorial Library of Baton Rouge. Although no written transactions were recorded, this book was most likely donated to the library by a local photographer as part of a set of numerous Shakespeare items.
The text that we chose to make a creative interpretation of is Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb. The book was published in 1910 and was intended to summarize many of Shakespeare’s plays. Of the plays we read in class, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet were included in this book. For our creative interpretation, we chose to produce a compilation of short clips from movies and added music to them to create “music videos”. We chose movie clips and music that we thought would best portray what the plays were about in a short amount of time in an attempt to recreate the summarizing aspect of the book. We also decided to create these music videos to go along with the reoccurring theme of “Top 40” of our class.
For Twelfth Night, our music video used clips from She’s The Man to roughly summarize some of the major points of the play. We chose this movie because it is a modern remake of the original play by Shakespeare. For the music, we chose to use Dude Looks like a Lady by Aerosmith. We chose this song to satirize the fact that Viola dresses like a man for significant portions of both the play and movie.
For A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we used clips from the movie A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Michael Hoffman. We used this movie because it is a very accurate recreation of the original play with a few minor variations. For the music, we chose Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dream and a very short clip of Back that Azz Up by Juvenile. We chose Taylor Swift’s song because she sings about love and dreams, which are two of the most major themes of the play. We decided to put in a short clip of Juvenile’s song to satirize the part of the play where Bottom’s head is turned into that of an ass.
For Hamlet, we took clips from Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet movie because it is an accurate recreation of the original play. We chose to play clips from the Ghost Busters theme song to satirize the fact that the characters in the movie speak to the ghost of King Hamlet. We also played parts of Hello by Adele, which paired with the scene when Hamlet speaks with the ghost of his deceased father.
In summary, this creative interpretation gives a brief summary of the plays to the audience in a format that is easily digestible and entertaining. The video clips we chose to use came from movies that were based off of the original plays, and the music came from popular songs whose themes were relatable to the plays.