Shak.Rap - Shakespeare and Hip Hop

Was Shakespeare the world’s first rapper? In 2009 British rap artist and MOBO award winner Akala accepted a BBC challenge to stage Othello with a hip hop twist. The result was Othello Retold, with 50 Manchester based MCs, musicians, dancers and visual artists. Here is part of their creation:

The course of deception never did run smooth Yet Othello still had more to prove

Cold is his heart, shielded by a cage

His evilness never fades Like a blade with no size As sharp as a colour that blinds

Deception, manipulation, manifested in his creation To divide, step into and override

Faithfulness does not lie but doubt corrupts the mind

Othello’s lost inside his heart skipping the beat The rhythm of Iago’s defeat

Akala believes that Shakespeare and hip hop have a lot more in common that we may imagine. To demonstrate this he posed some quotations and asked if we could tell if they were from Shakespeare or Hip Hop:

HIP HOP OR SHAKESPEARE?

(1) I am reckless, what I do to spite the world.

(2) A dead bird flying through a broken sky.

(3) Hear my soul speak.  

(4) Who inflicted this bitter sickness?

Click for answers


Michael Boyd, distinguished artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has also joined in, stating: “The closest to Shakespeare in contemporary times are rappers”. He singled out Will.i.am and Jay-Z and talked of how Shakespeare and rappers, in comparison with films and TV, speak directly to an audience: “There is something missing with [films and TV shows] that maybe Jay-Z doesn’t miss in a live concert. He is in direct contact with his audience”.

Shak.Rap Answers

(a) Shakespeare - Macbeth 3.1.111-112


(b) Hip Hop - Nasir Jones aka Nas


(c) Shakespeare - The Tempest 3.1.63


(d) Hip Hop - Inspectah Deck

Sex in the Restoration Theatre

The Laughing Audience - engraving by William Hogarth

In his book The Art of Living in London, 17th-century author Henry Peacham relates the following anecdote about a tradesman’s wife who went to see a play without her husband and there lost her purse:

“Where did I put it? Under my petticoat, between that and my smock”. “What” quoth her husband “did you feel nobody’s hand there?” “Yes” quoth she “I felt one’s hand there, but did not think he had come for that.”

In Restoration England if a gentleman was seeking an extra-marital affair, the ideal place to seek a partner was in one of the city’s many theatres, and in particular in the pit. Help (if help were needed) was available in The Young Gallant’s Academy (1674) by Sam Vincent, in which Chapter V devotes itself to ‘Instructions for a young gallant how to behave himself in the playhouse’....

Having ‘paid his half-crown and given the door-keeper his ticket’, the gentleman should ‘presently advance himself in the middle of the pit, where having made his honour to the rest of the company, but especially to the vizard-masks, [’Ladies rarely came upon the first Days of Acting but in Masks’- Colley Cibber (1704)] let him pull out his comb, and manage his flaxen wig with all the grace he can’. The next step was to buy some oranges from the ‘orange-wench’, and present one to ‘the next vizard-mask’. In this way ‘By sitting in the Pit, if you be a Knight, you may happily get you a Mistress…’ 

 If encouragement were needed this too was available on the stage itself, such as at the Dorset Garden Theatre, opened on 9 November 1671. It had a seating capacity of between 1,000 and 1,200, and a gilded baroque proscenium lavishly decorated with carvings and a heraldic emblem. A visiting Frenchman, François Brunet, wrote in his Voyage d’Angleterre (1676):

‘The auditorium is infinitely more beautiful and functional that those in the playhouses of our French actors. The pit, arranged in the form of an amphitheatre, has seats, and one never hears any noise. There are seven boxes, holding twenty persons each. The same number of boxes form the second tier, and higher still, there is the paradise.’

One of the most bawdy plays to be performed at the Dorset was The London Cuckolds by Edward Ravenscroft, first staged in 1681. Born in May 1644, Ravenscroft had been destined to follow his father and become a lawyer, but theatrical success in his adaptation of a Molière play persuaded him to give up law for a career in the theatre. He had further success with a farce entitled The Anatomist and with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. But his biggest hit by far was The London Cuckolds, an unashamedly rude play involving young rakes pursuing buxom married women. The play was so popular that it was performed each Lord Major’s Day for seventy years, until pressure from puritans caused Garrick to discontinue the tradition. 

The Four Times of the Day - Morning by William Hogarth (detail)

Edward ‘Ned’ Howard and a Restoration cause célèbre.

Edward ‘Ned’ Howard (1624 - c.1700) was one of four Restoration playwright brothers with a reputation for being difficult and demanding. He particularly disliked actors improvising their parts, and in 1667 became embroiled in a controversy involving his play The Change of Crowns, in which comic actor and fellow playwright John Lacy, regarded as the greatest comedian of his day, was performing.


It all happened on Monday 15 April 1667 at the King’s House theatre. It was the first performance of the play and the house was packed. King Charles II and the Queen were there, along with the King’s brother the Duke of York and the Duchess, and various members of the Court. Also present was Admiralty official Samuel Pepys, who was unable to find a seat and had to stand by the door. But he found the play ‘the best that ever I saw at that house’, and that Lacy ‘did act the country-gentleman come up to Court, who do abuse the Court with all the imaginable wit and plainness about selling of places, and doing every thing for money’ like no-one else. Everyone in fact seemed to enjoy the play. Everyone that is except for one person: the King.


Charles, in fact, was furious with Lacy for the liberty he had taken in apparently improvising his part, and in his anger had the actor incarcerated. Lacy spent several days confined, and on his release he met with Ned Howard. He blamed Howard’s play for his ill treatment, accused him of being more a fool that a poet, to which Howard replied by slapping Lacy’s face with his glove. Lacy responded in striking Howard on the head with his cane, and some there wondered that Howard did not run Lacy through. Instead Howard complained to the King, and the King’s response was to the close the theatre.


Samuel Pepys heard about the confrontation and recorded it in his Diary. He next saw Lacy on stage on 1 May 1667 in a play titled Love in a Maze, which he described as 'a sorry play: only Lacy's clowne's part, which he did most admirably indeed; and I am glad to see the rogue at liberty again'.

The Music of William Shakespeare

Musicians by Dutch artist Dirck Hals

What music did Shakespeare listen to? On Saturday 21 April 2012 between 10.30-11.00 a.m. (BST) BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a selection of what they call 'Shakespeare's favourite songs' chosen by scholar Stanley Wells, RSC director Greg Doran and musician Lucie Skeaping.


The selection to include a lullaby that the poet's mother may have sung him; bawdy tavern songs; and songs from the pen of the man himself.

Sir Peter Lely and the Windsor Beauties

The English Stuart king Charles II (1630-1685) had an eye for the ladies as well as being a prolific squanderer of public money. It is depressing to think that England abandoned its republic for a wastrel who had scant regard for parliament and who even cynically betrayed his own people's safety by accepting an allowance from Louis XIV of France in exchange for his non-interference in Europe.

Among the idle king's many mistresses were Barbara Villiers, also known as Lady Castlemaine; and the stage actress Nell Gwynn. The picture above by Sir Peter Lely is of Nell Gwynn, though there is an alternative belief that it depicts Lady Castlemaine.

Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680) was a Dutch-born artist who became a leading painter of the English court following the death of Sir Anthony van Dyck. He was portrait artist to Charles I, and he painted Oliver Cromwell when he was Lord Protector. In 1661 he was appointed Principle Painter in Ordinary to Charles II.

Among Lely's works were ten portraits of ladies of the court, the so-called Windsor Beauties, named after the medieval Windsor Castle, parts of which were rebuilt by Charles II. The paintings were later moved to Hampton Court Palace where they are currently on display in an exhibition entitled The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned. The exhibition runs until 30 September 2012.

Samuel Beckett's new suit

Beckett in his new suit in 1938 after it had been altered in Dublin

'...the suit is lovely except that it doesn't fit anywhere'.

It is the year 1936 and Samuel Beckett is living with his mother at the family home of Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock. Some years earlier he had resigned his post of lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and had recently undergone psychiatric therapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Now, back in Dublin, he is broke, unemployed, and quite likes getting drunk.


He mother is frantic for him to find employment, and he persuades her to fund a trip he could make to Germany in order to study paintings with a view to finding a post of curator of an art gallery. His mother agrees, and on the morning of 28 September 1936 he sets off for six months of wanderings around the newly created Third Reich. 


The trip is long and at times tiring, and towards the end he finds himself in the town of Bamburg, where he has a strange encounter with a tailor.


The man pours his soul out to Beckett: his poor health, his debts, even evokes his old war wound. Ever compassionate, Sam asks the man to make him a suit in 'midnight blue'. The tailor quickly produces a tape measure, takes Sam's measurements, suggests a special cloth, and gives a cost of 120 marks. Beckett pays 35 marks deposit and they arrange a fitting several days later in Nuremberg. 


Sam waits in Nuremberg, but there is no news from the tailor. Is he being swindled, he wonders. The tailor finally calls and tells Sam he will be coming by train. Beckett goes to the station but there is no sign of the man. He finally comes on a later train, what he calls an 'extra', and has the coat with him, but not the trousers. 


Sam tries the coat. The tailor praises the woof, the weight, says his own next suit will be of no other material. Sam is now convinced that he is being done, but consoles himself that he is not being done 'in the eye'. He writes in his diary:

'The difference between being done and done in the eye is in first case one knows and in second not. He thinks he is doing me in the eye, whereas he is only doing me.'

The fitting is done and the tailor departs. Several days later the finished suit arrives by post in Munich. Sam opens the package, looks at the suit, describes it as 'of grotesque cut, coat too big and trousers too short, but blue'. He writes a letter to the tailor telling him 'the suit is lovely except that it doesn't fit anywhere'. Later that day Sam buys a white silk shirt to go with the suit. He tries it on and finds it 'too big and beastly cut, but white'.


Shortly afterwards he returns to Ireland.


[Source: Damned to Fame, The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson]