"Journeys end in lovers meeting; every wise man's son doth know."

July 31, 2022 12:45 PM

Who would Lady Macbeth most like to spend an afternoon with? Juliet? Mercutio? Kate? What is Ophelia looking for in a lover, or a companion? Pair some of Shakespeare's characters off in We Are Not All Alone Unhappy, a Twine game by Cat Manning. For further reading, here's an explanation of the project.
posted by shirobara (12 comments total)

I like this, and I would love to see an expansion where we get famous characters from other plays- maybe some Brecht and Tennessee Williams characters in the mix.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 1:33 PM on July 31, 2022

Helping those two, sitting and waiting for that fellow to come along, each find someone might be rewarding for everyone except the audience.
posted by hippybear at 1:47 PM on July 31, 2022

Kill Shakespeare was a comics series which treated the Bard's characters as if they inhabited a shared comic book universe. Hamlet teams up with Juliet to fight Richard III and Iago - that kind of thing. It wasn't a great book, but it was entertainingly bonkers.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:25 PM on July 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is cool! It's a little unclear from the FPP but this is published via a scholarly journal ("Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation") special issue on Shakespeare and Gaming. Here's a link to the full TOC for this issue: https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/issue/view/7
posted by Tesseractive at 2:26 PM on July 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

Something I didn't figure out right away, but the number of hearts next to each character is the number of possible pairings.
posted by indexy at 2:51 PM on July 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Kill Shakespeare was a comics series which treated the Bard's characters as if they inhabited a shared comic book universe.

I’ve long thought that if Shakespeare scholars approached their field they way Star Wars and Star Trek fans do, there’d be endless fanfic trying to prove that the Merchant of Venice Antonio and the Twelfth Night Antonio were the same guy.

And Marc Antony in Julius Caesar was an ancestorb
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:16 PM on July 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

I haven't read Shakespeare since High School, but that was fun.
posted by Spike Glee at 9:07 PM on July 31, 2022

Huh, reminds me of Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet in a good way.
posted by sixswitch at 2:58 AM on August 1, 2022

I enjoyed this, but wish you could keep going after you got some but not all happy endings. I did appreciate the spin for Lady Macbeth and Mercutio, though.
posted by corb at 8:27 PM on August 1, 2022

I love this and want to draw it out as long as possible. And then have more.
posted by desuetude at 10:03 PM on August 1, 2022

This is delightful. All the characters read as plausible variations. My wife's comment when I told her about it was immediately, "So Kate and Lady MacBeth?"

My only qualm is that maybe Kate is a bit too embittered? It's been a while since I read the play, but last time I did my take was that Petruchio began planning to find a wealthy wife and get on with his life ignoring her as much as possible, and Kate was bored and trapped and enough smarter than everyone around her that she was ready to scream (and regularly did so), and the play is them realizing that the other is equally frustrated and partnering up to screw with the heads of everyone around them when they're force to deal with them. The closing scene is Petruchio proposing a game to Kate in absentia and her thinking it's hilarious and the two of them tormenting all the slow witted, boring wretches they are surrounded by.
posted by madhadron at 8:41 AM on August 2, 2022

I’ve had this idea knocking around in my head for years, but I just don’t think I have the playwriting chops for it. Lady Capulet and Lady Montague are secretly friends (old convent schoolmates?) and they meet incognito in an alehouse on the outskirts of Verona to tell dirty jokes, sing bawdy songs, and complain about their crazy, overdramatic husbands and children.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:53 PM on August 5, 2022