The Renaissance Rose

modern stagings of hamlet should keep them as royalty unless the fact that they aren't is hugely relevant to that production.

benedick and beatrice should be in their early 30s at least and claudio and hero should be noticeably younger. beatrice being adamant against marriage and both her and benedick's reaction to each other makes more sense if they're older.

this one's controversial but i think paris should be in his late teens, not way older. i might make another post elaborating on this but paris' death frames him as another victim of the families' violence, with romeo mourning + identifying him as being in the same situation as himself. it's not that old man paris isn't a good interpretation; it's often the easiest way to show romeo and juliet's positions as children helpless under their parents, and makes very clear what demands are being made of juliet. but i feel that adding paris to the list of young people killed in the play as a byproduct of the adults' violence gives romeo's identification with him more weight. given that he clearly has much more control than romeo and juliet but is still identified as a victim of the violence, i think it makes the most sense if he's a bit older than r&j but still very much young.

modern stagings of julius caesar should keep all the knives as knives, but if there has to be a gun, make cassius shoot himself in the head while caesar and brutus still die by stabbing. i've posted about this but the short version is that's it's the best way to show cassius' death as cowardly in contrast to brutus and caesar, whose deaths still mirror each other.

give the fool in king lear an onstage reason for disappearing. i like the 2018 national theatre version that has edmund kill him, and the 2023 south korean production that had cordelia be the fool in disguise the whole time. there was one from 2014 where lear beat him to death in madness which i think would be very shocking, but to good effect. the subsequent lack of comedy in the play after his disappearance would feel more jarring if we actually see his death.

For context: forcing fourteen year old girls to marry grown men was not as common as modern people believe back in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare was specifically showing Juliet's dad going from a good dad (you don't have to marry Paris and certainly not till you're older) to a bad dad (you will marry Paris and you will do so younger than we all know - yes back then they knew that - is healthy). The point of Paris' age is to highlight that Juliet's safety becomes less valuable to her father than his rage against the enemy house.

Ryland Grace is Eva Stratt’s sad dog wife he is astrophathers with Carl and their relationship is as doomed as it gets

he’s the third Adrian and Rocky decided was going to join their new polycule

he’s also the third Yao and Ilyukhina adopted off the street in the fashion of ‘we saw you from across the Hail Mary and we like your vibe’

he’s ALSO a very unwilling member of whatever Shapiro and DuBois have going on in the book for all the book readers the embodiment of ‘isn’t there someone you forgot to ask’

he’s also heavily gay for markiplier’s Simon Iron Lung starring in Iron Lung (2026)

and other variants of Markiplier

him being aroace and platonic soulmates with everyone yum yum yum

plurality in real life:

friend: is something wrong

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences