order from Amazon
I had just decided to name my new play “A year Without Shakespeare,” to express my weariness with the recurring unimaginative return again and again to the Bard. Then I came upon John Reed’s NEW/old play, and I feel fired up! What a dramatic re-imagination is herein offered us!
—Richard Foreman
The literary Trick of the Year!
—Page 6, New York Post
I can’t quite believe “All The World’s A Grave”: Such an Original idea.
—Ian McKellen
It’s a shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled times.
—Spalding Gray
The resulting story is both familiar and fresh, and the characters are energized and enlightened. Reed’s juxtaposition allows him to give added depth and dimension to characters. .. Shakespeare fans can expect classics, like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy or Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” lament. But Shakespeare fans will have particular fun catching all the familiar Shakespeare lines that come in surprising contexts. It’s not Juliet, for instance, who cries “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?”
—Scholarsandrogues
Reed skewers our early 21st century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.
—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine
With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare's own words and characters into an entirely new play. ... Reed has tapped into that muse and produced a re-envisioned Shakespeare that proves to be both provocative, substantial, and entertaining.
—Hipsterbookclub
A new and invigorating interpretation ... electrifying and comprehensive.
—Zoe Rosenthal, BatesStudent
An inspired bit of bricolage ... This “remix version” of Shakespeare proves fascinating and entertaining. Reed clearly loves the Bard. His pastiche contains many of Shakespeare’s best passages, which are always a delight to reread. More impressive, though, Reed fashions from this familiar material a story containing enough surprises to delight even those well versed in the Bard.
—Jack Helbig, Booklist
What's destabilizing—and often wildly comical—is not just the rude mash-up of characters and settings violently plucked from their canonical sources but the way in which the power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts.
—Christianity Today, Favorite Books of 2008
We haven’t experienced this much haughtiness since college!
—Timeout New York
A proven Thomas Edison ... sophisticated fun.
—Allan Jalon, Huffington Post
Reed caramelizes the Bard’s plays into a great and terrifying world ... a dizzying feat of writing and scholarship, and uncannily contemporary in its brew of constant trouble.
—Lynne Tillman
This is the Frankenstein's monster of Shakespearean tragedy.
—William S. Niederkorn
The power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts.
—John Wilson, Books and Culture
A wicked illusionist.
—Los Angeles Journal
PENGUIN/PLUME—
What it is: the known works of W.S., reconstructed, line by line, into a new tragedy, starring Hamlet, Juliet & Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, The Queen, Three Weird Sisters, Rosencrantz & Guidenstern, and the Ghost of the King.
The story: Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet, wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered further, and commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged Prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the Prince goes mad with jealousy.
The issues engendered: War, parody, the question of what is authorship, sex and exploitation, the current Shakespeare fracas, the long history of Shakespeare adaptations, Shakespeare and Hollywood, the Public Domain, the literary canon, the state of contemporary letters in relation to “great” works, the creative future we bequeath our children.
SCENES FOR ACTORS
Hamlet monologue—Act 1, Scene II
Juliet & Hamlet—Act 1, Scene IV
Lear monologue—Act 3, Scene II
Macbeth & Witches—Act 4, Scene VI, or excerpted by the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/10/fiction/an-excerpt-from-john-reeds-new-book-all-the-worlds-a-grave
Queen & Macbeth—Act 4, Scene VII
Queen monologue—Act 4, Scene VII
ENDNOTES
The endnotes are organized by act and line number, as keyed to the Penguin/Plume edition. They reference the provenance of each line, notable meter, and scene locations. (Please email questions or comments on the footnotes.) Many thanks to Ken Murray for transferring these to a practical document.
THE QUARTOS
There are currently four quarto versions, cut for the stage. Lengths (at 10,000 words per hour):
5,000 words: selection
8,000 words: selection
14,400 words: Quarto 3
17,400 words: Quarto 1 (10,000 words shorter than the Penguin/Plume edition).
SYLLABUS
Course description: Shakespeare in our day. What draws us to Shakespeare? What draws us to a language and society far from our own? That Shakespeare can be a riveting stage force is demonstrated time and again, from the most humble small town production to New York’s Broadway. But where is our time in the world of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Henry V? What characters come away from those plays to deliver a message to the contemporary world? And what do they say? In this course, we’ll read six plays by William Shakespeare (as named above) and view theatrical and cinematic performances. All The World’s A Grave: a New Play by William Shakespeare (Penguin Books 2008) by contemporary author, John Reed, will serve as our gateway, back to Shakespeare’s time, and then, back to our own. Course requirements: memorization of one Shakespeare Sonnet, one in-class presentation, and a final paper.
Please email requests for the syllabus, endnotes or Quartos, and queries regarding rights, to john[@]johnreed.org
Reed has brought music's remix culture to literature with stunning results.
—David Gutowski, largeheartedboy
All the World’s a Grave alerted the world to a timbre of postmodern genius never before seen in American letters.
—Rami Shamir, Evergreen Review
This send-up of the bard is both new yet familiar; by using a literary form of montage, Reed plays with our understanding of some of the best known characters from Shakespeare's oeuvre and creates a work that is eerie in its timeliness.
—Finn Harvor, Rain Taxi
Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we're mired in today; in the process he's created his own masterpiece.
—John Grooms, Creative Loafing, Charlotte
The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage.
—Fictionwise