The Lord's Bedchamber

[Christopher Sly]

I started a thread in the general Shakespeare forum titled: "Untaming of the Shrew." I probably should have placed it here. I have written a short 5 page play titled: The Lord's Bedchamber by Christopher Sly dramatizing what I think Shakespeare is up to in this play. I would love to hear some reaction, particularly from Shakespeare teachers and scholars. This play is at the heart of my master's thesis. It maps the geometry of The Lord's Bedchamber to the Hero's Journey, placing it between the first and second thresholds. It dramatizes how Shakespeare is using the first threshold to create "hero interruptus." It might make a useful reference reading to Taming of the Shrew. Or so I hope. My plan was to weasel my way into the classroom by nailing myself to Shakespeare's coattails.

Be the first person on earth to analyze this SHORT 5 page (barely) play. Would it be of value to teachers and students discussing Taming of the Shrew?

The Lord's Bedchamber - a play by Christopher Sly
http://www.gratefulseeker.com/the%20lord%27s%20bedchamber.pdf

[Beewulf]

Thanks for the invitation to respond to your work. It's not easy to translate a novel into dramatic form. The first thing you might do is put the material you've got into right format. There are various internet sites that explain what the format for a play should look like and what it should contain. Another thing to do is figure out how to put all information that's revealed by the narrator into the dialogue. Finally, the theme/idea of your scene is obscure; in order to increase a reader's ability to figure out what you mean, the dialogue should include information that makes your point about the symbolic nature of Sly's journey more coherent.

[Christopher Sly]

Beewulf,

Thank you for replying. You make a good point, and now I am thinking about following your advice. This piece is part of a novel, and I posted it for comment here to try to get some feedback on the ideas expressed concerning the nature of the lord's bedchamber, and my imagined escape. I should not have called it a play. Careless of me. I have gotten rather free with the term play, and playwright in my work, and I forgot whom I was addressing here. This scene is a fairly accurate reproduction of a magical writer's fugue that occurred when I took on the role of Christopher Sly and stepped into the lord's bedchamber to try and figure out what Shakespeare was up to. To re-shape this as an actually dramatic play, as you suggest, sounds like fun. Maybe I'll have a go at it.