Early Modern Verse

New plays, from Early Modern to postmodern.

That’s what it says on my business card, and that begins to sum up the range of styles, genres and personalities I take on in my writing. However, in recent years I have honed the Early Modern-style writing I have long been dabbling in, and have been writing almost exclusively in this style of late. Here I have highlighted projects I have written, and am writing, in just-barely-modernized Shakespearean language and form.

Most Seeming Virtuous Queen

A full-length adaptation of Hamlet in five acts, focusing on Ophelia’s madness journey and Gertrude’s relationships with her spiraling son and sometime ‘daughter’ Ophelia, with the added levity and wisdom of a new character, the Fool.

To Have is Not to Hold

A ten-minute play inspired by the confrontation between Gloucester and Lady Anne in Richard III, act I scene ii, reconceived roughly as if Gloucester had instead met with Katherine the shrew. A power struggle from start to finish.

Fellows Wise Enough

A one-act farce loosely based on the Comedy of Errors, but for that the twins are two pairs of cheveril gloves which resemble each other when turned outward. A cast entirely of clowns and fools.

My Anything

This project-in-the-works is a full-length reimagining of the Taming of the Shrew, but —as the play is so often whispered of — with the kinks worked in. This play explores how and why Katherine might choose a life with Petruchio, and what goes on in the scenes we’ve never yet seen.