Mini: Staging Violence in Shakespeare with Dr. Danielle Rosvally and Sydney Schwindt
In today's episode, we are joined by Dr. Danielle Rosvally and Sydney Schwindt to discuss how fight choreographers approach staging moments of violence in theatre, specifically in Shakespeare's plays. We will discuss how they collaborate with directors and actors to safely depict violence on stage, the state of the fight direction community, and how anyone can learn more about safe, consent-based practices for staging violence onstage.
Our guests:
Danielle Rosvally, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of theatre at the University at Buffalo where she serves as resident violence coordinator. She is a fight director, actor, dramaturge, and director. Danielle has been crafting and performing staged violence for over twenty years, and has written about fight direction for venues such as Theatre Topics, Fight Master Magazine, and various edited collections. As a researcher, Danielle specializes in Shakespeare; her book on on Shakespeare as an economic value comes out with the State University of New York press in July.
Sydney Schwindt wears many hats in the theatre world; she is an actor, director, fight director, and educator. She is a resident artist with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and works frequently with SPARC Theatre. She is an advanced actor combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors and is on the advisory board for the Same Boat Theatre Collective. She has taught movement and stage combat at Indiana University and the American Conservatory Theatre’s Graduate program.
Sydney directed “As You Like It” with San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare on Tour. It is running from now until mid May 2024 all across California. Check the websites for a public performance near you! www.sfshakes.org
She will be directing “Twelfth Night” with the Starling Shakespeare Company this summer. The show runs in rep with “Henry IV, Part 1” from June until September, 2024.
Learn more about Fight Direction:
Society of American Fight Directors
The British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat
Transcript:
Kourtney Smith (K): Hi Elyse.
Elyse Sharp (E): Hi Kourtney.
K: How are you doing today?
E: I'm doing well. How are you?
K: I'm also doing well. I'm really happy to share with our listeners the conversation that we had with our two guests for this episode.
E: Yes, I'm also super excited. This is an episode that we've been, I think, wanting to do for a while. We've had it in like the “one day we will have the ability to talk about this” and that day is here. And today we're talking about staging violence in Shakespeare and we are joined in conversation with two returning guests to the pod, Dr. Danielle Rosvally and Sydney Schwindt.
And our conversation today is so interesting and so expansive beyond just what it takes to choreograph or direct a fight in a play, but also they give a really great peek behind the curtain into the field of fight directing, fight choreographing in the theatre and the state of things.
So let's introduce our guests.
K: Danielle Rosvally, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Buffalo, where she serves as Resident Violence Coordinator. She is a fight director, actor, dramaturg, and director. Danielle has been crafting and performing stage violence for over 20 years and has written about fight direction for venues such as Theatre Topics, Fight Master Magazine, and various edited collections. As a researcher, Danielle specializes in Shakespeare. Her book on Shakespeare as an economic value comes out with the State University of New York Press in July.
E: Sydney Schwindt wears many hats in the theatre world. She is an actor, director, fight director, and educator. She is a resident artist with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and works frequently with SPARC Theatre. She is an advanced actor combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors and is on the advisory board for the Same Boat Theatre Collective. She has taught movement and stage combat at Indiana University and the American Conservatory Theatre's graduate program. Sydney directed As You Like It with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival's Shakespeare On Tour, it is currently running March 2024 until mid-May 2024 all across California. Check the websites for a public performance near you at www.sfshakes.org. Sydney will be directing Twelfth Night with the Starlink Shakespeare Company this summer. The show runs in repertory with Henry IV, Part 1 from June until September 2024.
K: Enjoy the episode.
E: Hi, Danielle.
Danielle Rosvally (D) : Hi
E: Hi, Sydney.
Sydney Schwindt (S): Hello
E: Thank you both so much for joining us today to talk about staging violence in Shakespeare. This is something that we've been really interested in talking about after, one, dealing with the very violent play of Titus Andronicus and now in a play that has so many sword fights and so many swords and daggers with Romeo and Juliet, we were just like, we need to have someone talk about this and it's not us, but we happen to know.
K: Yeah, we're not the authorities here. So let's bring on some authorities.
E: Right. So just to start off, for anyone out there who's unfamiliar with the role of a fight director, fight choreographer, can you explain what that job entails when you're working on a production?
D: Effectively, the fight director is in charge of the story of the play as soon as things devolve into violence. So we are brought in to help create the illusion of violence in service to the story and the characters that the director is working on with the actors in the room. And we are there to ensure that everybody is safe, but also that they're doing effective physical storytelling using many tried and true methods of illusions and sometimes with swords or other weapons.
E: When thinking about creating those moments where things devolve into violence in a play, what informs your decisions about what sort of weapons to use or if weapons are going to be used?
S: Honestly, it's usually the director or the script. On a rare occasion, I'll get asked, “oh, what would you like to do?” For Shakespeare or more conceptual pieces there is the possibility that the director is more amenable or open to options of like, “Hey, we're setting this in this time period. What do you think will be best for this?” Or, “Hey, we're doing post-apocalyptic.” Then usually you get a little bit more say, like, “Oh, we're going to use some fun weapons here.”
Another thing often that will help with weapon decisions are budgets. Sword rentals can be pricey depending on the length of your show, how many people are in the production who are needing weapons. Oftentimes people are not thinking about that in the full budget. So when you get to it and they're like, “Oh, all right, we have this in the budget for swords. What can we do?”
So usually it's not as much in the Fight Directors realm. And when it is, it's pretty exciting.
D: I think what most people don't understand is that there are swords and there are sword shaped objects. So you can perhaps go on Amazon and find a sword-shaped object, but it is not a sword. A sword is crafted specifically to withstand the force of physics that we put it through in stage combat and sword-shaped objects are not safe to execute even safe technique with. So a lot of folks who have never worked with a fight director before will be like, “Well, we bought these swords on Amazon.” It's like, I can't use them like they're pretty. You can hang them on an actor, but they're not functional. If you want to use swords, definitely involve your fight director early and often.
E: That's super fascinating to me. And like as an actor, I had no idea, like, the kind of work that goes in on your end to procure those and make sure that they are designed to meet certain specifications.
S: There is a big difference between a sword that is used on stage and, you know, even, even a weapon used for medieval martial arts tournaments, like we have blunted weapons, right?
Some are steel, some are aluminum. I have used polypropylene weapons–there are a vast variety of different weapons, but there are definitely stipulations to be able to put it on stage that make it a safe weapon to be using on stage and for the physical storytelling of the piece.
D: Yeah, and like a costume, form and function are going to meet. So there will be a difference in safety, quality. Like you can only use aluminum weapons with aluminum weapons and steel on steel, same thing. But then also, if I have a sword that I just need to use to menace another actor, it can meet different specifications than if I have a sword that needs to make full contact with another sword, right? So there's things you need to ask about what's happening on stage before you can say like, “Yes, this is fine or no, this is not.”
You can create violence with just about anything. It's just a question of imagination at that point. And the safety standard is a lot about who is going to use this and how and against what and at what time, right?
K: Sydney, you mentioned and Danielle, you also mentioned sometimes not using swords depending on the concept. And the first thing that popped into my mind was Baz Lerman's Romeo and Juliet, where swords are all guns. What are some fun alternatives or alternatives you've seen used that have replaced this typical Shakespearean swordplay?
S: Oh, man, I feel like especially in Shakepeare, you have such a world. I mean, we all, I feel like in the Shakespeare world, there's often the joking of putting a production on the moon, like you can do anything with it.
So there's just this vast variety that you can then play with. You know, I'm even a fan of just replacing things with sticks sometimes. Like Elyse, you and I worked on a show that had like it built into the set, which was really fun where you get to take out pieces of the set and then fight with those, which I think it lends itself to a new level of creativity.
D: Yeah, I did a production of Julius Caesar where we did super representational violence. So instead of stabbing people, we had these like frames with rice paper on them and the actors could like literally punch through them or use things to like go through the frame. So it created like a tactile sensation and also that idea of violence without having to stage literal violence, which saved us a ton of time in rehearsal, which is kind of the point.
I also recently did a production of The Play that Goes Wrong and there's a sword fight where one of the swords breaks and one of the actors is supposed to like fight with half a sword.It was at a high school. They did not have the budget for a broken sword. So we used a plunger instead.
S: I love that. I just so happen to have some old broken swords that I keep on deck just in case someone needs one.
D: Yeah, like if you have them, that's awesome. I didn't have any. And I also like didn't want to get into the liability of lending my personal armory to a high school, you know.
E: You both mentioned, like, the collaboration with the director and the budget and things like that. Specifically with Shakepeare, how, like, do you interact with the text like what Shakespeare has written into the play? For example, Shakespeare sometimes writes scenes in the middle of battles or fights. What's your process for thinking through breaking up these moments of violence that like stop and start and stop and start?
D: That's funny. I do like a whole day of this with my Theatre 101 class because we read Hamlet. And Hamlet's a great example because the final duel in Hamlet has some very specific things that need to happen in a very specific order.
There's the whole thing with the goblet and like the unction and the goblet and Gertrude has to drink and there has to be like examining the swords and Hamlet has to pick a sword, but not that sword and Laertes picks a sword and it's the poison sword and then there's the cut and then they swap swords and then there's a whole list of things and it's all written in the text.
So my first stop is text analysis, you know, like any, any dramaturgy project. And then from there, we'll do a discussion with the director about what's going on. My first question, I usually have like two questions for the director/actor is the first time we talk. The first is on a scale of One to The Audience in Therapy for Life, how violent is this show? And depending on their answer to that, my answer to a lot of these things will change, right?
I did a MacBee with High Schoolers once and it was like, do you kill the baby on stage? Do you take the baby off stage? Do you rip the baby out of Lady Macduff? Like, these are things that happen in productions of MacBee that change how violent that particular scene is. And so I call it the Langsner scale after my colleague, Meron Langsner, who made up this verbiage.
So that question. And then my second question is to the actors generally, do you have any stupid human tricks you can do? Because if we have an actor who can do a standing back tuck, then you bet your butt I'm going to be choreographing a standing back tuck into our fight because like, holy cow, that's really cool.
So it's a combination of looking at the text, seeing what the text has to say, charting that against the director's answer to like, how violent is this show? And then working through the actors and the bodies that I have, and their capabilities to tell the story as clearly as possible in the time allotted to me, because sometimes you have a director who's like, “I want a seven minute fight scene with blood and gore and special effects.”
And sometimes you have a director who's like, “I need this over as soon as possible. And I have like 20 minutes in rehearsal to do it.” Like, okay.
S: And I never like to come in with prearranged choreography. It's always coming in and figuring out who the people you're working with are exactly if you could do a standing back tuck amazing. But also if they're like, “Hey, like my arm doesn't bend this way.” I don't want to have conceived a whole concept based on that. I need to make sure that I'm working with the people I have in the space and with obviously the dramaturgy, you know, of especially within Shakespeare.
I always love talking to my actors about the ideas that they have about the fight too. Because so many times they've come in, they're like, “This is the moment that my character realizes this huge pivotal thing and we have to, we have to use that.”
And I've found my actors always have some sort of really great instinct for their character that I wouldn't have thought of because they've been working on this play for longer and they've been living in this character. And so what they bring to the piece always makes the fight unique and interesting, no matter, you know, if this is my 100th Romeo and Juliet that I've done.
E: This kind of gets into my next question. You both talked about working with the actors who you have and not coming in with preconceived ideas of what you're going to be choreographing. So how do you, on the fly, figure out the experience levels of the actors and what the bodies you have can do?
D: Nine times out of 10, you're working with an actor who's never held a sword before. Or at least I am. I don't know about you, Sydney. Is that your experience?
S: Yeah, it doesn't matter what level that I am working at, whether I am working with graduate students, professional actors, middle schoolers, what have you, nine times out of 10, even if they've held a sword, it might have been for a show and they've only done choreography for that. Even if they've done training, oftentimes it's not something they've kept up with, because it's not something everyone's doing all the time. So more often than not, you are going to be dealing with a more inexperienced actor.
It is a joy when you have someone who's trained a lot, or even in other physical realms. I did a Cyrano a while back at the Livermore Shakespeare Festival, and my Valvert used to be a professional ballet dancer. And there were so many fun things that we could do because of that, and he was very adept at picking up sword fighting. Though it wasn't something that he was super trained in sword fighting, he had this ballet background, but we were able to do some ridiculous balestras and fun footwork and silly things that made it just a joy.
So more often than not, you know, keeping it simple is helpful. But also, you try things, you'd be like, hey, let's try this on. That doesn't work. Great. Let's change it this way. Or, oh, that looks really easy for you. What if we add this into it? And then and if they're able to pick it up, awesome. It's a lot of, you know, adapting on the fly. Maybe that one's a little challenging. Let's adapt it here where it would still look similar, but be a little bit simpler in movement. There's so many different ways to take one thing, start simple, and then build on it to make it a little bit more fancy and fun.
D: Yeah, and even simple things. People who are used to moving their bodies make them look good. Like if I have a dancer in a fight, I can give them the same choreography as someone who has never done a physical discipline before, and the dancer is just going to look better because they know how to make the lines with their body, they know how to move in an aesthetically pleasing way, they know how to use their body to tell the story, and the other person has to learn all of this vocabulary.
And I do want to tag that part of the reason why we see such inexperienced actors with stage combat is an accessibility issue with the arts. Stage combat is a very specialized skill that's incredibly difficult to train because it is expensive. And there are only certain areas of the country where training is readily available, only certain universities that have people doing the training. If you're in a major city, then like maybe somebody will run it, run an independent class, but those are expensive and hard to do.
We have a huge EDI issue in the stage combat world. It is dominated by white men, and that is slowly changing. But it's a big problem that we talk about a lot.
So when we talk about like we're used to dealing with inexperienced actors, that's not because actors aren't doing their jobs. It's because we have an access problem in stage combat.
S: Yes, yes, yes, yes to everything Danielle said. Yes. The Society of American Fight Directors recognizes this, but has started a new program, the Triple E (EEE) Initiative, that if there's anyone out there from an organization who's interested in free stage combat certification courses, we have a yearly cycle. Now that we've been doing a couple different programs a year, it's new, and we'd love for people to apply.
So if you're interested in free stage combat certification courses through any program, please take a look at safd.org. I was helping program develop that, and I'm really excited about it.
K: It's a good way to lean into something I was wondering is like, how do you even go about being certified to do fight choreography? Like what, what even does that look like?
S: Well, there are no certifications that are required.
D: Yes. I actually wrote an article in HowlRound about this a little while back with my colleague Kate Busselle, who's an intimacy choreographer and the idea of certification in both intimacy and fight is an antiquated HR term that doesn't actually apply.
The Society of American Fight Directors, who Sydney just plugged, is a wonderful training organization, but they do not certify actors. You can get certificates, but it's not a certification. There's a program where you can become a certified teacher, but that requires many years of study and expensive training classes that are proprietary to the society. They recognize certain people as fight directors, but they're not certified.
So the language of certified is a thing that it's a buzzword that a lot of people use, but it's not an actual reality in the world of stage combat. It seems like it should be, right? Like you certify an electrician, you should have somebody certified to, like, put three feet of steel in the hands of your actors safely. Like that does seem logical, but...
E: Yeah, or lead any consent based practice. And it seems like there should be at least some sort of, like, low level bar to clear to be in charge of a room with that involved.
D: Yeah, there's not.
S: Nope.
K: I mean, I guess I'm not surprised because I'm just thinking about like, even though this isn't theatre, I'm thinking about the Alec Baldwin situation. Safety is not necessarily always prioritized in the entertainment industry when it should be.
S: The armorer was just charged today. I got the article today.
D: Yeah, I mean, there are standard protocols, but like the largest organization in the United States for stage combat, the SAFD, began in the 70s. It's a very new discipline as far as theatre goes, right? It took us a very long time to figure this out. In Shakespeare's time, they were still fencing masters who just, you know, fenced on stage. This is the history of theatre. We could just, you know, kind of fake it and it'll look great, question mark?
And the SAFD founders were very clear that they started the society because they were sick of seeing their friends get hurt on stage and they were sick of getting hurt themselves. And so here we are, but it's a very new discipline, unfortunately.
E: Yeah, and intimacy is only maybe a decade old.
D: It's slightly older than that, early 90s.
E: In your opinion, what does staging violence add to Shakespeare productions?
S: So this is actually something I've been thinking about a lot. Like, why am I a choreographer of violence? What do I believe in? How do I feel about this? And to be perfectly frank, I think Shakespeare's violence is something I feel more comfortable with.
And that's not just because of like, oh, I'm trained in Shakepeare, things like that. But it's because there's the ability to shape the story that I want to tell, or my ability to choose a director that I want to work with that also wants to shape the story that I want to tell because we're allowed to take this open source material and shift and change it.
And I feel like a lot of Shakespeare's violence is not condoning violence. It's showing the implications of interpersonal issues that lead to this and, you know, or government issues, like get a vast array of like personal to public to like huge life problems that end in violence and how it's not a good thing.
And I think there's lots of other performative violence out there that glorifies violence. And yet, for me personally, I found in my Shakespeare journey and my, my fight director journey, that generally when I'm working with Shakespeare's violence, it's usually going, “Hey, guys, this isn't a good thing. We don't want to end in this position. Look at the journey these characters take. And oftentimes one of them doesn't leave.”
Many of them die, especially when we're working in tragedies, like all the dead bodies at the end of Hamlet, right? I find those stories are really helpful and still very important.
D: Yeah, to kind of add to that, it doesn't help that statistically in contemporary theatre when you're staging violence, it's domestic violence against women. And that sucks. So when you come to Shakespeare and you're like, here are two male presenting folks fighting it out with swords, one of them is going to die and this violence is awful. I mean, like that is slightly more fun to think about, to do, to enact.
I would love to not choreograph another domestic violence against women situation, but they keep writing plays that way and it's not great.
With Shakespeare's violence, I feel like there's also the added layer of distance and therefore it can be fantastical in certain regards, which is why I personally got interested in stage combat because I was a kid who loved swords and this opportunity to like play with my friends with swords all the time is pretty cool when I get to get paid for it.
So this opens the door to doing the things that drew me to this field in the first place as opposed to more contemporary works.
S: There's something very fun about holding a sword.
D: Yeah, swords are cool.
S: But we don't look at it the same way nowadays. No one's walking down the street with a sword or if they are, it's larping and I like larping.
E: To kind of wrap things up, but also on a kind of fun note, what are some of your favorite fights that you've directed in your careers?
S: I'm a sucker for a Three Musketeers. I had the pleasure to work on one back when I was a company member at Davis Shakespeare Festival. I just love that show and we got to go so over the top and you get to add all the stupid sword tricks and all the silly little things that like make your heart light on fire because it's like a pageantry, you know, it is the sword fights are a heightened part of the show. It's not just like, oh, we get through this little moment of violence and to get on to the other part of the show or what have you. It's like, let's make this sword fight 10 minutes long, which is a joy as a choreographer.
D: I have two. I got to do an outdoor site specific production of a play called Bocón!, which is a bilingual fable about a young boy who flees violence in Central America to come to Los Angeles. And there is a fight scene between this young boy and, like, a skeleton knight.
So I had like my two main characters who did this sword fight thing. And then there's a point where the young boy realizes his power and summons forth the power that he has inside him. And in our production, it manifested as the rest of the cast, like appearing out of the trees and stuff to come be the magic.
So we did like all these lifts and, you know, magical Avatar water bending stuff with the other cast members. It was so fun. And there was somebody playing the violin live to punctuate what was going on. It was just so cool.
And then whenever I get to choreograph the Sir Andrew/Viola duel from Twelfth Night, my little heart is so happy because it's just ridiculous. Like neither of them wants to fight. And in some productions, they won't even hire a fight director because they don't have to fight. But like when they crank it to 11 and they like bring someone in, you're like, okay, we can have five minutes of absolute absurdity.
S: Agreed. I love that fight so much. As I have to say, I did get to decapitate Elyse once with a shield and that was pure joy as well.
E: That one's my favorite fight that I've ever done.
K: So you talked about the things that you like. What is something that you don't like when you see it in a sword fight or in a fight? What's one thing that you're like, this again or please don't do this?
S: For me, it's when the sword fight doesn't add to the story. When I am like, what is this doing here? Or sometimes it's like, there's no dramaturgical backing. And I don't mean like the story doesn't have a sword fight in it. I mean that the character suddenly shifts who they are. And it's not coming from a place of truth from the rest of the story. That's something for me where I'm like, this needs to be there for the story.
No character enters into a moment of violence and doesn't leave changed. And so that should be a big moment in whatever story we're trying to tell. So if it's suddenly detached from who that character was beforehand, then it will take me out of what I'm watching.
And the other thing is those unsafe moves that you go, oh dear God, as a fight director, it hurts. But as an audience member, it takes me out of the story completely. And I'm worried about actor safety now.
D: Yeah, that was going to be my number one when I see a show with a fight that needed a fight director and they didn't get one. And I can't with this. I can't.
There are so many ways to solve this problem of “we didn't have the budget to hire a fight director.” Do representational violence, like have a dance fight. I don't care, but don't put your actors in that situation. It makes me uncomfortable as an audience member. And do you really think that your podunk theatre company is going to survive one worker's comp lawsuit? Really? No. So there's that.
And then I detest the trope of “I have never been in a fight before. Oh, look, I have a sword and now I'm a badass, right?” Like the first fight being the thing that like magically makes you a martial artist. Suddenly, you can do everything or like “I trained in secret my whole life because I'm a girl and I couldn’t fight. Oh, look, now I can.” It's dumb. No, that's not how it works.
E: No, I love that. Well, thank you both so, so much for sharing this with us. I think that peeking into the world of fight directing and fight choreographing is so, so it's been so amazing to like just learn from both of you a little bit more about this field and hear your experiences. If people want to learn more about fight choreographing and fight directing, what resources would you share and where should they go?
D: Okay, so this is where we are going to go: safd.org, Society of American Fight Directors website.
S: Oh, the main website doesn't have all the different workshops because many of them are not accredited, but are still working through Society of American Fight Directors teachers. So like the website is a great place, but also there are Facebook groups for the Society of American Fight Directors and there people will post all of the workshops and training opportunities for the most part.
The Society of American Fight Directors does have regional representatives. Whatever region you are in, it is great to send an email to your representative and they will let you know who's in your area and what classes you can take if there are any or what's closest to you.
D: Yeah, I'll also shout out two international organizations. I'm in Buffalo, New York. So Fight Directors Canada also has courses. There's also the International Order of the Sword and Pen runs a workshop every year called the Paddy Crean workshop in Bampf, British Columbia. This year they also ran an online version, which I took. It was great. Obviously, it's not the same as being with someone in the room. But if you're just thinking about some basics and looking to get some things in your body and like maybe meet some other people in digital spaces, I think it worked out really well. They did a great job with it.
S: There's also several international organizations or other international organizations like the BASSC and the BADC in England. That's the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat and then the British Academy of Dramatic Combat. And then there's Stage Combat Deutschland. You've got a Nordic group, there's an Australian group. So there's there's a lot of different international organizations as well. So if you want to go spend even more money, you can go travel to do it.
D: There's a workshop being run in I want to say Helsinki this summer where you can learn combat on a horse. Never have I ever been more tempted to like figure out how to get to Helsinki.
S: No, it sounds so fun.
D: Sword plus horse equals shieldmaiden. Okay, we're good to go.
S: I will be so empowered.
E: Is there anything else that you'd like to share? You want to make sure people hear?
S: Like I want to talk about Romeo and Juliet. That's a whole different thing while we'll be here for another hour.
D: I'm gonna just plug Sydney's business. She makes amazing sword and stage combat centric art. You can get like art prints or it's printed on a variety of things, including t-shirts, and I own several and they're great. So you should go to True Edge Art and like buy some shirts because one of them just says swords are cool. I wear that a lot.
S: Thank you so much, Danielle. That means so much.
E: Thank you both so much. One: it was nice to see you both and have you back.
K: And it was great learning all of this. It's been 10 years since I've done any sort of like workshop for like sword fighting. And the last time I had a sword, it was a wooden sword and then a trash can lid. So get me on a plane. Get me to a workshop. It sounds so much fun.
D: Where are you located, Kourtney?
K: I'm in LA.
D: Oh, there's so many. Yeah.
K: There should be plenty of things.
D: You will not have problems yeah.
S: The LA Slay just happened in February. I was down there and there are new classes that are happening. I got a whole plethora of things that I'll send your way because I was just down there teaching.
K: Next time. And then if there's a horse one here, that'll be great, too, because that sounds really fun to live my Lord of the Rings fantasy of fighting on a horse.
E: Yeah.
D: That is legitimately the first horse stage combat workshop I've heard of outside of after hours at a Renaissance Fair. So just temper your expectations on that one.
E: Thank you for listening to this episode.
K: Our kind listeners, we can no other answer make, but thanks and thanks and ever thanks to our Patreon patron, Evelyn.
Quote of the Episode:
From A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 3, Scene 2, spoken by Puck.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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