So I was perusing old "theatre" posts on here, and found an old one that caught my eye: a bit over a year ago, /u/Tyruiop asked In the past was there an equivalent to "movies so bad they are good"?. Now, I don't know enough to say for sure or write an in-depth answer (why I'm putting this comment here instead of the Saturday Showcase), but I know the answer most likely is yes. And the reason I know this is because it's actually a plot point in my favorite Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Most people probably know the main storylines of the play: the four mortals already fail to break down into happy couples, and then fairies use love magic trying to solve the problem but instead make it worse. Meanwhile, the fairy king and queen are in a fight, so the king colludes with his loyal subject Puck to turn a mortal into a monster and have the queen fall in love with him. Then everything gets resolved, and it's happily ever after. Well, the additional subplot to the story is that it is soon to be wedding of King Theseus to Hippolyta, and Theseus tells his party planner Philostrate to find some sort of entertainment to have after the ceremony. One group of performers are the Rude Mechanicals, a batch of laborers and craftsmen who have decided to put on a play together for the wedding—and have since given their name to dozens of classical theatre troupes in the real world since! The issue is that they are not at all good, and have very little time to prepare; this problem is exacerbated when the lead is transformed by Puck into the monster that the fairy queen falls in love with, scaring everyone and wasting precious time. But that issue gets resolved along with everything else, and in the last scene, there is only one more matter to take care of: the wedding.

When Theseus asks Philostrate what kind of entertainment is available, he gives a few options: "The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung By an Athenian eunuch to the harp"; "The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage"; and "The thrice three Muses mourning for the death of Learning, late deceased in beggary." All of these Theseus rejects for one reason or another. Then they get to the third option, which is performed by the Mechanicals: 'A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth. Pyramus & Thisbe is based on a real myth of star-crossed lovers who cannot be together, which is found in Ovid's Metamorphoses and is a source of inspire for Romeo and Juliet. But the description confuses Theseus: how can the play be both happy and sad? Is it good? Philostrate explains how bad it is:

A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious; for in all the play
There is not one word apt, one player fitted:
And tragical, my noble lord, it is;
For Pyramus therein doth kill himself.
Which, when I saw rehearsed, I must confess,
Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears
The passion of loud laughter never shed.

Or, in normal English, he says that it's a short play that is still too long, and it was so bad it made him cry from laughter. Upon hearing this, Theseus requests seeing it, which freaks out Philostrate: at first, he was discussing it in jest, but the show is terrible, and he doesn't want to the king to actually see it. But he finds one reason it might be worthwhile, which is that they could laugh at the terrible performance:

I have heard it over,
And it is nothing, nothing in the world;
Unless you can find sport in their intents,
Extremely stretch'd and conn'd with cruel pain,
To do you service.

In other words, its only redeeming value is that it's so bad it's good. The Mechanicals perform the play while the audience comments on everything the actors are doing, and they have a great time as a result. I believe they also get the names of some legendary figures wrong, just making the scene worse. The performance ends and they try to do an encore, but the king can't handle any more, and the clock strikes midnight, so they are able to go to bed. Happy end.

I doubt that Shakespeare invented the concept of "so bad it's good" by writing this storyline. It's a very understandable plot point, and certainly people had seen performances that were laughably bad before this period, so audiences should have been able to relate to seeing it on stage. Whether there were people intentionally writing bad plays for this purpose—the way film studios like The Asylum might do—is a bit more dubious. This wasn't so much a "history answer", but rather a literary example from history, but I think it's a good one to address the topic. If there's on this sub who knows more about Shakespeare, or art/literature history in general, who can comment more about the history of "so bad it's good", frankly now I'm very intrigued, and would love to see what happened before Midsummer, if anything.

As a side-note, I've acted in this play a couple times, once as Peter Quince, the Director of the Rude Mechanicals, and once as Philostrate. It's a great scene, and wild how many different ways people can "screw it up." The second time, my director explained to me and the other members of the royal court that we were essentially being given the option of watching The Room, and that immediately put things in perspective over what our characters are being given the option to watch. It was a great time.

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In news unrelated to crappy plays in Shakespeare, this week I applied for a summer internship at the National Endowment for the Humanities. I like to believe my application was pretty good, so fingers crossed.

I was reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia's article on the history of Mexican horror comics in the latest issue of Weird Tales Review this week, which got me thinking back to how little of this history (and of Mexican pulps, which as in the US presaged comic books) there is. There's surprisingly little scholarship on this kind of thing in English, and that mostly only in some really obscure books (I think the only thing I've got on the shelf is The International Book of Comics from 1988 by Denis Gifford - and I have three books on the history of Canadian comics!) or talking about some hinky little curiosities (La Reina de la Costra Negra was the first Conan the Barbarian comic book - years before Marvel got the license - and featured a blond Conan!)

Anyway, some fascinating stuff, especially on the differences in how comics were marketed and the printing limitations.

Has there been any work with AI to read through untranslated ancient texts?

My understanding is there’s loads and loads of untranslated tablets from the Sumer period, and I’m sure other ancient civilizations as well, but they haven’t really been looked into because there’s only so many man hours available.

Has there been any effort to use AI for this task, and what could possibly be hiding in all these unread sources we don’t know already?

when was the "new england lighthouse" aesthetic? I'm thinking early 20th century but I'd like to narrow it down or see if I'm completely off...

Did the Soviets helped the Nazi's troops invade Poland?

Not sure if this is the right place for this.

My grandfather - Alvin Coox was a professor and an expert on Japanese WW2-era military history, specifically the Nomonhan incident in Manchuria. He passed away years ago, but just recently we moved his wife, my grandmother, into a nursing home.

We’ve been going through his documents and found tons of original printing of documents from the 40’s through 60’s from the US army office of military history and elsewhere. Things like the Japanese monologues, “Japanese studies in Manchuria”, etc. Is there anyone who would want these original documents? My parents are planning on getting rid of it all, the few places they called didn’t seem interested. Wanted to check before getting rid of so much historical documentation.

If you ask a question and don't receive a response, how long should you wait before reposting?

I’m looking to get into Roman and pre-medieval history in Britain, as well as pre-colonial Polynesia. Can anyone recommend some books or authors to start off with?

How did mankind deal with bellybuttons before modern modern medicine? Did everybody had wierd bellybuttons?

I remember reading about someone in history that pretty much had every job in his career, even being a pirate. Does anyone know who this could've been?