Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of how many SparkNoted titles have female narrators (S-U)

Or central protagonists.  Following the “first character listed under the character section” theory.

Salomé  by Oscar Wilde (with the titular Salomé)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (with Hester Prynne)
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (with Mary Lennox)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (with Lily Owens)
Shabanu by Suzanne Fisher Staples (with the titular Shabanu)
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (with the titular Carrie)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares (with Carmen Lowell)
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (with Gertrude Morel)
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (with the titular Sophie)
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson (with, well, Mary Rowlandson, who wrote it)
The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin (with Louise Mallard)
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (with Blanche DuBois)
Sula by Toni Morrison (with Cecile)
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood (with the Narrator)
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (with Katherine)
Tess of the d’Urbervillles by Thomas Hardy (with the titular Tess)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (with Janie Mae Crawford)
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (with Alice)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (with Scout Finch)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (with Mrs. Ramsay)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (with Mary Frances Nolan)
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (with the Governess)
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (with Viola)

23 titles.  1 of which is autobiographical.  12 of which have female authors.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of how many SparkNoted titles have female narrators (M-O)

Or central protagonists.  Following the “first character listed under the character section” theory.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (with the titular Emma Bovary)
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane (with the titular Maggie)
The Maids by Jean Genet (with Solange)
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (with Carol)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (with Fanny Price)
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (with Mrs. K., or Ylla)
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare (with Isabella)
Medea by Euripides (with the titular Medea)
A Medieval Life by Judith Bennett (with Cecilia Penifader)
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (with Frankie Addams)
Meridian by Alice Walker (with the titular Meridian)
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (with Mistress Ford)
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (with Martha Moore Ballard)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (with Maggie Tulliver)
Miss Julie by August Strindberg (with the titular Julie)
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West (with the titular Miss Lonelyhearts)
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (with the titular Moll)
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (with Rachel Verinder)
Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht (with the titular Mother Courage)
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill (with Lavinia Mannon)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (with the titular Clarissa Dalloway)
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (with Beatrice)
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (with Anna Fitzgerald)
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant (with Mathilde Loisel)
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya (with Rukmani)
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Marjorie Shostak (with, well, Marjorie Shostak, who wrote it)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (with Catherine Morland)
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (with Annemarie Johansen)
Obasan by Joy Kogawa (with Megumi Naomi Nakane)
Odour of Chrysanthemums by D.H. Lawrence (with Elizabeth Bates)
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (with Alexandra Bergson)
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (with Jeanette, who is presumably the author I think?)
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (with the narrator, sometimes revealed to be Karen, the Baroness Blixen)

34 titles.  2 (?) of which are autobiographical.  15 of which have female authors.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of how many SparkNoted titles have female narrators (A-B)

Or central protagonists.  This is easy, because I can go by who’s listed first in their Character List section.  (Oh, SparkNotes.)  I was going to do it A-E, like my previous SparkNotes list, but the SparkNotes website is acting up, so I’m just doing these first two letters.  Smaller groups!

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (with the titular Alice; this is about a child in the 1800s)
All But My Life by Gerda Weissman Klein (with, well, Gerda Weissmann Klein, who wrote it)
All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare (well, they list Helena first, so whatever)
American Dream by Edward Albee (with, apparently, Grandma?)
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver (with, apparently, Codi)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (with the titular Anna; this is a romance of sorts from the 1800s)
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (with the titular Anne; this is about a child in the 1800s)
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (with the titular Annie)
Antigone by Sophocles (with the titular Antigone)
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (with Thomasina Coverly)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (with Addie Bundren; I feel weird counting this, but she is first listed)
As You Like It by William Shakespeare (with Rosalind, hell yeah)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (with Dagny Taggart)
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines (with the titular Jane)
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (with Edna Pontellier; this is about the 1800s)
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (with Taylor Greer)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (with Esther Greenwood)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (with Sethe; this is set in the 1800s)
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (with, well, Anne Lamott, who wrote it)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (with Esther Summerson; this is from the 1800s)
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (with Pecola Breedlove)
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (with, well, Christine de Pizan, who wrote it)
The Book of Margery Kemp by Margery Kemp (with, well, Margery Kemp, who wrote it)
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed (with, well, Leila Ahmed, who wrote it)
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (with Sara Smolinsky)
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (with Sophie)

26 titles.  4 of which are autobiographical.  Several of which have appeared on analyzed lists previously. 15 of which have female authors.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of how many of someone’s 100 books to read before you die have female narrators

Or in cases of third-person narration, female central protagonists.  Again using this list.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (with Lizzy Bennet; this is a romance from the 1800s)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (with the titular Jane; this is rather a romance from the 1800s)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (with Scout Finch, who is a child)
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (with Lyra Belacqua, who is a child)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (with Jo March; this is from the 1800s and is somewhat a romance in places, ish)
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (with the titular Tess; this is apparently sexual, ans is from the 1800s)
Well, Shakespeare has a lot of relatively main ladies.  But since they’re plays, I can’t count any as narrators or anything.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (with a lady narrator called Mrs. de Winter and also the titular Rebecca is important)
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (with Scarlett O’Hara; this is a romance about the 1800s)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (with Esther Summerson, apparently; this is from the 1800s)
Alice in Wonderland by Louis Carroll (with the titular Alice, who is a child from the 1800s)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (with the titular Anna; this is a somewhat a romance from the 1800s)
Emma by Jane Austen (with the titular Emma; this is a romance from the 1800s)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (with Anne Elliot; this is a romance from the 1800s)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (with Chiyo Sakamoto)
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (with the titular Anne, who is a child from the 1800s)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (with Offred)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (with Briony Tallis; this has a lot of romance)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (with Elinor Dashwood; this is a romance from the 1800s)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (with Susie Salmon)
Bridget Jones‘s Diary by Helen Fielding (with the titular Bridget; this is a romance)
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (with Mary Lennox, who is a child in the 1800s)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (with Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp; this is a romance from the 1800s)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (with Celie)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (with the titular Emma Bovary; this is a romance from the 1800s)
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute (with Jean Paget)

28 of 100 titles, because I’m not counting “groups of protagonist” stories like The Chronicles of Narnia or something.  Interestingly, 15 of them are about and/or from the 1800s, 5 are about children, and 4 are by Jane Austen.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: a play-by-play of the top 10 most performed plays and musicals in high schools

As of December 2010, as reported by Playbill.com; this is the most recent list I can find.

This play-by-play will go as follows: italicized titles will be ones I’m familiar with (I’ve read the script and/or heard the score).  Bolded titles will be ones I’ve seen performed.  Underlined titles will be ones that I was involved in sometime during my school theatre career of yore.  Expect much commentary.  And titles I have nothing to do with will not be listed here.  Numbers pertain to their place on the Playbill list.

PLAYS
2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.  I feel like when I say that oh, I know this play, I should be doing the smug Roxy Richter voice/face.  That’s how intimate I’ve been with this play.  It was my first (and really my only, excepting in-class monologues) Shakespeare, though the language was toned down for schoolkids; I was Robin Starveling, because, why not?  And I played her as a 1970s groupie (obviously a la Almost Famous; I even had the furry leather coat), despite the fact that the rest of the production ended up being styled a la the vague 1700s/1800s (we were planning some weird decade mash-up; the fairies, who wore whatever they wanted, danced to songs of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s randomly throughout the play, so it was a concept that made sense, but time constraints made us go for the Generic High School Period Piece look).  And I have many feelings about this time.  Some less-fond memories, but some fond ones, too.
3. You Can’t Take It With You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.  My high school did this play, though I wasn’t in it; I did hang out backstage, though, so I’m fairly familiar with it.
7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  Which I read for class and saw, but have not been involved in, unless you count that time my friend and I learned the ridiculous “Hold It In” song from Speech & Debate (and even then, I played Gay Abraham Lincoln, so it doesn’t count).
8. Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  Seen it several times.  Did tickets for it once.  Didn’t really care that much.  (It’s sappy.  And me and sappy don’t get on too well.)

MUSICALS
1. Beauty and the Beast by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, and Linda Woolverton.  Obviously.  And I’m underlining one whole word to represent the time that I accompanied an entire musical revue on the piano and played this opening number.  (I still can’t hear “Belle” without my fingers wanting to jump around frantically playing chords.)
2. Seussical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.  Seen it more times than I really should have seen it, all amateur (which isn’t the source of my distaste; I just don’t like the material).
3. Grease by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey.  Which I’ve seen professionally, and I also regret this.
4. Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim.  Seen it at schools, seen a tape of the original cast.  Was in another school musical revue doing the prologue from this (as the Witch, as per she doesn’t actually have to sing ever in that number).  Yep.
6. The Wizard of Oz by John Kane, Howard Arlen, E. Y. Harburg, Herbert Stothart, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allen Woolf.  I guess.  I know the music.  I know the movie.
7. You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown by Clark Gesner.  Seen it amateur, yep.
8. The Music Man by Meredith Wilson.  I know the music.  I know the movie.
9. Once Upon a Mattress by Mary Rodgers, Marshall Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller.  Oh, this experience.  I don’t ever need to see this play again (even the 2004 movie is only worth turning on to hear Zooey Deschanel sing, and barely worth that since she sings other places).  But I have good memories, despite the fact that I really don’t like the material that much if I think about it too hard.  I do like that it’s a play about sex, though.  I, being the token chorus whore, was of course the kitchen wench, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned.  And because I’m me, there were ~18 pages of text about my character and how she was a lady and a kitchen wench because of her affair with the king and a magic spell and… yes.  It was insane, but a brilliant exercise in headcanon and extrapolation.
10. Thoroughly Modern Millie by Jeanine Tesori, Dick Scanlan, and Richard Morris.  This was my very first Broadway show, so it holds many fond memories, as I’ve before said.  And I feel like I can never actually see it again, because I’m afraid it wouldn’t measure up.  And that would be disappointing.

Okay, I’m actually shocked that Bye Bye Birdie isn’t on this list.  Seriously shocked.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: a play-by-play of Staffordshire University’s Drama, Performance, & Theatre Arts department’s list of 100 plays to read before you die

Obscure?  A bit, but it was the only “plays to read before you die” list I could find, so I’m going to run with it.  It can be found here.

Here, italics represent ones I’ve read, bolded italicized are ones I’ve liked, underlined italicized are ones I’ve read for school, *asterisked* ones are ones I’ve seen the film of and **double asterisked** ones are ones I’ve seen staged.  And I’m fully prepared for my showing here to be woefully inadequate.

Amadeus* by Peter Shaffer
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The Crucible** by Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
A Streetcar Named Desire* by Tennessee Williams (I really must explain this: I didn’t actually like the play that much.  I mean, I recognized it as really good, but I didn’t enjoy it a whole lot.  Until a few of my friends and I, when reading it for English, gathered in someone’s living room one weekend afternoon and read the second half aloud in terrible Southern accents.  That, I enjoyed.)
Our Town** by Thornton Wilder
The Cherry Orchard** by Anton Chekhov
The Importance of Being Earnest* by Oscar Wilde (I haven’t actually read it or anything, but I’ve seen the film version half a dozen times and I enjoy the hell out of it?)
Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind (HELL YES.  And sometimes you put the possessive /’s/ on to distinguish from the musical or just because it does [my copy does].  I love the original play to pieces and bits and I still have parts of the Moritat committed to memory and I wrote my AP English essay on this play [because I could quote directly off the top of my head and it made sense, not that I remember the prompt, but it worked] and got a 5, so YES.)
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
The following Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, Hamlet*, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet*, A Midsummer Night’s Dream* **
Everyman (I read this for/at work, so that’s basically like doing so for school)
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
18 out of 100 read.  21 out of 100 somehow witnessed.

I think I see the problem.  A lot of the plays I’ve read for fun (and there are plenty of them) were written more recently than 1998, and that’s when the most recent play on the list is from.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of just how functional the romances in 10 of the 100+ books to read before you die are

Interrupting my grand analyze every 100 books to read before you die list series to discuss some of literature’s most famed, idealized romances and just how functional they would be.  People always say that television gives us unrealistic expectations for… something.  I don’t deny this.  But I’m pretty sure that literature could be just as guilty.  It’s just sometimes better-written, older, and not interrupted by commercial breaks, so people don’t always think about it.

I mean.  Books and I, we’re buddies.  We’re close friends.  But TV doesn’t have to suck, right?  And graphic novels and comic books don’t have to suck either.  And neither do films.  And… yeah.

So.

10. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Uhm, hell no.  Scarlett and Rhett are one of the great romances of literature (and cinema) and they… are really, really not functional.  When the most memorable thing that one partner said to the other is “I don’t give a damn,” I don’t see how it could be anything but dysfunctional.

9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Again, hell no.  The great romances of this book are built around creeping, adultery, and the idle rich.  And Gatsby dies.  There is no function in their romance.

8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Again,, adultery, divorce, sexual liberation that’s really just treating other people like crap.  And the idle rich.  The literary idle rich never have satisfactory romances.

7. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
Oh look!  I wouldn’t say that every relationship in these books is super-functional.  No.  And I’m skeptical that every single pair of Harry’s Hogwarts classmates who married and popped out kids at the exact same time is still in love howevermany years later and still functional.  But then there’s Molly and Arthur, Tonks and Lupin, Bill and Fleur, things like that.  It’s hit-or-miss, but at least not a total miss, right?

6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
This… is a strange one.  Meg and John Brooke, yes.  Always forever and then he dies and it’s sad.  Marmee and Father, yes.  Even if it’s one of those “this book was written back when most parents that were decent human beings had stable relationships so there” cases.  Jo and the professor, ye-eesss?  I mean, I six-year-old shipped Jo and Teddy like mad, and I don’t believe for a minute, incidentally, that Teddy and Amy’s marriage is an entirely stable one, but I think in their way Jo and Bhaer had something good.

5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
HA.

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The title… kind of sets you up for a whole bunch of not-entirely-stable people living not-entirely-stable lives.  It’s very interesting, but way not romantic.

3. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
I also six-year-old shipped Anne and Gilbert, forever, and the fact that they probably still get into silly fights just means that silly fights won’t ruin their relationship because they love each other.

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Really, any Shakespeare play is amazingly dysfunctional.  Even the comedies.  Even the romances for crying out loud.  The Winter’s Tale?  Have mercy.  Hamlet is one of the two kings-and-queens of dysfunction plays, though.  I mean.  Gertrude + anyone is a disaster.  Hamlet + Ophelia is a hideous mess.  Even if I have this weird soft spot for Ophelia’s crazyassedness.  (I read this book that was retelling it from her point of view, and she faked her crazy and her death and ran away, and eventually hooked up with Horatio.  That was better.)

1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Yetagain, HA.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of someone else’s list of 100 books to read before you die

This week, the list comes from Literary Workshop at Blogspot.

Italicized titles are ones I’ve read.  Bolded italicized titles are ones I liked.  Underlined italicized titles are ones I read for school.

The Bible (ish)
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus, Antigone by Sophocles
Beowulf by Anonymous
Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear by Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (I read… parts.)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (again, parts.)
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (again, the blasphemous explanation)
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and I’ve read like… two Flannery O’Connor stories.
14 out of 100 read.  4.5 out of 100 sincerely enjoyed.  10 out of 100 read for school. 

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: a play-by-play of someone’s list of 100 books to read before you die

I plan on Googling as many of these lists as I can find and seeing how many of the books I’ve read total and how many books the lists have in common.  I also want to see how many I read recreationally vs. how many I read for school, and how many I actually enjoyed.  Comparing lists is fun and informative.  So here goes, using this list from Sunday Morning Sugar on Blogspot.

Italicized titles are ones I’ve read.  Bolded italicized titles are ones I liked.  Underlined italicized titles are ones I read for school.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (as I’ve explained, I only ever read the first one, because I am terrible)
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (with all my heart)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible (ish)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (with all my heart, again)
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (maybe I’d like it if I read it again, I don’t know)
Stuff by Shakespeare (I haven’t read all of them, but I like most of the ones I’ve read)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (this book is such a giant disaster of awesome where everyone is terrible and it’s fantastic.  Like a Civil War soap opera that’s way too long)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (well, I liked presenting about it to the class while we wore black and held Pirouettes in our hands like long cigarettes to be pseudo-intellectuals?)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (it was so long ago I don’t know if I liked it anymore)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (it was for a school book club, but it was extracurricular, so I’m not underlining)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (WAS NOT THAT GOOD.  Why does everyone still flip over it?)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (also the book club)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (I liked it, ish.  I would never reread it.  But it was good.)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (I read… parts.)
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (all kids read this book.  All kids are saddened by this book.)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (so all of Shakespeare was already on here, but this is, again?  Okay.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (was really morbid.  I should have enjoyed it, but I didn’t.)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (again, parts.)
30 out of 100 read. 16 out of 100 sincerely enjoyed.  13 out of 100 read for school.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: 5 possible examples of Shakespeare and the supernatural (someone had to)

As we well know, I’m a big fan of classic literature + monsters.  It helps me read books I’d otherwise take a year and a half to slog through, because I am a terrible uncultured philistine pop culture English nerd.  But adding monsters to things I like is also something I approve of, and I absolutely do love Shakespeare!  So, here’s five suggested Shakespeare/supernatural mashups, classed under “things in print” because I’m talking about reading Shakespeare, not seeing it performed.

5. Much Ado About Noshing
(Title suggested by a friend of mine, and clearly it is Much Ado + zombies.)  Leonato, a nobleman, is hosting some soldiers in the great war against the undead that is being waged across the countryside.  The leader of the soldiers is a prince called Don Pedro; his bastard brother Don John is actually involved in the conspiracy to create and control the zombies. His daughter, Hero, falls in love with one of the soldiers, Claudio; his niece, Beatrice, is flirting with another of the soldiers, Benedick, in an argumentative fashion.  Don John is an asshole, so he makes it seem as if Hero is participating in the zombie-creating plan with one of his associates; Claudio leaves her, disgusted, and they decide to pretend she has been bitten and zombified until truth can be revealed.  While this is going on, Beatrice and Benedick kill some zombies and admit their love, and soon it is revealed that Don John is a zombie master and Hero is innocent.  They all live happily and gorily ever after.

4. A Midsummer Night’s Scream
This one is pretty easy, since it’s already got fairies.  But let’s see what happens if we get permission from Charlaine Harris to make them, like, Southern Vampire Mysteries-style crazyass fairies.  Actually, here, I’m just going to rewrite the plot of Midsummer like it’s True Blood.  Hermia, a human woman, loves Lysander, a vampire (see?  This is why it has to take place at night!).  She is also courted by Demetrius, another vampire, who is in turn sought after by Helena, another vampire.  (So basically, it’s like Sookie Bill Eric Pam-who-wants-to-boink-Eric-still.)  Wackiness ensues when they get mixed up with the magics (!!!) of the fairies in the woods by their home, because these fairies are bloodthirsty tricksters, and they think if they can make Demetrius and Lysander both stick with their own vampire kind, they can have Hermia for their own because she’s part fae.  Titania and Oberon are crazy bitches.  Then everyone ends up as they’re supposed to.  (And somewhere they add in another character just so there can be a Jessica analogue, because she’s precious.)

3. The Taming of the Succubus
A hell-god, ironically named Baptista (there will be sly jokes), is responsible for two succubi: Bianca and Katherine.  Bianca is good of heart, and wants to renounce her sinful nature, but Katherine revels in the fact that she can seduce and ruin men.  Some young religious figureheads, Lucentio and Petruchio, enter the town in which these demon-types preside, but Baptista will only allow Bianca to renounce her nature if Katherine does as well (even he is tired of dealing with the willful girl); Lucentio is glad to save Bianca’s immortal soul, but Petruchio has the much more difficult task of “taming” Kate.  Taming her will give him considerable power, and possibly a promotion (saving a non-repentant succubus is much more legitimate in the eyes of God, though saving any succubus is good), so he works at it.  And because it’s supposed to have a happy ending, everyone’s souls are saved at the end and they all live happily ever after.

2. As You Bite It
(Wherein I get permission to use the Whedonverse Slayer mythology.)  Duke Senior comes from a long line of Watchers, and passed the knowledge onto his daughter Rosalind, but he was overthrown by his power-hungry brother Duke Frederick, recently become a vampire.  He did not turn his daughter Celia in her youth, wishing to wait until she was grown, but she is called as a vampire Slayer.  Shocked, she is unsure of what to do; Rosalind immediately offers assistance.  Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind from court, and she and Celia retreat into the Forest of Arden to train and learn about demons.  Rosalind also dresses as a man while doing so.  In the forest, she is courted by Orlando, who loves her, but gets advice from “her,” both about love and about demonology; she is also courted by Phoebe, a local saucy witch.  (Just ’cause Phoebe’s my babygirl.  Even if she is ridiculous.)  Celia falls in love with Orlando’s brother, Oliver; they are both committed to the cause of amateur demon hunting, which works out well.  With Rosalind serving as Celia’s Watcher, the girls slay their way back to court and a happy ending.

1. Romeo and Juliet and Ghosts
Yes, I know.  The other titles were bad witty puns; the other plays were comedies.  But Romeo and Juliet is ridiculous enough, and I propose this instead: at first, it’s the exact same story.  Except the entire town of Verona is like the house in American Horror Story, so when people get murdered they come back and haunt the hell out of each other forever.  Romeo dies, but Juliet doesn’t, because Romeo immediately comes back to life, and they exist forever in a weird Tate (Evan Peters) and Violet (Taissa Farmiga) situation while everyone else just tortures each other psychologically until, I don’t know.  Lady Capulet gives birth to the antichrist or something.

–your fangirl heroine.