Shakespeare and The Muppets

Today is the fortieth anniversary of Sesame Street, created by Joan Ganz Cooney and starring Jim Henson’s Muppet characters. The premise behind the show proposed that it would include high quality writing and spread “pro-learning values” to both children and their parents. From the beginning, Shakespeare has been part of that. To celebrate the show’s anniversary, I take a look at a history of Shakespeare and the Muppets.

A skull by any other name

Over ten years before Sesame Street, the first regular Muppet program, called Sam and Friends, aired in Washington, D.C. It included a character whose humor was of a type with the Cookie Monster later created for Sesame Street: a skull named Yorick. Yorick’s humor centered on his insatiable appetite; he consumed anything in his way, whether cookies or Kermit. Kermit acknowledged Yorick’s pedigree in an episode from 1959, when he introduced Yorick with the line, “Of course, there’s Yorick, as in Shakespeare’s ‘alas, poor Yorick—don’t eat my laughmeter.’”

Authorship questions

In 1963, still before Sesame Street appeared, Rowlf the Dog, who was a celebrity before even Kermit, appeared on The Jimmy Dean Show, where he recited Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Rowlf attributed the line not to Shakespeare but to Shakespeare’s dog.

Soliloquy on B

A version of the same soliloquy made an appearance on Sesame Street in 2001, when Patrick Stewart, Shakespearean and Trekian actor, appeared in Renaissance garb to soliloquize on the letter B. The segment (available on YouTube) is perhaps the most well-known Muppets Shakespeare reference, and Patrick Stewart has said that it is one of the two most distinguished bits of work he’s done in the U.S.

It don’t get classier than this

Of course, Monsterpiece Theater, Sesame Street’s spoof of Masterpiece Theatre, which in its turn spoofs works of classical literature, has a great tradition of using Shakespeare’s plays. Episodes have included Taming of the Shoe, Monsters of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson and Elmo.

Shakespeare Simplified

Hugh H. Davis, in his essay “The Muppets and Shakespeare” in Kermit Culture, suggests that besides the combination of Shakespeare and low culture for comic effect (‘alas, poor Yorick—don’t eat my laughmeter’), Sesame Street also produced simplified versions of Shakespearean themes and stories so that children would be introduced to literature they could then learn to love as they grew older.

He lists as examples two segments: “Three Witches,” which he says comes from Macbeth and in which the three witches learn to combine their magic and cooperate in order to make chicken soup; and “Alligator King,” in which the Alligator King asks his seven children to compete to amuse him in order to win his crown. He gives the crown to the child who doesn’t bring him jewels or rare treasures like the others, but helps the king stand back up when he falls over. Davis calls this a simplified version of King Lear, but I am skeptical that these segments were borrowed directly from Shakespeare and not some other source. What do you think?

Kermit, Prince of Denmark

In 1999, Jeff Marx and Bobby Lopez, who did (and do) not work for the Jim Henson Company but went on to write the musical Avenue Q, wrote a screenplay treatment and eight songs for Kermit, Prince of Denmark. Apparently it would have involved Kermit’s confusion of Denmark for Denver, the mistaking of Kermit for the real Prince of Denmark, and the double-casting of Miss Piggy as both Gertrude and Ophelia. Jason Alexander was to play Claudius. The song titles were to be:

• Off to Denver
• There’s More Than One Pig in the Sea
• Something About Him
• Claudius Rejoices (King For Awhile)
• Without You
• Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Doing the Mambo
• Talk (to Each Other)
• In Unexpected Places

When the project was sent to the Jim Henson Company in 2000, they weren’t interested, but in 2004, the Muppets Holding Company approached Marx and Lopez about going forward with the idea. It fell through the cracks when the Disney employee in charge of the Muppets left the company. But, Shakespeare and Muppet fans, despair not: perhaps it may still happen.