Shakespeare makes life better.
So, my traffic spiked yesterday and I had no idea why. Turns out that I’m the lead-off quote in a Google Book Search story about Shakespeare. Apparently they liked the whole “Sonnet 18 by David Gilmour” story. Thanks for the link, Arielle!
She (I assume?) called Troilus and Cressida and “obscure gem”. Not sure which, if either, of those words I agree with :).
Technorati Tags: blog, booksearch, Shakespeare
Ok, this is just painful. On this week’s edition of NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” there was an item about the changing curriculum of Shakespeare in England. Apparently (looking for a news item to back this up) they’re officially making it “easier”. Ready for the quote they gave? From Macbeth, they use the example: “Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come let me clutch thee…I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.” Apparently this is being translated, and I’m not making this up, into “Oooooo, wouldya lookat that?”
At least one line in Romeo and Juliet, as well, is translated into “Hey, how ’bout a snog?”
It’s almost too silly to believe, but they reported it as a true story. Gotta find me some confirmation!
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Excuse me while my head explodes, in the good way. When I saw this blog‘s headline, “David Gilmour – Sonnet 18”, I first skipped past it. Then said “Wait a minute…the Pink Floyd guy?” I got excited. Everybody hopes to hear the sonnets put to music, could it be that there’s audio of Pink Floyd doing it? Talk about your head exploding in the good way.
I won’t lie — the iambic pentameter model does not lend itself well to music — but who cares! It’s got that Pink Floyd sound, there’s nothing bad about that.
Just found this blog post where the author claims that Shakespeare, in his opinion, is overrated as a playwright. Just thought it was something my readers might want to go check out.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Promptbooks are copies of the script with a whole bunch of handwritten notes inside that the actors would have used to detail exactly how a scene would be played. This site has scans of a number of Shakespearean prompt books, including Macbeth. Fascinating stuff. It’s a little hard to navigate at first. Head for the images, basically. If you find yourself on a page that says “Hand” a lot, it’s actually describing in detail who wrote what on the page — but there’s probably an image of the page that you can click on.