Month: February 2008

So I’m watching Slings and Arrows  this week, finally, after a coworker let me borrow the DVD.  In Episode 1, a character speaks of Richard Burton’s Hamlet as the best one.  To me, growing up, Richard Burton was the guy in boring movies on Sunday afternoons after church.  The sort of movies that a 12yr old boy like myself would find crazy boring and not watch.  I know Burton’s Taming of the Shrew because I saw it in school, but that’s about it.  Never saw his Antony.  I see that he played Caliban, which intrigues me.  His Hamlet was in 1964. So, tell me.  Is it that good?  Should I seek it out?  Is it available on film?  IMDB tells me that there is a DVD release, although that doesn’t mean I’d be able to find it.

Via Bard in Boston I see that the Common show this year will be As You Like It. Hooray! A play I haven’t seen yet! Schedule runs July 18-August 3. They are back to a nice 3week schedule. I hope that’s directly related to all the bad press they got last year for squeezing us into 1 week and then complaining about how they couldn’t afford it after giving such big bonuses to all their executives. There’s nothing useful in the press release, just a bunch of patting each other on the back about how awesome Citi is for not taking away our Shakespeare. For more info you can visit CommonwealthShakespeare.org if you can find your way through all the Citibank advertising.If you’ve got younger kids you might want to check out Rebel Shakespeare up on the North Shore, who are also doing As You Like It, as well as Henry V and Romeo & Juliet.

http://voxefx20.blogspot.com/2008/02/natalie-portman-scarlett-johansson.html Ok, the link above is nothing but pictures of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, the stars of the movie (oddly, as I write this, a commercial for the movie just came on tv…)   But I found the link because they’d tagged it Shakespeare. Other than a straightforward Henry VIII connection, does anybody know a particular reason to think that this movie will have anything Shakespeare related?  I notice (via Wikipedia) that Sandy Powell, the costume designer, also did Shakespeare In Love.  Not that that’ll mean anything  :). Oh, and here’s an Amazon review of the book that takes the author to task for being less than subtle about the fate of Anne Boleyn, claiming that anybody who’s read their Shakespeare knows exactly what happens to her.

http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2423 Great article on the Arden Third Edition of the works, which has taken the bold step of publishing *three* different Hamlets (bad quarto, second quarto, and first folio) as separate texts, rather than trying to blend them.  The author of the post goes on to discuss how the separate scripts demonstrate that Shakespeare was first and foremost an actor who wrote scripts, and not some poetic genius locked up in a room by himself cranking out lines he never blotted.  On the contrary, there’s lots and lots and lots of rewrites. I think the major problem with this theory is that each change between the scripts does not necessarily represent Shakespeare himself saying “Ok, I didn’t like that, I’m changing it.”  There are many other hands at work, including his fellow actors, the typesetters, and so on.  For any given change between scripts you can’t say which one was what Shakespeare intended.

This is just barely a Shakespeare reference, but I liked it.  Raul Midon performed his song “All The Answers” at the TED conference in March, 2007.  The song is about how these days whenever we want to know something, we just Google for it.  He then goes on to intermix trivial questions where you couldn’t care about the answer with philosophical questions where all the googling in the world won’t get you the answer. One of the questions in the latter category is about Shakespeare, and I like the way it fits into the song. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/188