Tennant’s Hamlet Coming To DVD

http://www.kasterborous.com/news.asp?ac=11&id=2241 It’s official!  Polonius actor Oliver Ford Davies told the Telegraph:

"We are intending to film it over two or three weeks in June. It won’t be a full feature film as there isn’t time but it will certainly be more than just the filming of the stage. It will be fantastic to work together again."

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t really know anything about David Tennant, but his Hamlet got rave reviews.  If it is only half as good as Lear was, it’ll still be jaw-dropping.

Review : The Sourcebooks Shakespeare

The Sourcebooks Shakespeare I stumbled backwards into this fine resource when I saw a Twitter reference that mentioned both iPhone and Shakespeare.  So I wrote to Marie asking if she was doing some sort of software development related to Shakespeare. Long story short, I’ve got books to review :).  Marie was nice enough to send me review copies of King Lear and Macbeth (which I will be giving away next week in some sort of contest). I am very pleasantly surprised by how cool these are.  Let me see if I can break down the layout for you.  First and foremost, each book has a traditional script of the play – on the right hand pages.  Nicely laid out, lots of whitespace, which I like.  It looks visually like the kind of thing that might be read by an actor, rather than something out of an academic textbook with microscopic print. The left-hand pages are where you find all the good stuff.  Not only is there the traditional glossary of odd words, but actual trivia, anecdotes, images, and links to the accompanying audio CD where that particular part of the scene is being read aloud, so you can follow. Think about how cool that is.  We read about Lear and the Fool stumbling across Poor Tom’s hovel, while we flip through images of other people’s interpretations of that scene.  Where we don’t get images we get descriptions, like the story about a Cordelia who plays guitar through the opening scene, showing either that she was completely not paying attention to what was going on around her and thus completely taken off guard, or else that she knew exactly and was deliberately being rude.  I couldn’t get enough of that sort of thing, and only wish there was a way that they could imbed video right in there with everything else. Also strewn throughout are editorial comments that aren’t afraid to say things as they should be, like “Lear might be referring to _____ here, or possibly ______.”  I worry for textbooks that make factual statements to impressionable students, when another book might say something different with equal confidence that their answer is the only one.  Some of the editorial choices are interesting as well, and those too are called out in the comments.  I saw several times “Some editors place a scene break here, but Kent stays on stage the whole time so we chose not to.”  Cool – explanation of editor’s decisions, and not buried someplace in an appendix that I’ll never read. The book opens with a lengthy description of Shakespeare in performance, including stories about some of the more popular interpretations (like Kurosawa’s Ran, obviously).  It ends with a lesson on how to perform Shakespeare, and the importance of the spoken presentation.  This makes sense, of course because the books each come with an audio CD containing selections of well known Shakespearean actors performing key scenes from the play.  (I am deliberately not tearing into the book to listen to those, as I want to reward some of my readers with pristine copies.) I think this is a great idea.  From the web site we see that these are clearly intended for classroom use, and I’m glad to see it.  Personally as someone long out of school I think I’d boil down all the stories and images into a single volume, leaving only key passages from the play, and do it like “King Lear in Performance” or something.  After all, I already have many copies of the play and don’t need the book to be twice as long just so I know what scene they’re talking about when they talk about Gloucester’s eyes.  But maybe that’s just me? Excellent resource, fun to read.  It’s not often I get to say this about a Shakespeare book, but this is one that you can pick up just to look at the pictures!

Was The Cobbe Portrait Ruined By Restorers?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/how-restorers-ruined-the-last-portrait-of-shakespeare-1656028.html Whether you believe the Cobbe portrait is Shakespeare or not, this should be an interesting story.  A theory will be argued next week that the portrait was in fact changed deliberately to show Shakespeare as he aged – changes that were removed by the restorers. One of the big questions that people immediately asked when the Cobbe became so famous a few weeks ago was, “What’s up with the hair?  In the Droeshout portrait – done only 6 years later – Shakespeare is quite bald.”  The argument of the article seems to revolve around whether some hair was added, or removed, at different periods in the painting’s lifetime.

“She had Brutus call in to request Eye Of The Tiger”

http://www.ohiorc.org/adlit/inperspective/issue/2008-04/Article/vignette1.aspx I always like hearing about projects like these, mostly because I never got to do any when I was in high school.  This teacher was doing Julius Caesar, and chose to make a radio station project out of it.  “Odd,” I thought, wondering where the Julius Caesar comes in.  But she explains in depth how she broke the lesson down, including things like the advertising copy written for each side’s propaganda (and spoken by the DJs).  They also had to involve the characters in some way.  I was thinking of a “special in-studio guest”, but the idea of Brutus calling in to get request some motivational music is pretty funny.

Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bal-ages-of-man-0327,0,1031508.story “Ages Of Man” sounds like the sort of show I would love. Think of Ages as a collection of Shakespeare’s greatest hits. The show is a one-actor tour de force initially performed by Sir John Gielgud in the late 1950s in Europe and the U.S.The concoction includes the monologue from As You Like It that provides the title of the current show; King Lear mourning the death of his daughter, Cordelia; Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide and Prospero’s retirement speech at the end of The Tempest. Ages also showcases several much-loved sonnets: the 18th (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?), the 116th (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment) and the 29th (When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes).