Month: April 2009

Dear Orson Welles, When you need a Scottish accent for a Shakespeare play, don’t fake it.  Just get the man himself, Sean Connery:

  Here’s a guy who’s played nothing *but* a Scottish accent his entire career!  Seems only logical that he would have done the Scottish Play at one point or another. (To be fair, I hear Mr. Connery is actually very good in the recently released Age Of Kings DVD collection.)   “Sean Connery stars in the movie the Highlander, about the eternal Scottish warrior, and he plays a *Spaniard*.  Doesn’t anybody think about this stuff at all?”   -Craig Ferguson

So, today’s your Shakespeare Geek’s 40th birthday.  Been celebrating on and off for a few days, got (among other, non Shakespeare presents) another Shakespeare action figure as well as the “love quote” pillow which my 5yr old middle daughter had become simply enraptured with when she saw it on a web site back around Christmas.  When I unwrapped it, my older daughter (7) began reading, “Doubt thou the stars are fire…”  so I explained that Hamlet wrote that to Ophelia.  I didn’t get into the whole “ill phrase, vile phrase” thing. Anyway, I got to wondering what Mr. Shakespeare was doing when he was 40.  I found this link:  http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/timeline/kingsman.htm and a few tidbits from the years surrounding:

Sometime between 1599 and 1601 Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and from Hamlet on, until about 1608 when he began writing the great Romances Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Shakespeare’s vision turned to tragedy.  The comedies he produced over the next couple of years are distinctly un-funny, and have been called "problem plays": All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure (both probably written in the period 1603-1604).  Troilus and Cressida (probably written in 1602) is such a problem play that it has perennially confused audiences and critics, and may well  never have been performed in Shakespeare’s life time.  After Measure for Measure Shakespeare’s vision seems to turn unrelentingly to the tragic, with his great string of tragedies Othello (probably 1604), King Lear (probably 1605) Macbeth (probably 1605), Antony and Cleopatra (probably 1607),Coriolanus and Timon of Athens (probably 1606-8).  (These last two plays, along with Troilus and Cressida, surely Shakespeare’s least liked and performed plays).

(Emphasis mine.)  Yikes!  Mid-life crisis, much? If the quality of the blog starts going down, somebody please don’t forget to tag them as “problem posts”.  Just don’t call them “distinctly un-funny” 🙂

http://extremestudies.blogspot.com/2009/04/shakespeares-lost-play.html Kinda sorta not really? My experts probably know the drill, but for the newbies:    There’s been a play that we’ve known about for a while, called Double Falsehood (not sure if there’s a The in front of that) by Lewis Theobald.  Here’s the thing – he always maintained that it was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cardenio, the holy grail of lost Shakespeare plays. “Ummm…and do you *have* a copy of Cardenio?” people would excitedly ask him at cocktail parties, trying not to salivate. “Unfortunately my dog ate it,” he would reply.  Or the 19th century equivalent of a similar excuse.   Anyway – a little while back (just last year?) renowed Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor announced that he was backing Double Falsehood’s story, and has “re-adapted” (maybe?) it into The History of Cardenio. If you’re in the neighborhood of Victoria University of Wellington next month (May 2009) you may get a chance to see it.

"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand." Maybe I’m just slow.  I’ve certainly heard that quote before, and always took it to be an insult, suggesting that there’s plenty of errors where Mr. Shakespeare could have done better. It only just now dawns on me that that’s the point – given how good he actually was, can you only imagine what we would have ended up with if he *had* improved upon all the mistakes and weaknesses?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/weekinreview/26edelstein.html Perhaps the best article I’ve seen yet that dives into what past presidents have thought about Mr. Shakespeare.  We all know by now that Obama loves Lincoln and Lincoln loved Shakespeare, but this article looks in detail at Lincoln’s favorite speeches and his commentary on them as well, and then goes on to examine what other presidents have had to say on similar topics (including Reagan and Clinton). Then we also get a trip through the history of the presidency with mentions of the Shakespeare connection to:  John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Garfield, Millard Fillmore and JFK, ending with George W Bush (although it is certainly positioned as an insult in that case). Lastly the author (hey look – Barry Edelstein, I just got his book Bardisms last week!) goes on to make a whole laundry list of suggestions for speeches that Obama might want to use, once he gets around to quoting the Bard in public. Great article.