Month: July 2005

Don’t know where you’re at, but I’m sure there’s a local Shakespeare in the Park you need to visit. Up here in my neck of the woods it’ll be Hamlet performed on Boston Common. Performances start July 16 and run every night at 8pm (excluding Monday), Sunday night show at 7pm. Performances run until August 7. Currently planning to attend August 5. See you there!

Got your attention? Good. 🙂 I’m actually referring to the strange obsession with smells, particularly bad ones, throughout the play. Maybe this is a generic high school essay question, but I don’t recall ever noticing it before. What’s up with the smell?

• “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Not technically a direct reference to smell, but certainly conjures up the notion.
• “My offense is rank, it smells to heaven…” (Claudius)
• “…if you find him not within a month, you will nose him as you go up the stairs…” (Hamlet referring to what will happen to Polonius’ dead body after sitting around for a month)
• “And smelt so? Pah!” (Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull)

(Any others I missed? I don’t count the Ghost saying “I scent the morning air” because we’re talking about bad smells here.)

Do all the latter references exist just to reinforce the “rotten” notion from the opening scene?

I just discovered another Shakespeare blog today, which has apparently been around forever and appears to be hitting many of the same stories I am. Good, that means I’m on the right track :). This one is managed by the editor of Shakespeare Magazine.

Amazon’s Top 25 Bestselling Authors of All (Amazon) Time list is out, and as you have unfortunately guessed, Shakespeare is NOT on the list. The list covers the top 25, and I hear that Shakespeare was 26…right behind Tom Clancy. And they can only refer to the 10 years in which they’ve been in business, which is why I wrote it like I did re: “all time”.

Remember, though, that this is “best selling”. I expect that most people experience Shakespeare in high school when a book is handed to them, which they promptly return at the end of the school year for the next kid to use. If they’re exposed to Shakespeare at all after that it’s to buy the movie.

Look at who is on the list. JK Rowling and Dan Brown seem like obvious choices, in much the same what that somebody might say that Britney Spears outsells The Beatles. It’s probably true once you crunch the numbers from a certain angle, but that doesn’t mean it feels right.

Many (most?) of the books on the list seem to be in the management/motivational category. I’d think those a) tend to be more expensive than regular paperbacks, and b) tend to be bought on corporate expense accounts.

Glad to see Dr. Seuss so high on the list.

I understand most of the choices. But Dr. Phil??? And the South Beach Diet guy?? Shakespeare got bumped for these people? Oy. Just goes to show how meaningless “best selling” is as a metric. Shakespeare suffers from not being a fad.

If you’re a reader of science fiction at all then you must known Ender’s Game, Card’s classic story of a boy genius who (reluctantly?) saves the universe. (Later Card expanded it to a many book series, but die hards will tell you the original should have been left as it was :)).

His newest is Magic Street, where “The residents of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class African-American L.A. neighborhood, get caught up in a battle between the king and the queen of the fairies in this wonderful urban fantasy…” Points for you if you said, “Hmmm, that sounds like Midsummer Night’s Dream” because that’s exactly what the author has done, putting Oberon, Titania and Puck straight into the book.

“What was fun was fitting them into black culture and sort of back-writing onto Shakespeare’s story that they were black all along and the conceit that William Shakespeare actually knew Titania. That was too much fun. I couldn’t pass up the chance to do that,” he says.