Month: August 2005

The RSS Debate What’s in a name

Not the most Shakespearey article I’ve ever posted, this one deals more with the whole “RSS” thing I’ve been talking about lately and gives a little history, particularly about people’s desire to change the name.

Playbill News: Today in Theatre History: AUGUST 23: 1937 Eva Le Galliene is Hamlet in a new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, opening tonight at the Cape Playhouse in Massachusetts. Le Galliene, while an obviously odd choice to play the Danish prince, is not the first female to take on the role. Sarah Bernhardt had done it as well. Also in the cast is future stage legend Uta Hagen, making her professional debut as Ophelia.

When I saw this article about HBO’s new series “ROME” in my Shakespeare news alerts I thought for sure the connection must be to Julius Caesar. Perhaps mentioning that the whole “Et tu, Brute?” thing was concocted by Will, and not factually accurate.

Wrong. “[Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo] are the only two ordinary soldiers mentioned by Caesar in his book, so the idea was to do a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take,” says Bruno Heller, the series’ co-creator, executive producer and writer. He refers, of course, to the two minor characters in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” who became the title characters of a widely acclaimed Tom Stoppard play.

Something of a pleasant surprise. I rarely find people referencing R&G are Dead at all, much less trying to do their own version of the idea.

Ok, here goes nothing. When my oldest daughter was born I wrote her a baby diary detailing every day of her mom’s pregnancy. One of those, “It’s not something she’ll understand now, but maybe when she gets older she’ll appreciate it” gifts.

When my wife was pregnant with our second daughter I knew that I’d have to do something similar, but not the same. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven’t been doing a very good job of trying. Her first birthday is next week and I owe her this special gift.

So, I present a sonnet. I hope it’s good.

She looks at me and all my cares of mind
Dissolve like fleeting clouds from sun-warm’d skies.
Halt, Time! Preserve this wonder that I find
When I behold the heavens in her eyes.

But would the echoes of her laughter fade,
A cold eternal silence in their wake?
What dreams left unfulfilled, what bliss delayed,
If I should all of her tomorrows take?

Her future’s yet to come, mine lies unfurl’d:
‘Tis not for me alone that she exists.
For no imagination in the world
Could e’er conceive of beauty such as this.

So put your hand in mine and walk with me,
And know that all my life, I live for thee.

Updated 8/22: Changed a few words around.

I have no idea if it’s any good, but I think the most important thing right now has been to finish it. Being the shakespeare geek I am I did my best to get the Elizabethan form down. It helps that my daughter’s name is Elizabeth, because that makes it all the more geeky :), even if I’m the only one in my family gets the joke.

I’m hoping to print it, frame it, and stick it on a wall until she’s about 15 years old or so, in high school, and learns what a sonnet is. Then I can point to it and see what she thinks.

Her birthday is Wednesday so I still have a few ideas to futz over it and tweak a word here and there, this is really just the first complete draft. But, again, I want to commit myself to it so that I finish the fool thing and don’t put it on the shelf with all the other great ideas.

UPDATED September, 2010 – My new book, Hear My Soul Speak : Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare, is available now!

This article from Newsweek about how to give a wedding toast recommends not quoting Shakespeare. As the article says, “Some of your guests may have even heard on MTV that he’s dead.”

But it did get me thinking. Shakespeare’s not exactly known for writing many happily married couples, or having much that’s very nice to say on the subject. If you’re in the market for Shakespeare wedding quotes, what have you got?

When I asked my wife to marry me I said, ‘There’ll be time enough for Shakespeare, and limousines and travelling around the world…” before popping the question. So I knew that I’d have to do something at the wedding. We didn’t do much with speeches (not even the dads, just the best man), so pulling the microphone over for myself and giving a speech to everybody would have been a little over the top. So instead, during one of our dances together, I whispered this in her ear:

Who will believe my verse in time to come, if it were filled with your most high desserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty in your eyes, and in fresh numbers number all your graces? The age to come would say This poet lies, such hea’enly touches ne’er touched earthly faces. So should my papers yellowed with their age be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, and your true rights be termed a poet’s rage, stretched meter of an antique song. But if some child of yours were live in this time, you should live twice, in it and in this rhyme.

That’s Sonnet 17, if you don’t recognize it. I realize that some of my grammar is off, and I deliberately didn’t type it out in the correct format, because I did it from memory whispering it in her ear, and I’m not sure it really matters where the linebreaks were.

When we did the wedding video I made sure to work the “If I could write the beauty in your eyes…” bit right into one of the credit screens.