Everybody loved that video of the Beatles doing Pyramus and Thisbe. How about William Shatner doing a pretty funky rendition of Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” speech? Halfway through it turns into a rap video. His take on “Let slip the dogs of war” is nothing compared to how his arch enemy General Chang did it in Star Trek VI.

Weird. It’s from Free Enterprise, which I’ve never seen.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, video

I like this article on “Enjoying La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, by John Keats. It’s here because of the nice reference to Shakespeare:

Keats praised Shakespeare’s “negative capability”. If I understand the passage correctly, he’s referring to the lack of unambiguous messages in Shakespeare’s works. Instead of preaching or moralizing, Shakespeare’s works mirror life, and let the reader take away his or her own conclusions.
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Hey, it turns out that people are indeed putting the sonnets to music. I am both pleased and disappointed to discover Rhythm of the Sonnets which puts 12 of them to music, but only offers Real Audio clips for download. So I have no idea if they’re any good or not. If the author’s listening, how about some MP3? If I can’t put it on my iPod, I’m not listening.

Technorati Tags: mp3, Shakespeare, sonnet

I’m still looking for more examples of the sonnets put to music. But since I’m trolling through the videos this morning, here is the link to a short film somebody made of Sonnet 65. Interesting. Sometimes the sounds effects (the running water in particular) were too loud for the narration, and in general it was read rather fast. But still, a cool idea. I’d be happy to find a collection of such things.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, sonnet, video

Doing a little searching of Google Video turned up this “obscure gem”, a silent movie version of Twelfth Night apparently from 1910.

Actually there’s lots of free Shakespeare video in there, so have a field day. Lots of it seems to be from “60 Second Shakespeare” which is some sort of BBC workshop. And a number of high school productions.

Technorati Tags: google, Shakespeare, video