Anybody want to play a murder mystery Flash game based on Shakespeare?  BBC has one up called Seven Noble Kinsmen.  I don’t have time to play it in much depth, but I did get through the long intro (which is completely non interactive, just keep hitting Next) and eventually you end up in the mansion in the classic “Reclusive and potentially evil genius has invited all of his enemies to his mansion for revenge” plot.  Somebody play it through and tell me if it’s worth it :).  

Want a travel agent’s view of Shakespeare’s World?  For a change of pace from talking about politics and religion of the day, why not look around the actual geography of the time?  This Internet WebQuest was created by a junior high school student named Hugh Peebles (at least I think he’s a student, I assume he could be the teacher) and plays itself out like a game : ask the team a question (“What, in your opinion, caused a middle-class English boy to become one of the world’s greatest writers?”) and then turn them loose on the Internet to go research things like Holy Trinity Church, Stratford on Avon, The Globe, and so on.  

I don’t know what Supergun Cinema is, exactly, but I’m fascinated by these posts that keep popping up in my regular reading.  It appears to be the blog of somebody who is writing a screenplay about people writing a screenplay based on Shakespeare’s works, which is in turn modelled after Shakespeare’s works.  Got that?    Apparently his previous movie was called “Macbeth 3000” so Shakespeare figures prominently in his work.   The image caption in one of the related blog posts says “Macbeth + light sabers + Batman + snow + car chases + Super Dave + an Iraqi chemical weapons plant + a pedophile + Star Trek = comedy gold…”   I’m intrigued.  

This looks interesting.  University of Washington’s “Educational Outreach” program is offering free courses over the net.  Interesting to us, that is, because they have two Shakespeare offerings:  Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Comedies. Haven’t had time to read them in depth yet, but I’ve got them bookmarked.   Something like this I wish came in a PDF, I find that I’m more likely to read things like this if I can print them out all nicely formatted.  I don’t like reading web pages for too long.  

To be, or not to . . . Oh, never mind – Health – Times Online

Did Shakespeare have his bad days when he wrote just to get the wordcount up? Did he wake up hungover, look at a half finished page and think “Where was I?” Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director at the Globe, thinks so. He shows a number of examples (specifically from The Tempest, Macbeth and King Lear) where he feels that the Bard wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders.
It’s an interesting position to take. If you take the position that every word was perfect, then you’re just being silly – Shakespeare was a man just like everybody else. But if you cite specific passages and say “This is awkward” then people will come out of the woodwork to defend that particular passage and tell you that you simply didn’t understand it. At least this opinion is coming from somebody who is in the business of staging Shakespaere, so when he says “There’s no way to deliver a line like that with any passion” he’s got some degree of experience with it.
Does this remind anybody else of Polonius? “The most beautified Ophelia? That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase…”