http://magpiemagic.blogspot.com/2008/04/shakespeare-collection.html The other day we had portraits.  Today, bracelets.  This isn’t stuff with quotes carved into it, no no.  These are actual craftwork where the artist has chosen Desdemona, for instance, as her inspiration for the design.  Personally I’m not crazy about the two designs shown (Desdemona and Kate), but that’s just my personal taste.  I like the idea of Shakespearean characters as design, and would love to see what she does with more characters.

There’s a certain contradiction that I struggle with when trying to explain to people why Shakespeare is so frickin good.  I usually start with the argument that there are real people portrayed up on stage; Shakespeare illustrated the entirety of human emotion before our eyes.  “But!” counters today’s cynical audience, “How can we related to characters who run around and kill each other?” It’s a good point.  Maybe you’ve been in love, but have you ever been so in love that you’d kill yourself for it?  Maybe you’ve been ambitious at work.  Would you kill your boss?  It’s easy to say that today’s teens can’t relate to Romeo and Juliet because the idea of killing yourself over a boyfriend or girlfriend is just so far out of their realm of comprehension. But what if you would? What if within each of us lies the capacity to feel that level of emotional response?  Take whatever stupid thing that one of Shakespeare’s characters is about to do – kill himself, kill the king, kill his wife.  Come up with a reason why it is stupid and why you wouldn’t do it.  Now imagine having an emotional response so strong that those reasons don’t seem like enough to stop you.  It’s not that we *can’t* react like Shakespeare’s characters…it’s that we choose not to.   We choose not to because we must continue to exist in society.  You can’t go around killing people when you’re upset.  It’s like that cliche we hear all the time in the movies when the good guy chooses not to finish off the bad guy:  “You’re not worth it.”  Longer version:  “The strength of the emotion I’m feeling right now that’s driven me to hang you upside down off of this building does not outweigh my understanding that if I drop you, I will go to jail for the rest of my life.”  But what if it did?  Shakespeare’s tragedies are an illustration of how that would look.  They are tragedies for a reason.  The character who lets emotion rule all, who ends up doing the stupid thing that we wouldn’t do, ends up getting taken out of the picture.  Not too many characters escape that punishment.  So maybe it’s more of a vicarious thing, then.  Maybe Shakespeare’s not always showing us what we *are*, but what we have the potential to become. Maybe that’s why we say things like “The greatest Lear of his generation” but not “The greatest James Bond of his generation.”  Somebody gets to step into the role of Lear or Hamlet or Richard the III and, however briefly, leap into the depths of what they *could* be, if the world were a different place.  We, as the audience, watch in a combination of admiration and fear.  Admiration for these characters who are not constantly reigning in their emotions for fear of societal reprisal.  Fear of what happens when they don’t.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Charlton Heston died this weekend.   It’s debatable what his greatest role was – Moses?  Ben Hur?  The human guy in Planet of the Apes?  Hopefully he’s not remembered as the crazy head of the NRA. When a well known actor like Heston passes away I like to scan his works and see if there was any Shakespeare we can talk about.  I found something interesting about Mr. Heston, who by the way played the Player King in Brannagh’s Hamlet.  Check this out: Antony and Cleopatra (1972) …. Marc Antony Julius Caesar (1970) …. Marc Antony Julius Caesar (1950) …. Antony   Seems the man was born to play Marc Antony!  According to IMDB Heston actually directed the 1972 A&C himself.  I wonder how often you get to see an actor play the same role with a 20 year difference between them?  In 1950 he would have been just 26. You want something downright spooky?  Heston played Sir Thomas More in the 1988 TV version of A Man for All Seasons.  In the 1966 movie version the title role was played by Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield, who himself died less than a month ago. That’s a little eerie.  Or, you know, coincidental.  Take your pick.

http://blog.askmisspriss.com/?p=61 This simple question gets a very lengthy answer, including quotes from Keats, Coleridge and Herman Melville, a shout out to Harold Bloom, and a good summary of something I’ve always said: It’s long been observed that one of the best measures of literature is when you can discuss the characters of a story, or play, as if those characters were real people: when you can talk about their personalities ; when you can psychologize over them, their choice of careers and deeds; when you can pick their brains and discuss their addictions and predispositions, as if these characters were actual human beings. I never really thought about it being “long observed”, but that certainly gets to the heart of what I get out of Shakespeare.