Month: July 2008

It’s the strangest thing, but “akfarrar shakespeare” keeps showing up very highly in my referrer logs.  I’m wondering if our own Alan K. Farrar has a fanbase I never knew about? 😉  Or if he’s just doing a huge amount of ego surfing!   🙂

http://www.aizawa.2y.net/sp/Tempest.htm Say it with me:  No matter how well, or how many different ways you translate Shakespeare, if you try to do it line by line, you are doing the source material a grave disservice. The value is in the *poetry* first and foremost, so if you take that away, then you’ve got no obligation to try and swap out the words (unless you happen to be doing a side-by-side, which most often people are not). Without the poetry, you’re left with plot and character.  So forget about the line-by-line stuff and just retell the story in your own way, if that’s what you really want to do.  If you want to get somebody interested in Shakespeare and you’re afraid of the language, that’s the way to do it.  Hook them with the story and the people, and then bring in the language.  Don’t take away the language and say “Trust me, the original is much better than this.”

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=133942&command=displayContent&sourceNode=244910&contentPK=21111793&folderPk=103546&pNodeId=244911   Rufus Wainwright already does a killer version of Sonnet 29, so much so that I’ve been on a hunt for “sonnets to music” ever since. The article above links an interview with the man, where he says he’s working on a compilation of 9 sonnets (to debut in April, in Berlin) for a potential album. Does anybody mind if I quote myself?     (Thanks to listenerd for the link, which I almost passed over because it looks too random to be valuable….wrong! :))

Since I missed the big speech yesterday at Rebel’s Henry V, I went home and brought up a few versions on YouTube for the kids.  First is Olivier’s:

Then Brannagh:

  For kicks (thanks Christine!)  here’s Jackson from Rebel Shakespeare during the performance I missed this weekend:

Here’s an intriguing one.  It’s Brannagh’s audio, but someone has placed the entire speech over battle scenes from the game Starcraft.  I actually counted the number of times the shivers went up my spine during this:  16.  Damned near brought tears to my eyes.  It’s one thing to watch Brannagh standing among his troops giving the speech, it’s another to listen to it while you watch a glorious battle with soldiers going bravely to their doom:

Over the weekend, a comment came up in conversation (re: As You Like It) that I would apparently not like it, as I’m more into the tragedies.  (This said by the neighbor who, a few years ago, we attended Taming of the Shrew with where we argued about the relative merits of Shrew v. Hamlet).  Here’s what came out of me, on the fly: “You want to know the difference between tragedy and comedy, as far as mass appeal goes?  For the tragedies, you can go see one 50 times, and every single time you’ll walk away saying ‘Wow, I never thought about it in that way before.’  There’s just that much depth in them, that you always see something new, something to think about, every time. The comedies on the other hand, excepting the few really great ones, are pretty much the same shallow sort of stuff whenever and however you see it. Miscommunication, slapstick…it’s like seeing a romantic comedy in the movie theatre.  You might like it, you might come away saying it was good, but a few weeks later it’s not like you’re still talking about how it gave you something to think about, and nobody’s in a rush to go make it again and interpret it differently. It is what it is. So where’s the gap?  Simple – the academics, and the Shakespeare geeks like me, we are the sort who will go see a play 50 times, and look at the differences each time and think about what they mean.  But most people won’t do that.  Most people in general will go to see a show once.  So for them, the comedies are awesome, because they don’t need depth, they just need laughs.” A little something for a Monday morning.