http://games.ign.com/articles/101/1013349p1.html When I see headlines like this I immediately scan for Shakespeare (I know he didn’t write novels but typical web writers don’t make such clean distinctions…)  Alas, no Bard in this list. But it does beg the question, what Shakespeare makes for good video games, and what sort of game would it make?  I’ve seen a number of variations on Romeo and Juliet as a game, ranging from text adventure to platform/jumper.  But what else?  Could Macbeth make a good first person shooter? 

http://chud.com/articles/articles/20456/1/OF-COURSE-3D-SHAKESPEARE-WHY-DIDN039T-I-THINK-OF-THAT/Page1.html 3D Shakespeare.  Love it.  Immediately makes me think of Macbeth more than Hamlet, though.

Don’t ask me why, but I was thinking about Othello a minute ago, specifically the “It is the cause, my soul, let me not name it to you” scene.  It clicked with me just how scary that really is, if you consider Shakespeare’s characters as real people who could really be walking the Earth next to you. So I thought I’d ask : Which of the tragic heroes, if you knew them in real life, would be the scariest?  Lear’s got a temper on him and he goes a little crazy, but it’s more the forces around him that cause the damage, not him.  Macbeth?  Sure he’s a bit of a mass murderer, but I’m left thinking that everybody who gets it in that play is really in his way in one form or another (even if hypothetically, like Banquo, or collaterally, like Macduff’s family).  Who knows, maybe it’s the bloody nature of that one that makes it hard to even imagine in real life. Hamlet’s a bit scary when you think about it.  Not for butchering Claudius, that was straight up revenge.  Or for how he ran through Polonius, which was a bit impulsive.  I’m talking about sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, a purely calculated move.  Did he have to do that?  Couldn’t he have written “throw them in jail” instead of “execute them”, or something similar? Now compare Othello and Desdemona.  He’s not even really that bad of a guy, is he?  Does he run around the play killing anybody?  Desdemona is a complete innocent.  Othello gets just completely brainwashed, not into a rash and impulsive act, but into something so calm and collected that he pretty much explains to his wife what he’s going to do before he does it. That, I think, is what worries me most of all.  That there are personalities like that who can be manipulated to any degree, even to the killing of innocent loved ones.  It’s not that Othello was crazy like Lear (and arguably Hamlet), or that he was already a little bloodthirsty like Mr. “unseamed him from nave to chaps” Macbeth over there.  PTSD much?  Othello was a regular guy who was manipulated into doing a pretty bad thing.  Which means you could quite possibly say the same about anybody around you.

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5750WZ20090806 I’ve thought about it, and decided that this news that Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio teaming up to do a new Brave New World movie counts as Shakespeare news. While it’s true that the title comes from our beloved Miranda in The Tempest (“O brave new world that has such people in it!”), the book itself if you’ve never read it has quite a bit of Shakespeare. I’d like to say I’m looking forward to it, but I’ll have to refresh myself a bit on the story and what their plans are.  Wasn’t Gattaca awfully close to this one?

http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2009/08/05/21stcenturyshakespeare_ap.html?tkn=LVLFUMLGNs87P5dvBsphoTcZGapD8SYik0S1 I link this article on “Shakespeare and Texting” not because it is a new or useful idea (it is neither), but because of this quote:

"The language is terrible," said RayLene Dysert, who teaches freshmen composition at West Texas A&M University and led a recent workshop on teaching Shakespeare for high school teachers.

That pains me in so many ways I can’t begin to tell you, but I’ll give it a shot. If you think that the language of Shakespeare is terrible you probably shouldn’t be teaching it, don’t ya think?  Much less teaching other teachers how to teach it?  Really?? Listen.  It’s really not that hard to understand.  Shakespeare is neither play nor poetry – it is both, simultaneously.  Yes, it is complex, but that is precisely why you can’t separate them.  Anybody could have written the plot of Romeo and Juliet (as we all know, Shakespeare didn’t invent most of his plots).  It’s *how* he wrote it that makes it genius.  I think that’s the word you were going for when your word processor swapped it out for “terrible”. If you want to keep just the play, fine, rewrite it.  But it’s no longer poetry, and it’s no longer Shakespeare, so don’t call it that and don’t claim that you made it easier.  I can make math easier by getting rid of all numbers greater than 10, too, but that’s not doing my students any favors. And if you do insist on doing that?  You know, because it’s too hard?  Please do me and your students a favor and get rid of all studying of all poetry in all forms.  Who cares whether Robert Frost was writing about thoughts of suicide in Stopping By Woods?  Forget Edgar Allen Poe, let’s have Stephen King.  Truth is beauty and beauty truth, and that is all I know on Earth and all I need to know? W TF does that even mean?  Poetry has no purpose, after all.  It’s hard.  Why do they insist on using strange words that I myself don’t use on a daily basis, and why do they order them in unusual ways that I myself would not order them?  That’s stupid.  Everybody should talk like everybody else, that’s the only thing that makes sense.  People who don’t talk like me are stupid, after all.  That’s the only lesson to learn, is that the world revolves around me, and if something is different from how I do it?  Then it is broken until somebody else fixes it for me.