As I continue through Playing Shakespeare I’m becoming more intrigued.  I don’t really know anything about this Barton who runs the show.  Are these people in his workshop professional actors who are doing him a favor, helping him to demonstrate techniques to a mostly off-screen audience of younger, less experienced actors? Or when Ben Kingsley asks a question, is he honestly the student to Barton’s teacher?  Yes, that Ben Kingsley.  Gandhi.  Holding a script and asking Barton questions about how to play a scene. There’s a moment I watched last night when his “students”, Kingsley among them, encourage Barton to do a passage to show them what he’s talking about.  They give him this speech, of all things: KING OF FRANCE

Where is Montjoy the herald? speed him hence:
Let him greet England with our sharp defiance.
Up, princes! and, with spirit of honour edged
More sharper than your swords, hie to the field:
Charles Delabreth, high constable of France;
You Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon, and of Berri,
Alencon, Brabant, Bar, and Burgundy;
Jaques Chatillon, Rambures, Vaudemont,
Beaumont, Grandpre, Roussi, and Fauconberg,
Foix, Lestrale, Bouciqualt, and Charolois;
High dukes, great princes, barons, lords and knights,
For your great seats now quit you of great shames.
Bar Harry England, that sweeps through our land
With pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur:
Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon:
Go down upon him, you have power enough,
And in a captive chariot into Rouen
Bring him our prisoner.

And at the drop of a hat he’s right there, boom, whole speech, in character, as a demonstration of what he’s talking about (in terms of his students “not going far enough”).  They even ask him about how he chose to pronounce certain words, and he specifies when he chose the Folio pronunciation. Who the heck is this guy? All of the other actors, Patrick Stewart included, refer to a script when doing relatively well known passages such as from Julius Caesar or Merchant of Venice.  And this Barton fellow riffs off the above, which is basically a whole sequence of proper names – French names, no less! – without so much as a pause?  Maybe it was a good editing job (this is video, after all), but it was quite impressive, I have to say!

The star of “300” and “Bounty Hunter”, Gerard Butler, will take on the role of a foul-mouthed leprechaun in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”

What?

Describing his role in the movie Butler said “I play the most perverse, disturbing, disgusting, foul-mouthed leprechaun you could ever imagine.” He also said that it will feature a lot of swearing.

Wait, what?

The project is being led by, “Shallow Hal” director, Peter Farrelly and is expected to be released this year.

Oh. [ via Irish Central , and I swear I thought this was some sort of weird St. Patrick’s Day variant on April Fool’s or something! ]

When comparing Shakespeare’s body of work to Robert De Niro’s (“frayed at both edges”) I failed to account for a particular factor that Frank Skinner points out in his comparison to Michael Jackson: Once the artist is dead, our attitude toward his work changes. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/frank_skinner/article7067745.ece So it is with Cardenio, or a new Michael Jackson CD, or a new Dr. Seuss book or Frank Herbert or Robert Heinlein, or a new John Hughes movie.  When a creator of things we like is taken from us, we’re sad because something in our brain says, “No more stuff from that person.”  So then we hear that there might still be more stuff and we’re all, “Hurray!  More stuff!”  We are so excited, in fact, that we are more willing to overlook the obvious (which kinda gets back to my point) – there may be a reason why this “lost” material was lost to begin with.  Maybe it’s just not any good.  Maybe the creator never intended for it to be produced.  Maybe it wasn’t finished. An even worse fate that the publishing of unpublished work is when somebody continues it for you.  We are so desperate for that new work that, when we hear it is unfinished and therefore we can’t have it, somebody steps up and says, “I’ll finish it!”  At this point it’s easy to be torn, because one side of your brain says “Hurray, I get more stuff after all!” but the other side is still able to say, “Hey wait a second, Eoin Colfer, you’re no Douglas Adams !”  But still, partial new content is better than nothing, right? Maybe? I expect this is where Cardenio ends up.  Assuming it is real, who knows what state it was in when Theobald got his hands on it?  He “punched it up” a bit.  It appears now that Brean Hammond and the folks at Arden have done the same thing.  So no, it’s not like somebody opened up a desk drawer and found a complete script for “Cardenio, by William Shakespeare ” sitting there waiting for the world to see.  But we knew that was never going to happen.  Heck, we don’t have *any* of the plays in that sort of form.  If it’s legit, this is really the closest we’d ever come to a “new” Shakespeare play.

Just to complete a thought from yesterday ..

P.S I hope it turns out that Geoffrey Rush’s lucky charm is the Daffy Duck, I like the idea of Daffy hanging out on the set of Shakespeare in Love.

Today I get to see the answers, and I was right? Geoffrey Rush : Daffy Duck figurine
Cate Blanchett : elf ears
Robin Williams : ivory trinket
Meat Loaf : two stuffed bears
Sharon Stone : crystal This post has nothing to do with Shakespeare, I just felt obliged to close that loop from yesterday’s post.

My 5yr old needs to work on her letter formation.  We’ve been encouraging her to copy sentences, monk-like, to practice word formation, spacing, punctuation and so on (as opposed to just writing the same letter repeated over and over). Hmmm…. I need something that my daughter can work on copying, a short sequence of short words.  Whatever shall we pick? No bonus points awarded for guessing the answer to this most obvious of questions: 🙂 This is actually the second copy that she did. The first, where I sat next to her and went over every letter, was accidentally thrown out.  I said “Can you make me another one?” and this is the version I got, without a single bit of help from any grown ups.  I think it looks even better. The story gets even better when you imagine the scene in my kitchen.  My wife and I are cleaning up after dinner, my 5yr old is at work on her letters, repeating to herself “To be, or not to be.” Her 3yr old brother wanders in, hears her and says, “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Love it! UPDATE : You know what? It’s only just now, some 8 hours after getting this, that I notice the extra “to” in there.  I love it even more.