Performing Shakespeare over Twitter is nothing new – Twitter of the Shrew took place a year ago.  But here we are again, this time with Such Tweet Sorrow, backed by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The thing is … I don’t get it.  I visit the page, and I see stuff like this:

Tybalt_Cap:  “It’s a joke! Salty mash, sausages that are basically hotdogs, overcooked veg and was that water or gravy? Now for my meeting with the head“

or

LaurenceFriar: “ sitting with a sandwich on a cold stone wall,memories rushing re #10yearsago when I waited for the most wonderful woman 2 meet me for brunch“

I was very confused until I read their story so far page, which lets me know that this is not Romeo and Juliet, this is a “modern retelling” which is not the same thing at all.  They’ve put specific details to the ancient grudge – a car accident between Capulet (driver) and Montague (victim).  They’ve added characters – who exactly is “Jess”?  And there is no “Romeo” listed in the cast of characters.

Looks like a sort of young adult / fan fiction / soap opera that happens to use some Shakespeare names.  If you started calling Scar “Claudius” and Simba “Hamlet”, it’d still be the Lion King, not a modern retelling of Hamlet.  I don’t really know why the Royal Shakespeare Company is involved.

Over the weekend we had some friends over, and the old 1970’s tv show “Sanford and Son” came up in conversation.  This reminded me of a post I made back in January 2008 about the episode where Lamont (the son) is playing the role of Othello.  I thought it was worth dusting this one off for folks that hadn’t seen it:

Funny how things have changed in 30 years!

Thanks to reader James Weston for sending this one my way.  We’ve covered disaster specialist Roland Emmerich’s plans to tackle the Oxfordian argument in the upcoming movie, “Anonymous”.  The LA Times doesn’t seem to like the idea. 

Funny, only after reading the article and moving to post this did I realize that the opinion piece is written by James Shapiro, currently making his own mark in the Shakespeare books with his argument that they are most certainly collaborative and most certainly not autobiographical:

In cashing in on this fantasy, Emmerich’s film may lead moviegoers to believe that only a nobleman had the necessary gifts to write the works of Shakespeare. Sure, it’s only a movie, but try explaining that to schoolteachers who will soon be confronted by students arguing that the received histories of Elizabethan England and its greatest poet are lies — and that their teachers, in suppressing the truth, are party to this conspiracy.

Emmerich’s film will also do a deeper disservice to Shakespeare’s legacy. Encouraging audiences to believe that the plays are little more than the recycled story of a disgruntled aristocrat’s life and times devalues the very thing that makes Shakespeare so remarkable: his imagination.

McSweeney’s is at it again!

From the people that brought you Hamlet’s Facebook Page, the Romeo and Juliet Police Blotter and Lady Macbeth on Ambien, we now have “Macbeth and Macduff arguing over semantics”:

MACBETH: Wast thou ripped from a man?
MACDUFF: No…
MACBETH: Then thou wast of woman born, what’s the problem?
MACDUFF: I think, technically, to be “born” you need to pass through the birth canal.
MACBETH: No. If you exist, then you were born.
MACDUFF: I grant you it’s a bit of a gray area. 

I love these guys.

I’ve at times wondered if Shakespeare got much of his “pop culture” status simply by nature of the fact that he is in the public domain, and thus everybody rushes to his body of work for material whenever they need some.  I used to work with a guy who was a Hemingway Geek, and one of the things we’d always debate is how my readers could, at will, cut and paste large sections of the plays, while his could not. Hemingway is still very much under an aggressively pursued copyright.

Anyway, that’s a weird way of saying that as my kids go through the Muppets television show on Netflix, we keep running into Shakespeare references mixed in with a whole slew of other ancient comedy material.

In this case it was Season One, Disk 2 and Kermit the Frog was running a panel on the important questions of the day.  Miss Piggy was one of the guests on the panel.  I only had a brief moment when he said “important questions” to think, “I wonder if he’ll reference Shakespeare?” when he said, and I quote, “Was William Shakespeare Bacon?”

Well you can predict what happens from there – Miss Piggy takes offense at the word “bacon” (although Kermit does clarify that he means Sir Francis), but chaos soon erupts and puns go flying all over the place.  There wasn’t much Shakespeare beyond that, but I immediately told the kids “Oh I am so posting that on the blog.”

In a later episode on that same disk, Harvey Korman is playing the lion tamer to a “ferocious” beast that is actually a big cuddly blue monster.  “Speak!” he shouts at the monster, and I think “He’s going to quote Shakespeare, isn’t he?” but no, what he says is “Well I was reading Balzac recently, and I had some thoughts …”