Free Shakespeare In Bits : Romeo and Juliet Edition !

April 12, 2010June 19, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Shakespeare Geek, in conjunction with Shakespeare in Bits, is pleased to announce our new contest where we’re giving away *10* copies of their new interactive Romeo and Juliet software (the new standard in multimedia Shakespeare) for PC or Mac!

We reviewed the product a few weeks ago. Highlights:

The complete, unabridged, original text, with comprehensive study notes, analysis, plot summaries, and SIB’s unique in-line translation system.
Almost three hours of top-quality audio, brought to you courtesy of Naxos Audiobooks, with Kate Beckinsale as Juliet, Michael Sheen as Romeo, and Fiona Shaw as the Nurse.
Three hours of original, engaging animation, covering every word of the play.

Contest Rules

1) Become a fan of Shakespeare Geek on Facebook. (They’ve since changed to just calling this a “like” now.)

2) Become a fan of Shakespeare in Bits on Facebook.

3) On either wall (or both, if you like!) post something about Shakespeare. We’d like “What Shakespeare means to me” or “My best Shakespeare experience”, but quite frankly the content is up to you because of step #4 …

4) Share your story with your friends! Get your friends (and strangers, why not?) to “like” your post. So if you want to win, post something good 😉

5) At the end of the contest, we’ll choose the 10 top stories that have the most “likes” to each win a free copy of Romeo and Juliet from Shakespeare in Bits. Posts will be chosen from both walls, so if you post on both you’ll get two entries in the contest (though you can win only once).

6) In the event of a tie, remaining prizes will be given away by random drawing from all entries. So just posting something, even without campaigning to get it liked, gets you good odds of winning too.

7) Contest ends on midnight EST on April 22, so we can announce the winners on April 23 in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday.

8) Shakespeare Geek is based in the USA while Shakespeare in Bits is based in Ireland, so we are not restricting the contest to a particular geography. The prizes will take the form of registration keys to unlock the downloadable product, which is available for both PC and Mac. (iPad and iPhone/iTouch versions on the way.)

UPDATE April 23, 2010 : This contest has ended. Thanks for playing!

Any questions? Get posting! (Teachers, this software is perfect for a classroom setting so motivate your students to support your entry!)

Coriolanus : The Movie … The Blog

April 9, 2010April 17, 2023 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Ok, I seem to have seriously dropped the ball on this one. We’ve known about Ralph Fiennes doing a Coriolanus movie for some time. What I didn’t know is that 30 Ninjas has a blog up detailing the day-to-day progression of the movie?! The site itself is a bit nightmarish on the eyes, and I can’t even find a subscribe link to get it in my daily feeds, but it certainly looks chock full of content! Coriolanus was never really my thing, but maybe that’s because it’s been so ignored. Maybe a movie will change my mind? I just wish they had a treatment like this for when Julie Taymor was doing her Tempest, I would have been all over that. UPDATE: Found the link to subscribe.

C-SPAN Shakespeare [Video]

April 9, 2010April 17, 2023 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

[ Found via http://www.shaksper.net ] I haven’t fully explored this yet, but the C-Span video archives are now open to the public and somebody’s beaten me to the “search for Shakespeare” button :). Definitely play around with the search features, as there are many of them. I found that limiting to “academic topics” helps, and sort by least recent instead of most if you want to see some of the more historic stuff (like an interview with Harold Bloom). Also included are things like mock trials (Hamlet for the murder of Polonius), which are probably where I’ll head first as I’ve often heard about those, but never watched/read one.

Review : Hamlet The Video Game

April 8, 2010July 22, 2024 ~ duane ~ 5 Comments

Ok, remember a few weeks ago when we spoke of Hamlet, the Indie Game? At the time I thought it was new, but a little searching shows me that I’d seen it coming back in Sept 2009! Anyway, I’m happy to announce the Hamlet is now available from Alawar Games. They were nice enough to send me a copy for review, and while I’ve not yet finished it, I think I can at least give people a taste of what to expect. As far as Shakespeare content goes, hardcore geeks will likely be disappointed. The connection to Hamlet seems to be in name only, as the plot line quickly reveals : Polonius wants his daughter Ophelia to marry Claudius, and Hamlet must save her. Only problem is that you in your time travelling spaceship have crash landed onto poor Hamlet, and now you must rescue Ophelia. From her dad. So that she doesn’t have to marry…Hamlet’s dad? Exactly. As I play each level I’m looking for Shakespeare jokes (as the password to Polonius’ lair I guessed “Corambis” :)), but I’m not finding too many. At this point, unless something suddenly changes in later levels (maybe a jealous Gertrude will make an appearance?), this could just be a generic “save the princess from the bad guys” story. But I’ll take such a game with Shakespeare characters over one without, anyway. Though I’ve not met them yet I can see from the materials that a number of other characters make guest appearances. The game itself is a logic puzzle where to move past each screen (each portion of the story) you must find the things that are clickable, and how to click them in the right order to unlock whatever needs unlocking. Sometimes this is easy (the bird drops the seed, the rain makes the seed grow into a vine to be climbed…) while other times it is quite difficult (“Ok, guess the password now.”) There are hints for each level including what your character thinks (this is very important, always check this), clues hidden on the page itself, and another hint that you will earn if it takes you too long to solve the level. I’m currently stuck on a puzzle that is all about the hand eye coordination, and it is a little frustrating. I usually work off of a Thinkpad stationed on my lap, using the touchpad instead of a mouse. In this particular puzzle I have to hit several small targets very quickly, and I’m not doing so well at it. The implemention of the game is very good. It offers both full screen and windowed modes, and is nice enough in windowed mode to do things like turn off the sound and the timer when you are not playing. Excellent. The sound and graphics are very good, not blow-you-away like a 3D shooter would, but very consistent for the world view they’re trying to create. Quite a large world it is, too. Sometimes you’re outside, sometimes underwater, sometimes on a …spaceship? You’ll interact with other characters, too, so don’t worry about this being a quiet little mouse clicker. Stuff is definitely moving out from under you. Sometimes stuff is trying to shoot at you, too. It reminds me a little bit of Fool’s Errand, if anybody remembers that classic puzzle game. You get a screen, you know you have to do *something* to get past that screen, and each screen is pretty much 100% different from the previous screen. Now you’re on your own. Unlike Fool’s Errand it is entirely linear, so if you get stuck on a level (as I am, currently) you don’t have many options other than to stick with it. The demo lets you play for an hour, so see how far you get. I played for more than an hour on my review copy and only got through maybe 5 levels, and I’m told there are 25 in the game. And hey, at $9.95 for the full version it’s not a bad deal to add this one to your collection and say you’ve played the Hamlet game.

Love Is My Sin, A Guest Post by Carl Atkins

April 7, 2010July 22, 2024 ~ duane ~ 7 Comments

Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor. He sent me this review over the Easter weekend, with permission to publish. So I went to see Peter Brook’s production, “Love Is My Sin” at the Duke Theater in Manhattan earlier this week and, all in all, it was an enjoyable hour of performance. He selected 31 sonnets to be read by Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington. Both actors read The Sonnets well, but Michael Pennington blew Natasha Parry out of the water. He was fantastic! Whereas Parry often made feeble attempts to show emotion by varying pauses, her almost constant monotone defeated her purpose (she also went up on her lines once). Pennington showed how an actor can use vocal modulation to great effect and injected an enormous range of feeling into the sonnets he read. His readings were fluid and sensitive. Wow.
Brook scored fewer points with me. He took the sonnets he chose out of order and arranged them in groupings under the titles “Devouring Time,” “Separation,” “Jealousy,” and “Time Defeated.” He effectively manipulated The Sonnets to make them tell a story of his own invention. This was most apparent in the “Jealousy” series where he had the actors bantering back and forth as if each sonnet were answering the other, even though there were “young man” and “dark lady” sonnets interspersed with one another and, read in context, the speaker of The Sonnets, does not change. As presented, the “Jealousy” series was done well and was fun to watch (Parry came alive in this set). The other series were more tepid, and not as interesting as the “back story” that runs through The Sonnets as you read them in the order they are printed. I have no problem using The Sonnets for their dramatic content in original ways, but one ought to be honest about what one is doing. In the playbill, Brook writes: “This astonishing collection allows us to penetrate into Shakespeare’s own, most secret life. It is his private diary, in which we find his intimate questions, his jealousy, his passion, his guilt, his despair. Above all he searches to discover for himself the deep meaning of being attracted by a man or by a woman, even by the act of writing itself.” Apparently, Brook never got past Wordsworth in his reading on The Sonnets. His now hackneyed cry “With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart!” is almost 200 years old, was always controversial, and is certainly not mainstream now. But by taking liberties with his presentation of The Sonnets, Brook is certainly not presenting his audiences with anything that could be considered authentic.
As far as the choice of sonnets is concerned, Brook’s picks are pretty good. I was bothered, however, by his breaking up of double and triple sonnets (I suspect he did not recognize them). He presents the first half of 15/16, 73/74, 50/51, 44/45, and 27/28; the second half of 89/90; and of the triple 91-93, only 92-93 in reverse order. Only 5/6 and 133/134 are spared! This shows a fairly poor reading of the poetry.
I was pleased by the inclusion of two of the most powerful sonnets, not usually thought of as “love poems”: 129 (Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame) and 146 (Poor soul, the center of sinful earth). Also, Pennington (with a little help from Parry–a nice touch) did an excellent reading of 145, a sonnet that is often derided as unworthy of Shakespeare.
In summary, I had an hour of fun listening to sonnets well read. Pennington was a joy to listen to. The production was interesting enough, if not taken too seriously. No ground broken here, just entertainment.