I’m sorry I missed Shmoop’s article on Shakespeare’s hidden dirty jokes for the big day.  This is one of the more interesting “Shakespeare said dirty stuff” articles I’ve yet seen, as it throws out “the beast with two backs” and “my tongue in your tail” right off the bat as too easy.  These examples, you need to work at.  Even better is the style in which with a wink and a nudge they try to explain it, without ever coming right out and saying it.  They even include modern music equivalents, in case that’s easier for the modern listener! As I look, the examples may not be new to the hardcore geeks among us (happy daggers, walls with chinks for kissing, and Malvolio’s commentary on his lady’s handwriting…) but the archery references in Love’s Labour’s Lost had gone over my head.

Woot! Last night I wrote:

What was my most popular day ever?  It was the day I titled a post “Shakespeare as Bob Dylan”.  That one post got onto a Dylan fan board and hoooboy did traffic spike!  They didn’t stick around, really, since that post didn’t have much meat in it.  But man, he draws a crowd.  The discovery of Cardenio hit maybe 2/3rds the traffic Dylan got.

Well that’s true…as far as visitors go. But can we talk page views?  Yesterday ended up whooping Bob Dylan day.  People who come to talk about Shakespeare tend to browse more. Best Shakespeare Day Ever!

This is how I exercise my new Netflix Streaming option. :)   How will the man known for the booming voice handle the range required for Lear? I’ll admit I skipped through this one, really watching just the opening and closing.  As I mentioned in an earlier post I’m trying to whip out a few more before the day’s over.  Wife’s asleep. 🙂 The opening, what we’ll call “angry Lear”, is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Jones.  Here’s a guy that makes the ground rumble when he speaks in his normal voice, so can you imagine when he’s angry and yelling? He’s a scary scary man. Strangely a bit too scary, if you ask me.  When he turns to Cordelia for her turn to go, it’s like he’s upset with her before she ever speaks.  In other Lear’s I’ve seen he’s more loving, making it obvious that she is the favorite.  Here, even though he does admit that he was counting on her to come through so he could give her the big piece of land and relax, he’s very intimidating about it. What about the end? How does Jones howl?  He doesn’t, and I don’t understand it.  He could have howled in a way that would have echoed for miles (the video is actually a filmed stage production).  Instead he enters simply speaking the lines.  “Howl.  Howl.  Howl.” I suppose this is supposed to show him as confused and helpless, almost as if he is speaking gibberish, but that’s not how I like to imagine it (as we discussed re: Olivier).  He definitely plays up the “lost it” aspect of the character, mumbling mostly to himself before leaping up to stage a re-enactment of “I killed the slave that was hanging thee”. A while back I got to see Orson Welles’ Othello and I think something I said there is true here when we get to the “Cordelia, stay a little” line.  When Olivier said it I had to stop the film because tears welled up in my eyes so fast.  When Jones says it there’s more a sort of “Ok I said that line and now I put my ear to her lips as if I’m hearing her say something”, know what I mean? I didn’t buy it, basically.  He didn’t transcend from “actor doing the role” to “father refusing to accept the death of his daughter.”  That’s a shame. I’m curious to see what other Shakespeare Mr. Jones has done.  Perhaps something a bit more warlike, a little less tender.  He might make for an interesting Othello. 

Whew!  I’m exhausted.  Granted I was nothing more than online all day, but still!  Seemed busy.  I greatly enjoyed being surrounded (virtually) by Shakespeare stuff all day. Kept wanting to say that I celebrate Shakespeare Day like an Irishman celebrates St. Patrick’s Day but there wasn’t nearly enough alcohol to back that up. As promised I broke my last year’s record (which turns out to only have been 9 posts in a day) with, well, this will be the *11th* post on Shakespeare Geek today!  My RSS people must be getting sick of me!  And I’m very happy to have a tolerant boss at the day job, because about half of those bad boys were queued up and ready to launch throughout the day but a bunch of them I whipped up on the fly as stories came in that caught my eye. Meanwhile I put out 27 Twitter posts.  Traffic was flying all over the place, thanks to all the “mentions” and “retweets” that came along with that.  Picked up a whole bunch of new followers!  Thanks everybody for the boost! Day’s not over so I won’t have my real traffic numbers until tomorrow, but I can already see that today’s been my second most popular day ever, beating out the “discovery” of Cardenio back in March. What was my most popular day ever?  It was the day I titled a post “Shakespeare as Bob Dylan”.  That one post got onto a Dylan fan board and hoooboy did traffic spike!  They didn’t stick around, really, since that post didn’t have much meat in it.  But man, he draws a crowd.  The discovery of Cardenio hit maybe 2/3rds the Dylan traffic got. Ok, I’m about Shakespeare’d out for the day (ok, who am I kidding, if the wife falls asleep I’m gonna bang out two or three more posts and maybe a movie review before midnight..)  Take care, geeks!  Happy Shakespeare Day, and THANK YOU SHAKESPEARE!