Slate has their article about Roland Emmerich’s coming authorship movie entitled “The Shakespeare Apocalypse“, but halfway through the article the author hands me this better subject line on a silver platter, so how can I not steal it? 🙂

Early in the daylong set tour, it becomes clear that Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s upcoming drama about the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays, won’t be a decorous literary costume drama but rather a certifiably loony fantasia built on an epic scale.

I love it when people use the “loony” pun when speaking of authorship, I highly support that. (The Oxford theory, for those who do not know, was first put forth by a Mr. Looney. They’ll never escape the tittering that goes with that. 🙂

The author gets to be part of the press tour for the movie, so there’s all kinds of good backstage info all written from the perspective of an author who’s clearly not on their side.  Quite an amusing read.

Actress Lynn Redgrave has died of breast cancer at 67.

In doing some research I realized that we’ve spoken of Lynn Redgrave here on Geek previously.  Allow me to quote from my April 2009 article:

On the day his mother died, the celebrated actor Sir Michael Redgrave
had a matinee and an evening performance to give as Hamlet. Backstage at
the theater, he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Then he went out front.
“And he did two of the greatest Hamlets he ever played.”

Yes I realize that Lynn is not in that, it’s because she wrote it.  Later in life she wrote several plays about her parents and their attachment to the theatre, Shakespeare in particular, including Shakespeare for My Father, and Rachel and Juliet.  The latter is the subject of my post from one year ago.

I think it’s wonderful that her IMDB page lists one of her Shakespeare credits as “ABC Afterschool Specials (Various Characters)“.  This was in 1973, and also starred John Gielgud.  I would have been 4.  I don’t think I was into Shakespeare quite yet.

I’m unfamiliar with her theatrical work.  Anybody else have stories to share? Any productions she was particularly well known for?

Danger, this article from Cute Overload is titled “Cover Your Ears, Shakespeare” for a reason.   Many bad (or, depending on your taste, awesome) puns follow, especially in the comments.

Not really much of substance in this article about Shakespeare baseball references, since obviously the man died a few hundred years before the game was invented.  But, much like bringing up “Thou base footballer!” in King Lear, you can go scraping the text for things that *sound* like baseball.  Actually I’m a little surprised by just how many they found.  Catch a fly?  Stealing bases, errors, foul and fair balls …  I once heard about Klingon Camp where they play the entire game in Dr. Okrand’s made up language.  Perhaps we could have Shakespeare camp and play the game entirely using misappropriated Bardisms?

(*) I remember an episode of the television show Frazier where brothers Frazier and Niles Crane had staged a theatrical performance.  After the apparent success of the opening, Niles can be seen saying to his brother, “We’re a hit, a palpable hit!”  That one seems to come up often (and obviously in the article above, you see).