My parents-in-law are going to the Greek Islands this fall.  Today my mother-in-law excitedly told me that they’d be going to Corfu!  When it did not register with me, she explained that this island was the setting for The Tempest.  I don’t want to say that I told her she was wrong, because I don’t know one way or the other, but I expect the claims were … dubious.  The island’s pretty safely a complete fiction, as far as I know.

But then I remembered that The Tempest is supposedly based on a true story, so I thought that maybe in the true story version, Corfu was the island in question. Thus somebody’s played connect the dots with the story and stuck Mr. Shakespeare’s name all over the tourist literature.

Googling around does indeed find me a bunch of references to the island of Corfu as the setting of The Tempest, but they are all “Greek tourist information” in nature, I can’t really find any Shakespeare references.

Getting home from the in-laws house, I consult Asimov.  If there was ever an encyclopedic tome of Shakespearean info to consult all between one set of covers, Mr. Asimov was it.  No help here.  All he tells us is that the island is not identifiable on any map, and at best it would be somewhere between Italy and Africa.  He does, by the way, go on to describe how and when all the moons of Uranus, so it’s safe to say that if he had the knowledge, he would have shared it.

Anybody got better research?  Does Corfu have any sort of meaningful claim to the title (such as a real-life backstory), or did maybe they say “Hey, we’re an island in between Italy and Africa, let’s brand ourselves as the Tempest island!”

(For the curious, what Asimov does say about the Tempest, without disclaimer, is that it is Shakespeare’s final work that he completed entirely by himself, unlike the Fletcher plays Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen that he merely contributed to.  Funny how times have changed, no?)

I love when I get questions like this. An unnamed reader (I’m not sure if she’s supposed to be asking this) has just been placed in charge with ordering copies of Shakespeare’s plays to be made available in the gift shop of the theatre company she works with.  So she’s asked me, and by extension us, for recommendations on which publisher’s editions to get.  In her own words she’s looking for something that, “stays true to the bard but would be readable for people new to Shakespeare.”

I know you’ll all have some great suggestions!  Earlier this year we had discussion of carrying around your own copy of the First Folio and people seemed to land on the Norton version – but would this satisfy our questioner’s requirements? Is it still approachable in the way she’s looking for?

UPDATE: My source says thank you for all the ideas!  We can keep discussing favorites, of course, but she’s thinking about going with Folger editions for her needs. 

On a different note does anybody know if any of these versions are available in an online / iPhone edition? That’s how I do all my reading these days.

I don’t know if it’s still called this, or if anybody still plays it, but us old timers used to amuse ourselves back in the day when “Babelfish” was the primary foreign language translator on the net by taking a popular phrase, running it through some random languages until it spit English back out the other end, then taking turns trying to guess what it meant.  Surely everybody’s played a version of this game.

Here’s my new twist. I monitor Shakespeare quotes on Twitter. Very often they come up in a foreign language.  When one looks popular, I’ll often stick it into http://translate.google.com to see what quote it really was.  Very rarely do I recognize the quote after translation.

So, for fun (and because I feel like I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit), here’s a handful that are skimming by on my Twitter feed right now. See how many you can get right:

• The love of young people not in the heart, but in the eyes.
• You learn that no matter how many pieces your heart was broken, the world does not stop for you to fix it.
• Doubts the light of the stars, From the sun has heat, until the truth Doubts, But trust my love.
• Cried at birth because we got to this huge scenario demented.  (I think this one might be my favorite!)  
• There is nothing good or bad, is human thought which makes it appear so.

I don’t have the correct answers for those, but I think that 4 out of 5 are relatively obvious.  I’m wondering if one of them is even Shakespeare at all.

Something occurred to me doing this.  Shakespeare’s word patterns confuse the heck out of translation engines.  If something translates back into English naturally (such as the questionable one above), chances are good that it wasn’t Shakespeare in the first place, no? 

I’ve heard of this movie, but never seen it. Several times now, though, I’ve seen the following quote and it makes me want to look this one up.

Mr. Magorium: [to Molly, about dying] When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He’s written “He dies.” That’s all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is “He dies.” It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with “He dies.” And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it’s only natural to be sad, but not because of the words “He dies.” but because of the life we saw prior to the words.

Having no context for this quote within the movie, I’m confused. First of all, “He dies” is a stage direction, and it’s the exact same stage direction everybody gets when they die. So there’s no significance in that. As for “No brilliant final words”, you’ve chosen a senile old man clutching his daughter’s dead body, what exactly did you expect? Go see Hamlet for deep thoughts.
But then Mr. M goes and says exactly what I’m saying when he points out “because of the life we saw prior to those words.” Well, yeah, exactly. So….what exactly was your point about the “He dies” thing and the no brilliant last words? Did you want brilliant last words, or did you want a life prior?
So, two questions. First, somebody feel free to explain this quote to me in context. Second, is this a movie that my kids would like? What is it rated, and if it’s not G, why (i.e. is it violent, language, etc…)? If it’s a kids movie with real people that happens to have Shakespeare in it, I’m all over it.