Month: October 2015

Whenever a new Shakespeare movie comes out, everybody does a list of movie adaptations.  But here’s my problem.  Nobody seems to want to do the research.  Take this one, for example:

Are these the 10 best Shakespeare screen adaptations?

4 of the 10 are from the year 2000 or later (including Julie Taymor’s Tempest.  Really?)

3 from the 1990’s (including 10 Things I Hate About You, grrrrrrr.  Not the same thing!)

1 each from 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s (including Brando’s Julius Caesar, Peter Brooks’ King Lear and Chimes at Midnight)

We’ve been filming Shakespeare for basically about one hundred years. So is it reasonable to believe that 70% of the best versions all come from the last 25 years?

What sort of criteria should we use?  You can’t drop a 1936 Romeo and Juliet into a class full of high school English students alongside the 1996 Leonardo diCaprio version and ask them which one they like better.

The art of movie making, it would seem logical to assume, has gotten better over time. The quality of the equipment that goes into it, the special effects, the scope and budget.  So is it true, then, that the best movies in general have all been recent movies? When we speak of those older movies is there an implied, “…for its time” qualifier tacked onto the praise?

Does anybody have a favorite Shakespeare adaptation from before 1990 that they believe stands up to a more modern adaptation? If a friend asked you for a recommendation, would you dip into 100 years of Shakespeare movies or would you stick to the more modern stuff?

UPDATE : This guy gets it right.

I was hoping this article would have more relevant content, given that it teases “fake Shakespeare sonnets” right in the title. But I found a gem of an idea that I love:

It’s called a Shakespeare-bot. A group of ten-year-olds have written a basic computer program based on language patterns. Plug hundreds of words into the program and it will begin to spit out fake Shakespeare sonnets. 

“The trick with teaching computer science is to integrate it with other curricular subjects,” says Nicky Ringland, co-founder of Grok Learning, a platform of online computer science courses teaching children to code and providing teachers with much-needed computer science support.

That’s all we get for Shakespeare references.  I am currently looking for links to the project and will update the post if I find any.  Seriously, I’m thinking I’ll try to contact them directly.

What I love love love is the “integrate it with other curricular subjects” thing.  Amen to that.  That’s the essence of STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) that’s all the rage these days. But that’s only one side of the equation.  All those words are really just variations of each other (what is science without math?  engineering without science?).  But unless somebody puts them together, nobody is going to connect math and Shakespeare or science and Shakespeare.

This is something I brought up several years ago (“Teaching With Shakespeare“). I’m glad to see I’m not the only crazy one.

For various reasons we don’t need to go into, I am applying to jobs as of late (not much mirth involved).  One of the application web sites broke the monotony by asking specifically for me to “write something out of the ordinary that will get our attention.” I wrote:

I’ve been building web sites since 1995, but my 8000 social media followers only want to talk about Shakespeare.

My coworkers (we’re all looking, so we’re all helping each other) liked the personal nature of the Shakespeare thing to me, and suggested I take it even farther by working some Shakespeare into my cover letter.

Hmmmm….but what?

Who’s got good quotes related to unemployment?  Positive quotes, mind you.  Not about how much unemployment stinks.

I went with the following:

“To business that we love we rise betimes and go to ’t with delight.”

I bookmarked this article about The Riddles of the Witches thinking it would be something interesting, but it’s really not. Looks like a high school student’s homework.

However I did find one thing worth discussing:

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays. There is no sub-plot. Shakespeare has constructed it with great structural economy even without introducing the main characters.

Without even…??

First scene : Witches.  What are the witches there for? They’re there to meet with … Macbeth!

Audience:  Ok, who the _____ is this Macbeth character? Sounds evil.

Second scene : A dying soldier describes in detail about how this Macbeth character hacks his way through enemy troops to come face with the leader of the rebellion, whom he then proceeds to “unseam him from the nave to the chop” and fix his head upon the battlements.

Audience:  Whoa.  Bad ass.

Third scene : Witches again.  A drum, a drum!  Macbeth doth come!

Audience:  Can’t wait!  Bring him out here! Let’s see what the big deal is all about!

In other words, I’d suggest that Macbeth has one of the best introductions Shakespeare gave any of his main characters.

Which of the other title characters get that kind of build up?

I always bookmark and retweet articles like this one that offers Three Reasons Why Shakespeare Remains Relevant. I am unabashedly biased on this question, and as long as there are people asking *if* he is relevant, then I’ll be there to post as many answers to the question as I can put my hands on.

But … I don’t like this lady’s answers.  Her three reasons:

1) Adaptability.  Great so you’re saying that his staying power comes from the fact that whatever parts we don’t like, we can just change or omit? I guess I get the point, that there is an underlying foundation to Shakespeare’s work that is not found in the details.  But, still … it seems weird to say that he’s still relevant because you can change the parts you don’t think are relevant.

2) Popular Touch. This one I just flat out disagree with. I’d say that an equal number of people would cite to you all the kings and queens and royal courts and say, “People these days don’t want to watch a play about that.”  True, you can adapt a story by turning the king into a mob boss or family patriarch, but still, once again, you end up arguing that Shakespeare is relevant because of the parts that you can take it upon yourself to make up out of whole cloth.

3) Great Publicity.  Well, I mean, I suppose.  It’s kind of weird that she uses the existence of the First Folio as the prime example, and doesn’t really mention David Garrick.  Just the fact that Shakespeare’s works were published in Folio was not enough by itself to catapult him to the godlike status he enjoys today.

So let me ask you, then – why is Shakespeare relevant to you? How do you, personally, answer the question?

For me it’s more about the universality(?) of the work. By that I mean that all around the world, for the last several hundred years, most of the people on the planet have had something in common, whether they knew it or not. If I have seen Much Ado About Nothing, and you have seen Much Ado About Nothing, then there is a certain bond that exists between us that can be turned into something more. It does not matter if you live in the same country as I do, speak the same language, or if you’re twenty years younger or older.  It’s like a constant against which all things are relative. It’s a building block.

Make sense? Back in high school I learned a bit of Esperanto.  Anybody familiar with it? Esperanto is a language invented by L.L. Zamenhoff around one hundred years ago.  He thought that if the entire world had a universal neutral language, that cultural boundaries would dissolve. You could start to share literature. You could travel all around the world, and always be able to speak the language. There would be no burden of “my country is more powerful, therefore if you expect to deal with me, you will learn to speak my language rather than me learning to speak yours” (I’m looking at you, english).

Shakespeare’s like that.  Remember last year when The Globe did all the plays in all different languages? There you go.

P.S. – I also happen to own a copy of Hamlet translated into Esperanto by Doctor Zamenhoff himself.  Apparently he too believed that our beloved Shakespeare could serve as a Rosetta Stone for achieving his dream.