Author: duane

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Ooo! Oooo!! Teller’s Doing The Tempest!

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Show of hands, who recognizes the magician duo Penn & Teller?

Ok, who knew that Teller is a Shakespeare scholar who has already directed Macbeth?

I just found out that he’s doing The Tempest this summer. I wonder if it will be filmed like the Macbeth was?  I’ll have to keep an eye on the calendar and see if I can’t get to this one.

The fascinating thing about Teller’s stage productions, if you hadn’t guessed, is that they include actual magic into the production. Which would explain why he started with Macbeth, of course, and why he’s tackling The Tempest next.

What other Shakespeare play should be on his hit list?  Something with more ghosts?  Or maybe something with fairies?  He obviously likes to work with the dark stuff (the article quotes him as going for a “dark kind of sideshow” vibe with his conjoined twin Caliban).  Has anybody done a dark Midsummer?

DVR Alert – Olivier’s Hamlet on TCM

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In case you haven’t seen it in a while (or, gasp, never seen it!), Turner Classic Movies will be showing Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet on February 22, 2014 at 10:30pm (eastern). When I see stuff like this I almost always record it if for no other reason than to fast forward around and appreciate whatever scenes I happen to be interested in at the moment.  I’ll certainly show my kids the famous Yorick scene.

 

Don’t Thank Me, Thank Shakespeare

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After teaching my fourth graders the other day, my daughter kept asking me these mysteriously Shakespearean questions.  “Daddy?  Is Merchant of Venice a Shakespeare play?”  

“Yes,” I’d reply, “Why do you ask?” Knowing that I hadn’t mentioned that one.
“You’ll see in a few days!” and then she’d run away.  Then back, “What about Henry vee eye?”

“It’s pronounced Henry the Sixth, but yes, that’s one too. That was actually one of his first…”

“Ok, gotta go!” and off she’d run.
Look what I got from the entire class!  This was actually on a gigantic card, but I couldn’t fit it all in my scanner:

I love some of the spelling (Julies Caesar, Mercent of Venice…) and the research that went into it, since I didn’t mention half those plays.

Thanks everybody!  I’ll be back soon!

How To Draw Shakespeare

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Last week when I taught the fourth graders, I wanted to bring some handouts.  I’d been playing aroun with the idea of a “How to Draw Shakespeare” thing.  Keep it simple, something that with two seconds you could sketch anytime you had a pencil and a couple of square inches of clean paper.  Here’s what I came up with!

I have no idea why he came out so slanted, but I did it in a hurry and I was trying to make the six of them relatively equal without messing up and having to start all over.  Then it wouldn’t scan properly so I kept having to go over the lines.  That’s what we in the business call version 1.0.