I’m not surprised I missed this amid all the Avengers hype over the last few months, mostly because it’s very tiny and buried at the far end of a long video clip with no fast forward button.

BUT!  If you’re patient, and you really really want a glimpse of what Joss Whedon’s got cooking for his upcoming Much Ado movie, there’s a couple of seconds of footage tucked away in this Avengers story from May.

When I saw the name Kim Cattrall pop up in my inbox I assumed it was one of those social network digests I get periodically (“Kim Cattrall and Sean Combs have joined Pinterest!”), but I was pleasantly mistaken.  It was a press release for an upcoming event where the Sex In The City star is going to be talking about Cleopatra along with Janet Suzman:

In an event called Cleopatra: Not the Usual Passion Assigned to a Woman the two will discuss their experiences of playing Shakespeare’s iconic character, described by Suzman as “the most interesting role for a woman ever written”. Along with Jude Kelly they will discuss the complexity of the role, and explore why Cleopatra has the independence that allows her to speak to modern women.

Cattrall’s Shakespeare interest appears relatively new – all the links I can find associating her with out favorite topic seem to come from this month :).  Here’s video of her performing Sonnet 103.

And, here’s her in a musical number with Andrew McCarthy from 1987’s Mannequin 🙂

A few years back (2008, specifically) I posted the question Why Do You Hate Shakespeare? What Do You Hate About Shakespeare? with the intent that people googling for related subjects would possibly land there, offer up their thoughts, and start a conversation where perhaps we could turn some folks around.   That post still gets traffic and comments.

Sometimes it’s fun though to revisit the archives and get some new opinions.

I don’t expect that most of my regular readers hate Shakespeare, obviously, otherwise they’re going to be ridiculously frustrated reading a blog like this one.  But surely many of us have had conversation with someone offline who has launched into the “I hate Shakespeare because….” diatribe.  Feel free to share such stories.

Shakespeare is wonderful for children. It fires their imagination – they recognise people being superstitious, greedy, envious and falling in and out of love.

I didn’t get the chance to play Macbeth but I don’t half envy his lines.  

If you look at the punctuation of Shakespeare and obey it then you’ll never run out of breath. He writes where the pause should be. If you understand that, you unlock the play.

I like the format – short, almost in a question and answer form but not quite (I can’t imagine an interviewer asking, “If you look at the punctuation, then…..what?”)  I’ve not yet read them all but other luminaries include Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Ben Kingsley, Simon Russell Beale, Alan Cumming and others.