Next Installment from Big Think includes a boatload of questions including:
* Which Shakespeare play would you save from a fire? [ Lear for me ]
* Which play would you let burn? (Maybe it’s not worded exactly that way, but that’s what I’m taking from it). Shrew gets no love here.
* “Are you a Hamlet or a Lear guy?” and is the difference between those two really “a young play” and “an old play”?

I was asked today by my 4yr old son, “Who is the smartest person in Shakespeare?”
I said “Good question, I’ll have to check.”
Here’s me checking. Who’s got an idea? I’m trying to figure out which characters I would think of where smart is a defining characteristic. Does that go hand in hand with scheming, and must the answer be a villain? Or is it potentially a strategic thing, and the answer is political/military/historical?

Roland Emmerich, the Orson Welles of the disaster movie genre (or is he the Michael Bey?), has a new Oxfordian movie coming out, I’m sure we all know that by now. What I did not know how seriously he apparently takes himself. You see, he “expects fury” from us Stratfordians, who are going to turn up in droves to picket his house:

He tells Empire magazine, “I have serious doubts Shakespeare wrote his plays… I’m expecting to have people protesting outside my house. We knew there’d be so many attacks on the film, so we decided to make the film as authentic as possible.”

Blink a few times, rub your eyes, and read that last sentence again. He’s planning to make his movie as authentic as possible.
If that statement wasn’t custom-made to draw the ire of Shakespeareans everywhere, I’ll eat my hat. This press release courtesy of “We Market By Trolling Agency, Inc.”

This sounds entertaining. Imagine telling Hamlet from the perspective of the players. As a comedy.

The focus is on a ragtag band of actors from Devon, England, playing the hinterlands. They’re far afield in Denmark, where they happen upon Hamlet, brooding over the murder of his father. Hamlet hires the troupe to stage a play for the king depicting a similar situation, hoping to catch the king’s reaction as proof that he’s the culprit.

But this is not Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Here, the title character is a vain wimp who complains about being cold and berates his bumbling guards. Other characters are hilariously altered as well: King Claudius is an imperious twit with a speech impediment. Queen Gertrude is a martini-swilling “cougar.” And Ophelia is birdbrained klutz. In this version, the players overhear that Claudius plans to kill Hamlet. They scramble to thwart the plot and to save their own skins.

The article doesn’t say whether they keep the bloodbath at the end, or if they change it for the sake of comedy. I’d be curious.

Ok, maybe the series that Big Think is doing has some potential. Here James Shapiro, Carol Gilligan and Kenji Yoshino is discuss “Which Shakespeare play do you think most illuminates contemporary issue and our culture?“
Ok, who guessed Antony and Cleopatra? Wouldn’t have been my first choice. Not that I had a first choice, I just don’t think of A&C that often.

Jim Shapiro: …I think about how, especially Antony, deals with the disappointment others have in him. This is kind of an Obama type problem. Philo and Demetrius come out at the beginning. This **** general offloads the ****. He is not doing what—we want to follow him and lead. We need him to lead us in the way that he’s always led us by those Roman values or whatever parting line it is and he realizes he is not going to do that anymore and he has to deal with their disappointment in him and I think that’s really hard today. We live in a world in which we don’t want to disappoint our followers or our students or our political supporters and you also have to do that if you’re going to be true.

It gets better from there. Yoshino goes throws Titus Andronicus into the mix as well.
It’s short, but thought provoking.