In case you missed it this past fall, the Washington Shakespeare Company is going to repeat their very popular night of Klingon Shakespeare:

“It’s very entertaining,” said Chris Henley, artistic director for the Washington Shakespeare Company. The company will act out scenes translated into Klingon from both “Hamlet” and “Much Ado About Nothing.”

I gained much appreciation for this project when I realized that Mark Okrand – the guy who actually invented the Klingon Language – is chairman of the WSC board :). That’s a match made in heaven. 🙂

In this book of historical fiction, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare isn’t the forgotten wife left behind to raise children as her playwright husband lives a theatrical life. In Ryan’s version, Hathaway makes her own mark on the London art scene and writes some of her husband’s plays – but without getting the credit.

Such is the description given for Arliss Ryan’s “The Secret Confessions of Shakespeare’s Wife”, which it should be clearly noted is a work of fiction, people. Fiction. Relax and enjoy.

Compare with Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germaine Greer if you want something more in the biography genre :).

Helen Mirren just did it for Prospera in Taymor’s Tempest, so why can’t Yvonne Flack do the same with The Suffragette Hamlet, her own “truly new play” that gives her a chance to take on what she considers to be “every classical actor’s dream, and secretly, every actress’s.”

I just never seriously thought I would be able to take on the role until [director Darcie Flansburg] approached me with the idea of a reverse-gender Hamlet.

What boggles my mind is that these students of their art – Ms. Flack’s “entire dissertation is based around non-Western adaptations of the play” – seem not at all interested in mentioning Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary actress who portrayed Hamlet 100 years ago. Does this woman truly believe that a woman can’t play a man’s role?
NOTE – Do NOT miss that Sarah Bernhardt link, where we actually dug up some extraordinarily rare footage of Ms Bernhardt’s fight scene with Laertes, in 1899! How often do you get to see THAT?

It was just recently that I was speaking with Christine, a fellow Shakespearean, about Shakespeare movies. Coriolanus, Gnomeo, The Tempest. “Who am I kidding,” I told her, “It’s The Tempest. I may not have loved it but I’ll almost certainly get it on DVD when it comes out.”

Well, it’s coming out September 13. Will you be getting it? Apparently one of the extras is “Julie Taymor interviewing Russell Brand, as William Shakespeare.” Having now read that, I may break it into little pieces shortly after watching it. We shall see.

Wait, wait, wait… The Godfather was supposed to be a modern version of King Lear?

Ten Academy Awards nominations and the winner of 3 Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay; the top-grossing film of the year, and a $134 million box-office hit; set in the mid to late 1940s NYC to the mid 1950s, a 10 year period, with Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, head of the crime family; it was filmed as a modern version of Shakespeare’s King Lear (featuring a king and three sons: hot-headed eldest Sonny, Fredo and Michael); the ‘honorable’ crime “family,” working outside the system due to exclusion by social prejudice, was threatened by the rise of modern criminal activities – the “dirty” drug trade. Family loyalty and blood ties were juxtaposed with brutal and vengeful blood-letting, including Corleone’s attempted assassination in 1945 after he refused to bankroll a crime rival’s drug activities…

[ Spotted on Filmsite.org’s history of the Oscars ]
Anybody want to discuss that? Beyond the “king separating his empire among three children” bit I’m not sure how long it holds up. Is this a legitimate comparison, or more like how Lion King is supposed to be Hamlet?