Actress Lynn Redgrave has died of breast cancer at 67.

In doing some research I realized that we’ve spoken of Lynn Redgrave here on Geek previously.  Allow me to quote from my April 2009 article:

On the day his mother died, the celebrated actor Sir Michael Redgrave
had a matinee and an evening performance to give as Hamlet. Backstage at
the theater, he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Then he went out front.
“And he did two of the greatest Hamlets he ever played.”

Yes I realize that Lynn is not in that, it’s because she wrote it.  Later in life she wrote several plays about her parents and their attachment to the theatre, Shakespeare in particular, including Shakespeare for My Father, and Rachel and Juliet.  The latter is the subject of my post from one year ago.

I think it’s wonderful that her IMDB page lists one of her Shakespeare credits as “ABC Afterschool Specials (Various Characters)“.  This was in 1973, and also starred John Gielgud.  I would have been 4.  I don’t think I was into Shakespeare quite yet.

I’m unfamiliar with her theatrical work.  Anybody else have stories to share? Any productions she was particularly well known for?

Danger, this article from Cute Overload is titled “Cover Your Ears, Shakespeare” for a reason.   Many bad (or, depending on your taste, awesome) puns follow, especially in the comments.

Not really much of substance in this article about Shakespeare baseball references, since obviously the man died a few hundred years before the game was invented.  But, much like bringing up “Thou base footballer!” in King Lear, you can go scraping the text for things that *sound* like baseball.  Actually I’m a little surprised by just how many they found.  Catch a fly?  Stealing bases, errors, foul and fair balls …  I once heard about Klingon Camp where they play the entire game in Dr. Okrand’s made up language.  Perhaps we could have Shakespeare camp and play the game entirely using misappropriated Bardisms?

(*) I remember an episode of the television show Frazier where brothers Frazier and Niles Crane had staged a theatrical performance.  After the apparent success of the opening, Niles can be seen saying to his brother, “We’re a hit, a palpable hit!”  That one seems to come up often (and obviously in the article above, you see).

Last night, after forcing my wife to watch a portion of Hamlet, I told her “You know I’ll watch the whole three hours again.  With remote in hand, stopping and rewinding.”

I tried to explain why that is.  It’s more than just “I liked that movie, I would watch it again.”  With Shakespeare’s masterpieces you get this dual-nature thing going where on the one hand you’ve got what Shakespeare wrote us 400 years ago.  That’s not changing.  You could see Hamlets now till the end of time and the source text isn’t going anywhere. But on the other hand you’ve got this particular interpretation.  It is one of a million.  So, sure, Hamlet always says “To be or not to be”, but how did this particular actor say it?  And why? How does it differ from how that other actor said it?

I was at a loss to explain the analogy. I started down the path of saying “Imagine you have a chance, regularly, to go see the Mona Lisa.  But that’s not quite it, because that’s a masterpiece that doesn’t change, it’s the same every time you see it.  What if every time you saw it, it was different?  Still the same, still the Mona Lisa, still a masterpiece.  But … different.” 

Does anybody know what I’m trying to say?  Many a science fiction story has been written about all powerful core sources of “stuff”, be it energy or life or power or what have you, and the notion of seeds or splinters of that wellspring being used as the essence of new “stuff”.  It’s a bit like that.  Here you’ve got this body of work that’s essentially infinite in that we can continue to draw on it forever.  So each time we perform it we’re taking a little sliver of it and creating something new. 

Make sense? Am I babbling?

So, Wednesday night before Hamlet came on, I was lying in bed with my wife watching some other program that she likes.  Typically she falls asleep a lot sooner than I do, so it’s easier to just DVR my programs and watch them a little later.  She knew full well that I’d be watching 3 hours of Hamlet later, and since it was also my birthday I threatened to require that she watch it with me :), but I did not follow through on that threat.

Anyway, it’s getting late, she’s falling asleep and mumbles, “I know you want to go watch Hamlet, go ahead and go back downstairs.  Hark who goes there.”

Me:  “….”  <open mouth> ” …. ” <close mouth> “…..”  <shakes head> ” … what?”

Her: <mumbling> “Go downstairs, watch your show.  Who goes there.”

Me: ” ??? You know that’s the opening line to Hamlet?”   (* Yes I know it’s more like “Who’s there?”, work with me here.)

Her: “Yup.”

Me: “I had no idea you knew that.”

Her: <snore>

Boggles my mind when she does that.  Not “To be or not to be” or “what a piece of work is man”, quotes she hears the children say all day long.  No, she quotes (accurately or not) the opening line, which many people wouldn’t even recognize. I have no idea if she looked it up in one of my books just so she could do that (doubtful, otherwise she wouldn’t have waited so long to deliver it), remembered me talking about it (possible, though I certainly haven’t done so deliberately in months), or remembered it from an actual Hamlet production we’ve seen (less possible, as it’s been years since we watched Hamlet).

I think I’ll keep her.