http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=592 Ages ago, I remember it well, I was a front end manager at the neighborhood supermarket during my freshman year of college.  The woman who worked the night shift me was a retired English professor.  We got to talking about Shakespeare (shows how long my geekery goes back, I guess) and King Lear came up.  She said, and it’s always stuck with me:  “If the entirety of human civilization were to die out tomorrow, all evidence of its existence erased save one thing, that one thing should be King Lear.”  I found it a powerful endorsement, to say the least. Allison Croggon’s review of Peter Brooks’ King lear is damned near art all by itself:  “…it seems to me that when I say something is a masterpiece, I mean that its achievement is not that it rises into some lofty empyrean sphere where history no longer exists. It’s a masterpiece because it does the opposite: because it makes a gesture so potent that it seems to draw all human experience into its gravity, because it reaches deep into individual and collective memory and hauls experience, naked and bloody, into the present.”   Go read the whole thing, you won’t regret it. 

[I just realized that this story from the other day ended up on my other blog…] The other day I blogged about how bringing home a Shakespeare action figure kicked off a whole round of telling my 3 and 5 yr olds stories from Shakespeare. Yesterday I hear my 3yr old playing and she says, “The girl was on the island, and then the witch threw her in the dungeon.” “What’s the witch’s name?” I ask, nodding at my wife to “Watch this…” “Sycorax,” says my daughter. Love it. The best part is how she knows about Sycorax (the witch from The Tempest, by the way) in the first place is even better.  I don’t tell them about her, because she’s not really crucial to the main storyline.  “Daddy,” asks my 5 year old, “How many girls are in this story?” “Just one.  Miranda is the only girl.” “But in my book, I saw somebody else with long hair, and I think it’s another girl.”  I may have mentioned that I have a comic book version of The Tempest kicking around. “That’s probably one of the pirates,” I tell her. “I don’t think so,” she says, and goes to get the book. Sure enough, she’s looking at a picture of Sycorax.  So I have to explain how that’s the witch Sycorax, who ruled the island until Prospero came and kicked her off. And how she was Caliban’s mom, and mean to Ariel and put her in a tree, until Prospero rescued her.

“Paradox” merits a link just for the magnitude of the task she’s set herself (as an independent study, no less).  She’s writing a Shakespearean style play about the Bard’s life, based on the connections between his life and his works.  She’s got the dynamics of his marriage from Richard III, and now she’s on Merchant of Venice having seen a book entitled “Shylock and Shakespeare.” She then launches into a comparison of Portia to women in the church of Latter Day Saints, and a lengthy discussion of her own thoughts on her (someday) LDS marriage.  Quite an intriguing post. Good luck!

From The Advocate in Louisiana comes this interesting letter looking at the common confusion of quoting Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Bible.  It caught my eye because while discussion of Shakespeare vs the Bible is quite common, I don’t often hear Lincoln thrown in there.  As a matter of fact I had no idea that Lincoln was a Shakespeare fan (apparently Macbeth was his favorite play, and John Wilkes Booth had played Macbeth). Unlike many articles on the subject, however, the author does not answer any of his “Who said it first” questions.  So you’re not going to learn anything new.  As a matter of fact the whole letter is actually written by a commitee member for the Lincoln Bicentennial. 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2150903,00.html [via An Alternate Kettle of Fish] Interesting (and lengthy) article all about Anne Hathaway, better known as Mrs. Shakespeare.  What’s her story?  More to the point, what’s her relationship to the sonnets?  After all, we’ve spent 400 years talking about whether Shakespeare was gay, and who the Dark Lady was, but rarely do we have any glimpse into Shakespeare’s relationship with his own wife.  The author of the article, Germaine Greer, wonders under what circumstances Hathaway first saw the sonnets (remember they were published in 1609 but some where written as much as 20 years prior).  Her theory is that she was given a copy after they were published, and not by Shakespeare.  What happens next? Very interesting glimpse into a subject not typically covered in the usual Shakespeare biography.