Shakespeare makes life better.
In case you haven’t seen it in a while (or, gasp, never seen it!), Turner Classic Movies will be showing Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet on February 22, 2014 at 10:30pm (eastern). When I see stuff like this I almost always record it if for no other reason than to fast forward around and appreciate whatever scenes I happen to be interested in at the moment. I’ll certainly show my kids the famous Yorick scene.
After teaching my fourth graders the other day, my daughter kept asking me these mysteriously Shakespearean questions. “Daddy? Is Merchant of Venice a Shakespeare play?”
Behold, the kind of Valentine’s I get at my house :
Shakespeare’s looking a little more like a Pilgrim than he may have liked, but I love it!
Last week when I taught the fourth graders, I wanted to bring some handouts. I’d been playing aroun with the idea of a “How to Draw Shakespeare” thing. Keep it simple, something that with two seconds you could sketch anytime you had a pencil and a couple of square inches of clean paper. Here’s what I came up with!
I have no idea why he came out so slanted, but I did it in a hurry and I was trying to make the six of them relatively equal without messing up and having to start all over. Then it wouldn’t scan properly so I kept having to go over the lines. That’s what we in the business call version 1.0.
I probably knew this once, but while googling for “Valentine” references in Shakespeare’s work I re-discovered that Mercutio has a brother named Valentine:
Romeo
Stay, fellow; I can read.
‘Signior Martino and his wife and daughters;
County Anselme and his beauteous sisters; the lady
widow of Vitravio; Signior Placentio and his lovely
nieces; Mercutio and his brother Valentine; mine
uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters; my fair niece
Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio and his cousin
Tybalt, Lucio and the lively Helena.’ A fair
assembly: whither should they come?
In the mood for more info I googled “Mercutio’s Brother” and found Mercutio and his Brother Valentine, by Clayton Garrett.
Now, clearly, I’m a bit stuck because I’ve been slamming the new Rosaline movie as having nothing to do with Shakespeare. If anything, we’re at least given a bit of character for Rosaline by Shakespeare – Valentine gets nothing but a name on an invitation! So anything you say about Mercutio’s brother, or his relationships, is entirely 100% not Shakespeare.
Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to go see it, though ;). Maybe it’s a guy thing? The whole young adult high school romance vibe that Rosaline gives off doesn’t do it for me, but having grown up with just a single older brother myself, I think I’d like to see a “behind the scenes” story of Mercutio and his brother, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
I wonder if you can buy the script?