Part 2 of the Hollow Crown series, Henry IV Part 1 (got that?) is this Friday.

I feel like I don’t know where to begin with this monumental Shakespeare event, and quite truly can’t get my own head around it. I’ve never really studied the history plays, and now here they are played out in front of me with pretty much every modern Shakespearean actor I could imagine (including Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, some guy named Patrick Stewsomething, and many many others). I started watching Richard II earlier , but became so engrossed in it so quickly that I had to remember that I had a family who had no idea what they were watching. So instead I promised myself an evening of nothing but the bliss of watching hour after hour of Shakespeare after they’ve all gone to bed.

Know what I did do? I broke out my First Folio, and started reading Richard II. I don’t know why people say “Don’t read the plays, see the plays” because the combination of the two is insane. You see it, and then you read it, and it’s like your own personal recorder fires up inside your brain and starts replaying the movie for you, whenever you want. Love it love it love it.

A day doesn’t go by as of late that I’m not sent a link to either the Star Wars Shakespeare thing (which I still need to post myself), or the recently posted Shakespeare Terminator 2 thing.  Of course we can go back even farther (further?) and include Two Gentlemen of Lebowski on this list as well.   I’ve taken to using the term that Bardfilm used, “novelty” Shakespeare.

Here’s my question:  what’s the point? Who is this for?

On the one hand you’ve got the audience that easily recognizes T2 and can spout all of Arnold’s best lines, but probably has no clue about much Shakespeare.  “Wow!” thinks said audience member, “Shakespeare is old and difficult but we all know how brilliant it is, so to retell an entire movie like T2 in nothing but Shakespeare lines must be an amazing accomplishment!”  So this person goes to the show, “sitting through the Shakespeare to recognize the T2 references” to steal a phrase from Orson Welles.  Is anybody learning anything about Shakespeare from this?

On the flip side are the Shakespeare geeks who are excited about the idea of Shakespeare’s words being used to tell a “new old” story, old in that we know the story, new in that we don’t yet know how Shakespeare would tell it.  Kind of like J.J. Abrams directing a Star Trek movie. And we go, and we listen to John Connor shout “Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” and we laugh and we clap and we turn to the person next to us and whisper, “Julius Caesar.  Act 3, Scene 1.” because yay we recognized that one. Are we paying attention to the T2 story? Can our brains let us just cut and paste all the most recognizable quotes and reshuffle them at will like that?

Thus we come back to that word “novelty.”  Is that really all there is to this?  People spot it and say, “Oh hey, that’s new, I’ve never seen that before!”  Is that the entire audience?  Because eventually there’ll be so much of this that it’s not new anymore.  Then what?

Many people over the last few days sending me the link to William Shakespeare Presents Terminator The Second , which takes Arnold’s blockbuster and retells it using lines from our dear friend Shakespeare.

Now for bonus points, how many of my faithful readers remember when we covered this Kickstarter project back in April 2011?

I wonder how you get the rights to something like that?

The reason I started this blog, way way back in 2005, was because I wanted to talk about Shakespeare and didn’t have people in my life with whom I could do that.  Well, I mean, I could, but all they’d do is smile and nod politely and then make for the exits.  So I decided that every time I wanted to talk about Shakespeare, I’d post.  Sometimes you nice people even write me back!

Sometimes, though, a more one-to-one conversation is in order.  A blog is not a conversation, it’s more like a cocktail party conversation where people are constantly coming and going and you’re never really sure who even heard you or was listening, until and unless they respond.  Sometimes what you need is a dedicated, focused conversation between two people were you have some reasonable expectation that the person is listening to you and probably going to respond.

With that in mind, here’s my Skype info.  If you want somebody with whom you can randomly chat about Shakespeare, hit me up.  I’d love to have some more detailed conversation with those of you who’ve been following and commenting for years!  I can’t promise how often I’ll be around, but who can?