When I saw the name Kim Cattrall pop up in my inbox I assumed it was one of those social network digests I get periodically (“Kim Cattrall and Sean Combs have joined Pinterest!”), but I was pleasantly mistaken.  It was a press release for an upcoming event where the Sex In The City star is going to be talking about Cleopatra along with Janet Suzman:

In an event called Cleopatra: Not the Usual Passion Assigned to a Woman the two will discuss their experiences of playing Shakespeare’s iconic character, described by Suzman as “the most interesting role for a woman ever written”. Along with Jude Kelly they will discuss the complexity of the role, and explore why Cleopatra has the independence that allows her to speak to modern women.

Cattrall’s Shakespeare interest appears relatively new – all the links I can find associating her with out favorite topic seem to come from this month :).  Here’s video of her performing Sonnet 103.

And, here’s her in a musical number with Andrew McCarthy from 1987’s Mannequin 🙂

A few years back (2008, specifically) I posted the question Why Do You Hate Shakespeare? What Do You Hate About Shakespeare? with the intent that people googling for related subjects would possibly land there, offer up their thoughts, and start a conversation where perhaps we could turn some folks around.   That post still gets traffic and comments.

Sometimes it’s fun though to revisit the archives and get some new opinions.

I don’t expect that most of my regular readers hate Shakespeare, obviously, otherwise they’re going to be ridiculously frustrated reading a blog like this one.  But surely many of us have had conversation with someone offline who has launched into the “I hate Shakespeare because….” diatribe.  Feel free to share such stories.

Shakespeare is wonderful for children. It fires their imagination – they recognise people being superstitious, greedy, envious and falling in and out of love.

I didn’t get the chance to play Macbeth but I don’t half envy his lines.  

If you look at the punctuation of Shakespeare and obey it then you’ll never run out of breath. He writes where the pause should be. If you understand that, you unlock the play.

I like the format – short, almost in a question and answer form but not quite (I can’t imagine an interviewer asking, “If you look at the punctuation, then…..what?”)  I’ve not yet read them all but other luminaries include Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Ben Kingsley, Simon Russell Beale, Alan Cumming and others.

Hi Everybody,

Just this week in the comments someone was bemoaning the poor state of Shakespeare ebooks these days.  Well I think I might have an answer to that.

Folger Editions, in conjunction with Simon & Schuster, are now available in eBook format.

I have two very important questions that I haven’t been able to answer yet:

1) The image in this article clearly looks like an iPad-specific format.  Is this only going to be available in the iBook store, and not for Kindle and others?

2) From the article, each ebook “will have the same pagination as the physical book, with hyperlinks allowing readers to move easily between text, commentary, and a host of illustrations from the Folger’s collections that bring Shakespeare’s plays and world to life.” As a techie this frightens me, because this sounds suspiciously like “we took an image of each page, and the so-called ebook is really just a sequence of pictures of pages.” This makes the page look perfect, of course, but it also causes a number of features to suffer, including the ability to search and bookmark the text, as well as doing simple but important things like manipulating the text size to a comfortable level. In the world of ebooks, “the same pagination as the physical book” is actually a bad thing, because working backwards that means “we will decide how much content goes on a page, not you, so if the print is too small for you, that’s your problem.”

If I can find out more details I’ll update.