I’m not quite sure how to categorize this, but when I got to Richard saying something as over-the-top awesome as, “Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so, That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,” I thought “Man, I need to make a post out of that.”

I’m sure that he’s going to say amazing stuff like that many times in this play.  That’s right up there with Aaron the Moor’s “Villain, I have done thy mother.”

What else ya got?  Iago’s got lots of evil lines, but which ones are really his best over-the-top ones that make you laugh out loud and say “Oh my god that was awesome, I love this guy.”

So I’m tackling Richard III, as I mentioned, and blogging as I go.


Now, see, all I’ve ever heard about Richard III is about the villain, the monster, the deformed killer of children.  Nobody told me the man is hysterical.

I mean, seriously, is it just the Librivox audio I’m listening to, or are the opening scenes supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny?  Richard and Lady Anne give off this really dark Beatrice and Benedick vibe that I was not expecting at all.

Richard (alone) : Hmmm, I think I’ll marry Lady Anne. True, true, I did kill her husband and father, but I can work around that.

Enter Lady Anne.

Richard:  Marry me!

Lady Anne: You killed my husband and my father!

Richard: Well, yes. Marry me anyway!

Lady Anne: I’ll think about it.

Exit Lady Anne.

Richard (alone):  I can’t believe that worked!

And that’s after the whole opening with Clarence, which was equally over the top silly:

Richard (alone) : Now, see, all I need to do is slip the king a note that he has to beware of someone whose name starts with G.

Enter Clarence.

Richard:  Clarence!  Where you off to?

Clarence: The Tower!

Richard:  The Tower! Goodness, why are you being sent to the tower?

Clarence: I have no idea!  The King says it’s because my name is George, can you believe it?

Richard: That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard!  Well, fear not, I’m sure everything will work out.

(* See, the whole “I thought your name was Clarence?” thing that KJ mentions in his comments earlier, never bothered me. I just assumed that Clarence was his title and that George was a little used first name. )

Anyway…is the whole play like this?  That’s some of the most ridiculously funny stuff I’ve seen in a while.  I’m waiting for the beheadings.

So I’m tackling Richard III, as I mentioned, and blogging as I go. 

One major question right out of the gate is, “What exactly does this mean? How does one approach a new play?”  It’s not like I’m constrained to wandering down to the local Barnes & Noble and picking up the paperback edition.  It’s safe to say that I’ve got access to a wider variety of resources than that 😉  Not only is there a complete works over on my bookshelf over there, I’ve got the works locally on my laptop and on my phone, not to mention easy googling.

“No Fear” editions that claim to do a <shudder> line by line translation of the play are not an option. If you need to ask why, I point you to 6 years of Shakespeare Geek archives. 🙂

However, it’s also not reasonable to just jump in and read the play.  “Performed, not read!” everybody’s been screaming for years.  Not to mention, in my particular situation it’s just unrealistic so sit down for any amount of time with a Complete Works and all the necessary reference material, and still get a coherent first read of the story.  I see that as more the kind of thing to do after multiple reads, when I can better dig down into specific analysis.

So, performance.  Performance, performance. An argument I’ve always made against “Go see it!” is that this is easier said than done. You can’t just snap your fingers and have a live show of every Shakespeare play, you have to take what you can get.  And right now I don’t know of an R3 in my area.

Well, then, what about movies?  I will get to the movies – the McKellen, most likely, both because it is available for streaming on Netflix and also because his footnoted script is available online and I can follow along.  Once I’ve done that I’ll probably come back around and check out the Olivier version.

Middle ground?  Audio.  I have plenty of time with my iPod (driving, yard work, etc…) which is currently filled with just podcasts and science fiction novels.  Shakespeare Teacher’s recent post on the best of Shakespeare on Audio gave me the idea.  But you don’t have to run out and drop the bucks for Arkangel
, when Librivox is around.  For those that don’t know, Librivox offers free MP3 readings of many public domain works, including of course Shakespeare.

So, there’s my starting point.  It’s currently Saturday afternoon, I’ve got the McKellen R3 in my Netflix queue, and the Librivox recording on my iPod.  I will have to back up my listening with reading, as it’s obvious after just the first few minutes that some “Who is speaking now?” context is needed when doing nothing but listening.  But I can work with that.  My game plan is to listen whenever the opportunity presents, back up with reading when I get a moment, and play catchup with the movie version for a few minutes every night before bed.

So now that the school year is upon us again I’m going to bust out an idea that somebody approached me with last year. A school out in Colorado asked whether I’d be interested in using Skype to do a virtual interview with their Shakespeare class. I thought it sounded neat.

For various technical reasons that never happened (firewalls and client VPNS and other buzzy buzzwords), but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a good idea.

So, consider the offer out there. I want to talk to more people about our favorite subject. If you’re in a position to be in charge of a group of people who might be interested in hearing that (students, I’m assuming), and this sounds like an interesting and feasible idea, then send me a note and we’ll see whether we can make it happen.

Full disclosure : This is in no way going to end with me saying that I expect to be paid for this.  I just want to practice interacting with groups in more dynamic ways than “I post and you people comment.” I also don’t promise that, if I actually get a flood of requests, that I will be able to respond favorably to all of them 🙂  There’s only so many hours in the day after all.
 

Now that the experts have been gathered at 60 Minutes With Shakespeare to answer the very important scholarly issue of Shakespearean authorship, I thought maybe we could queue up some other equally important issues for them to tackle next?

Is it true that Shakespeare hated Mondays?  There’s no evidence to suggest that any of his plays were written on a Monday, so from that we can assume that he preferred to take long weekends.  Burden of proof rests on those who seek to prove that Shakespeare was at his most productive on that particular day, preferably between the hours of 9 and 11.

Shakespeare’s favorite color was green, true or false?  Looking at his complete works we can see that green is mentioned almost 25% more frequently than his second favorite, red.  Orange is clearly his least favorite, mentioned less than 1/10th as frequently as other colors. And, since the color orange figures prominently in the national flag of Ireland, we can therefore conclude that Shakespeare was making a very early political statement about the United Kingdom.

Can you confirm or deny that Shakespeare did, in fact, once argue with his wife?  Since we have no shortage of evidence in the intervening centuries that shows that married men do indeed argue with their wives, it is only logical to assume that everything that some men do, Shakespeare must therefore have done. There is strong indication that this particular fight was about that earring in the Chandos portrait. He liked it, she thought it made him look gay.

Was Shakespeare a cross-dresser?  His plays are loaded with boys dressing up as girls dressing up as boys. Since we know his work to be mostly biographical, this is a logical assumption we can draw.  Additionally, state of the art computer-based textual analysis is currently being performed to determine whether the number of times a king is killed in the plays is a statistically significant indicator that Shakespeare, too, once killed a king.

Has anyone but me noticed that if you take all of the sonnets, dump all of the letters used into a big pile, then withdraw the letters in a certain order it spells out “Hello my name is Edward de Vere and I wrote all this poetry stuff and theatre junk”?  Granted you end up with a bunch of letters leftover, but that’s an error introduced by the typesetter.

Thank you for your time.  The world must know! I have to get back to my email, Roland Emmerich has shown interest in obtaining the movie rights to this post.