So, Stylist Magazine wrote me today with a link to their Shakespeare’s Most Memorable Quotes article. I get lots of similar requests and often brush them off as linkbait. But this one is actually quite good, and worth a link, and I’ll tell you why.
First, there’s 40 of them, not just 10. So even those most of them are the same old classics we’ve heard a million times, there’s plenty in there that you’re not used to seeing make the cut – including selections from Merry Wives and Measure for Measure.
Each quote is cited – play, act and scene. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me when I cruise through the various quote databases online and find quotes mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, because people just blindly copy something from one place to another with no research or concern for quality.
There’s a picture for just about all of them of an actual stage (or film) production. So part of the fun is recognizing which productions you’ve seen, and which actors you can spot. For a small handful they went with a drawing or book cover – I wonder why? And, having said that, does anybody know where that Lear image comes from? It’s quite jarring.
Note as well, if it doesn’t become obvious, that there’s both rollover text as well as a slide show. So you can either hover your mouse over each image to check out the quote, or just click on one to zoom in, and then page through all of them. The user interface engineer in me appreciates that very much.
So, something for everybody. Even if you know all the quotes you can still have fun checking out the images. Somebody over there didn’t just try to drum up some traffic by sticking Shakespeare’s name on a bullet list. They actually put some research into it. Well done, Stylist!

Here’s a question I don’t think we’ve ever covered before. Does Shakespeare ever play with anything other than a traditional, sequential timeline? In other words, is there ever a time when Scene 3 takes place chronologically before Scene 2? For example in a flashback, or a staged re-enactment of one of those many “Here let me tell you what happened offstage…” moments? I know that there are a good handful of instances of “Ok, now, flash forward a few years.” But does he ever, for any reason, flash backward? Would an Elizabethan audience have even understood that concept?
The opening to Taming of the Shrew would be close to what I mean, if it started with grandparents Petruchio and Katherine being pestered by their grandchildren to tell the story of how they met. Know what I mean? It’s certainly a standard form of storytelling these days, and I’m wondering whether it would have been completely alien to Shakespeare and his audience.

Other than Midsummer, which of Shakespeare’s plays have some element of the magical in them? The Tempest, of course. As You Like It has the goddess Hymen showing up at the end, correct? And then there’s Macbeth‘s witches. Hamlet and Julius Caesar‘s ghosts. The more I think about it, the more there are!
What about The Winter’s Tale? I bring it up because recently I mentioned something about “Hermione pretending to be a statue” and somebody wrote back “I’m glad you’re with me on the whole pretending thing, you don’t want to know how many arguments I’ve had.”
Really? Were we ever expected to believe that this is a statue come back to life? I never thought of it as anything other than a trick of Paulina’s.

Sir Laurence Olivier famously left Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of his Hamlet. So, play director for a minute. Who else appears to be a major character that you think you could get away with cutting? You are allowed to give that character’s lines to other characters, as necessary, but you can’t invent new characters to compensate. No merging to create a new and unique character (so no blending of Tybalt/Paris/Prince into a single entity ala Sealed With A Kiss).

That certainly caught my attention, as I’m sure it did yours. I think, though, that the project is really better described as a series of made-for-tv movies?

Patrick Stewart, David Suchet and David Morrissey are among the stars confirmed for a new TV production of Richard II.

The season, which will take a fresh look at the bard’s life and works, will also include adaptations of his history plays Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V, set in the medieval period and filmed on locations around the UK and mainland Europe. St David’s Cathedral and Pembroke Castle, in West Wales were used to film many of the scenes.

The screening of the films is linked to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which is billed as the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympics and Paralympics.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/showbiz/2011/05/29/shakespeare-tv-series-filmed-in-wales-91466-28786092/
So, 4 movies. I’m unsure how that translates into a series, but we shall see.