If you like a bit of ballet or opera with your Shakespeare and you’re in the neighborhood, the Royal Opera House in London is staging both Verdi’s Macbeth and Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Romeo & Juliet later this month.

Verdi’s Macbeth is always a popular opera, with instantly appealing music and a familiar story taken from Shakespeare’s play. The treacherous and scheming couple at its centre make for wonderful operatic villains – the type of strongly drawn characters that Verdi portrays in his music so well. With Simon Keenlyside making his Royal Opera debut in the title role, and with Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera, conducting the opera, this is a revival with an extra thrill. Macbeth’s ‘dagger’ soliloquy and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene are just two of the play’s famous moments that inspired Verdi to wonderfully inventive and atmospheric music. The heroic Macduff, a chorus of witches and the vivid apparition of the eight kings complete an opera that has the composer at his most theatrical. Phyllida Lloyd’s production, last presented by The Royal Opera in 2006, uses Verdi’s 1865 revision, especially noted for Lady Macbeth’s great aria ‘La luce langue’ and the wonderful Act IV opening chorus, and brings out the dark motivations of the Macbeths and the light of justice for those they wrong.

The Royal Ballet is thrilled to announce that it will perform Kenneth MacMillan’s timeless classic Romeo and Juliet at The O2 in June 2011. This will be the first time the world-renowned ballet company has performed in a UK arena and promises to be a ballet spectacle to remember.

A stellar cast of Royal Ballet dancers including Carlos Acosta, Tamara Rojo, Mara Galeazzi, Edward Watson, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg will dance the roles of the famous star-crossed lovers for four shows, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the Royal Ballet Music Director, Barry Wordsworth.

Any geeks out there an opera and/or ballet fan, and want to tell us about it? I have to admit I’ve seen neither ballet nor opera with a Shakespeare twist. I would say “other than the occasional channel surfing past PBS” but as I think back I’m not sure I’ve even seen that much.
I can, however, tell you about the time a professional wrestler stopped mid match to quote Hamlet’s Yorick speech. True story.

Although this article makes the Harry Potter comparison , I’m still very interested in the underlying idea that when you read, you”psychologically become part of their world and take away emotional benefits.”
Forget wizards, let’s talk Shakespeare. Isn’t this describing exactly what we’ve always known Shakespeare to be great at? We love the Henry V speech because *we* take our own personal motivation from it. We get all deep and existential with Hamlet because hey, it’s not like we know any more about the undiscovered country than he did, and we’re still just as consumed by it.
A fairly obvious question would be, “Doesn’t all fiction do this?” and I suppose the answer is “Yes…to an extent.” Sometimes to an extent so small that you don’t even notice. It takes a master to build universes. Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and yes even Harry Potter. For every “classic” (forgive me for calling Harry Potter a classic already), there are hundreds of knockoffs and wanna-be’s that tried to paint an almost identical universe, and came up short.

Whenever I see one of these 51 Facts About William Shakespeare lists, I always give it a quick glance to see if a) anything’s just wildly wrong, and/or b) to see if there’s anything new and interesting that I didn’t know.
I like this list. It does seem to cover mostly standard information – when he was born, died, what his father did for a living, etc..
But #11 was new to me:

Because Anne Hathaway Shakespeare’s tombstone states she was 67 when she died in 1623, it is generally believed that she was eight years older than her husband. However, the figures 1 and 7 are easily confused–so she might have been 61, only two years older than William.

Is that true? That this is the only information used to give us Anne’s age, and that it is questionable? I’ve never heard that, and I’ve heard an awful lot of conjecture about William Shakespeare’s marriage. I’ve yet to hear someone say “Anne was almost 10 years older than Shakespeare…..or, not.”

Happy Mother’s Day to the mother of my children my wife Kerry, to my own mom Mary (aka “Nanta”) and my mother-in-law Kathy (aka “Gammie”), and all the moms out there! (I realized that if I put a comma between “mother of my children” and “my wife Kerry”
We’ve done worst mothers, we’ve done a comprehensive list of all the mothers and we’ve even done sonnets for Mother’s Day. So, what should we cover this year?
Who do you think is the most *interesting* mother character? I’ll let you define that how you want. Lady Macbeth, maybe, precisely because there’s no child in the play? Gertrude for her complex and sometimes faulty balancing of relationships between what it means to be a mom and to be a wife? Hermione for her loyalty to her crazy jealous husband?

Thanks to Julia from The Browser for this link to their interview with James Shapiro, who we’ve mentioned once or twice in the past. The author of Contested Will lays out his picks for the 5 best biographies of Shakespeare, with lengthy explanation of why.
I just got the link and have not had time to fully grok the list, but I do recognize the name E K Chambers and I think I even have Nicholl’s The Lodger on my Kindle, I’ll have to double check. But other than that, I don’t recognize a single entry. Love it when I learn stuff!