Thanks to regular reader Angela for the link!
Alan Cumming, fresh from playing Sebastian in Julie Taymor’s Tempest, wants to tackle more Shakespeare. And he’s got a doozy of an idea – he wants to try Lady Macbeth:

“I want to do a production of Macbeth where I play Macbeth one night and Lady Macbeth the next – and the girl who plays Lady Macbeth will change around too. I think it’s a way at looking at gender, what defines a man.”

I like this idea, and I respect him as an actor for even bringing it up. We often hear about giving male roles to women – Helen Mirren’s Prospera comes immediately to mind, though we also had a post recently about a gender-bent Hamlet as well. It’s not often you hear male actors speak of their desire to tackle a female role.
Also, maybe I’m misunderstanding him, but is he suggesting that the female lead, when he is playing Lady M, would take on Mac? So depending on when you saw the show you’d either see it played straight (ahem), or bent? I think I’d feel obligated to see both versions, if that’s the case.
What do you think? I know, I know, no girls in original version, boys plays girls’ roles all the time, yadda yadda. I’m not talking about 400 years ago, I’m talking about today, by contemporary expectations and standards, what do you think? What sort of expectations are you going to bring to the show if you know that a man is playing Lady M? If a man were playing Lady M and a woman playing M, which one do you think you’d pay more attention to?

Here, of course, that’s a rhetorical question. We know the answer. But Marjorie Garber is taking it to the next level in her new book, The Use And Abuse of Literature.

For Garber, of course, literature does matter. “Language does change our world,” she writes. “It does make possible what we think and how we think it.” Echoing an argument made by the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom, Garber claims for literature a sort of stem cell-like power to generate fresh and new imaginative experiences in those who read it.

The article is short, but it seems that the book will be something of a throwback to the old “two cultures” debate — should you teach literature or science? Sure, both, but at what ratio? Which is more important?
Readers of this blog may answer that easily, but that’s why our language has words like “should” – because what we want is not always the same as what is. How many times a day do I see some form of the question “Why teach Shakespeare? Is Shakespeare still relevant?” In my world everybody would know the answer to that question, and stop asking it.

I’ll be watching for reviews of this book, I’m curious to see how much discussion it generates.

You may have already seen by now this NY Times article entitled How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers:

Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.

When I first saw this come through I was surprised at how short it was, until I realized that it’s just a snippet from the upcoming book “How Shakespeare Changed Everything”, by Stephen Marche.
Honestly I read it and skipped it, and I’m only posting here to get a little discussion going since everybody and his uncle Antonio has been linking it. I couldn’t help but think, “Didn’t we already go through this with Bloom?”
What do you think? Did Shakespeare invent teenagers?

Flipping through my Kindle version of the plays this weekend I tripped over this description of Twelfth Night (found here via Google Books):

This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind not despise them and still less bear any ill will towards them.

This comes from William Hazlitt, in the early 1800’s (the Google copy is dated 1845, and I note with a smile that it is dedicated to Charles Lamb, of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare).
Am I misunderstanding something, or has our understanding of Twelfth Night done something of a one-eighty? I’ve seen it described as the dark and twistiest of the comedies. Here, Hazlitt claims it has no spleen.
What’s going on? Somebody fill us in on this Hazlitt fellow.
UPDATE: From the Wikipedia page, I think I would have quite liked this guy:

His approach was something new. There had been critics of Shakespeare before, but either they were not comprehensive or they were not aimed at the general reading public. As Ralph Wardle put it, before Hazlitt wrote this book, “no one had ever attempted a comprehensive study of all of Shakespeare, play by play, that readers could read and reread with pleasure as a guide to their understanding and appreciation”. Somewhat loosely organized, and even rambling, the studies offer personal appreciations of the plays that are unashamedly enthusiastic. Hazlitt does not present a measured account of the plays’ strengths and weaknesses, as did Dr. Johnson, or view them in terms of a “mystical” theory, as Hazlitt thought his contemporary A.W. Schlegel did (though he approves of many of Schlegel’s judgements and quotes him liberally). Without apology, he addresses his readers as fellow lovers of Shakespeare and shares with them the beauties of what he thought the finest passages of the plays he liked best.

Emphasis mine. But yes, yes, yes.

This has potential. I’m not fully sure yet what it is, exactly – a software download, a programming language? But it seems like the end result is 3D representations (such as Second Life) of theatres – including the Globe! Be sure to check out the video on the rightside navigation. I could definitely picture kids in an English class getting to poke around stuff like this, even if it is just playing the YouTube walk through, for those schools that are not quite at the interactive level of having each kid cruise through Second Life on his own.