I love the paradox : Shakespeare is so difficult and irrelevant to modern society that nobody can understand why we even teach him anymore … and yet every time a new movie comes out, inevitably somebody compares it to Shakespeare.
Today’s example is True Grit, the current remake of the old John Wayne western. Although the linked interview is with 14yr old Hailee Steinfeld, she quotes co-star Barry Pepper for the Shakespeare reference.
Combing through the quotes page on IMDB, I found this amusing bit of dialogue that Mr. Shakespeare himself might have penned:

Rooster Cogburn: The jakes is occupied.

Mattie Ross: I know it is occupied Mr. Cogburn. As I said, I have business with you.

Rooster Cogburn: I have prior business.

Mattie Ross: You have been at it for quite some time, Mr. Cogburn.

Rooster Cogburn: There is no clock on my business! To hell with you! To hell with you! How did you stalk me here?

Mattie Ross: The sheriff told me to look in the saloon. In the saloon they referred me here. We must talk.

Rooster Cogburn: Women ain’t allowed in the saloon!

Mattie Ross: I was not there as a customer. I am fourteen years old.

Rooster Cogburn: The jakes is occupied. And will be for some time.

Although modern moviegoers may know him now as Sabretooth from the X-Men movies, Liev Schreiber is actually an accomplished Shakespearean (which I personally learned when he was a guest on NPR). So when he was the invited guest at Yale University Theatre recently, interviewed by Dean of the Yale School of Drama, the conversation was not about Magneto and Wolverine:

He added that he attributes his success to rehearsals. Schreiber said he was initially intimidated by the ambiguous notion of success in theatre.

“In French, rehearsal is called repetition,” he emphasized. He added that it is important to repeat rehearsals until the actors know the verses “upside-down.”

Luckily, he said Shakespearean verses come much more easily to him than normal script.

“It’s like a nursery rhyme,” Schreiber said. “It’s so easy to just repeat and repeat and repeat.”

I appreciate the simplicity of that thought. It says that anyone can do it – but don’t fool yourself, it’s going to be hard work. He doesn’t say you have to repeat yourself a dozen times. You’ll have to repeat yourself hundreds of times.

UPDATED for spelling the man’s name right.  Thanks, Christine!

Introducing a new feature that will hopefully go out every Monday, where I summarize last week’s most interesting posts for those folks who may not be stopping by on a regular enough basis, and missing out when they scroll off the main page.
Last week started out slow, with nothing to write about Sunday, and even Monday little more than a personal anecdote about my 4yr old doing Hamlet while he brushes his teeth.
Tuesday didn’t herald much else, other than a revisit with the Alaska Bard-a-thon, a project that I first wrote about back in 2007 that is still going strong.
Wednesday, things started to pick up. I though that Eddie Izzard doing Christopher Walken doing Shakespeare would have been the big hit, but Bardfilm dropped a new list on us – Shakespeare Internet Initialisms – that absolutely eclipsed Mr. izzard. (To be fair, Bardfilm and I promoted the holy heck out of his post on Twitter, and dear Eddie had little to stand on other than the drawing power of Christopher Walken :)). Right in the middle I dropped in a quick post about how to interpret Stephano’s band of would be murderers in The Tempest, but I think my single got lost between those two big home runs.
Thursday had nothing exciting for us.
And then came Friday, where I unknowingly opened up a serious can of Othello worms, first by asking what exactly an “ancient” was and what that means about Iago and Othello’s relationship. That then led to the big controversy of the week about whether Othello really did sleep with Emilia, as well as some side discussion about how the age of a character (when Shakespeare doesn’t tell us) determines how you play it, which in turn led to some stories about actors’ favorite backstories.
And last but not least, don’t miss the final story of the week (which I posted late on Friday) about All The World’s An Ape, the theatre review blog authored by a 14yr old who is trying to see every Shakespeare play in the span of 2 years. He’s seen 28 of them already, including Al Pacino’s Merchant and Christopher Plummer’s Tempest. I’m seriously jealous!
There you have it. If you missed any, feel free to go back an have a look! Comments remain open, and via that Recent Comments widget in the blog sidebar people will see what you write, so don’t feel like the post has scrolled off therefore there’s no more reason to comment.
Also, feedback always welcome. Like this feature? Want it to change in some way? Is Monday a good day? I picked Monday morning because the only other logical time would be either a weekend day, or Friday. Weekends are no good because I’m generally busy with family, plus traffic is very low anyway and nobody’s going to see the recap posts. Friday would be good, but Friday’s also often a very busy post day (see Ape post at 11pm!) so if I tried to summarize the week during the day I’d inevitably miss something.