This article, where formerly interesting actor Rupert Everett slams formerly interesting actress Jennifer Aniston, was of no interest to me at all until I spotted two things.
First, in his wild shotgunning of every topic imaginable in the hopes of stirring up something controversial, he calls Shakespeare “an overrated writer who should be banned for the next 100 years.” I could care less what he says about Jennifer Aniston or George Clooney, but taking shots at Shakespeare is stretching things pretty far.
Second, “It’s no secret that the actor feels that his coming out as a gay man stalled his Hollywood career.”
Absolutely. I mean, it pretty much wiped Sir Ian McKellen off the map, right?
Jackass.
  

Bardfilm has discovered a list of Shakespeare’s resolutions for the New Year (with additions and expansions by Shakespeare Geek himself). Enjoy this rare find!

Shakespeare’s New Year’s Resolutions

1. Stop casting Jack Lemmon, Bill Murray, and other comic characters in serious roles.
2. More bears and bear-baiting references. Maybe actually have someone pursued by a bear?
3. Lose ten pounds. Then earn it back again with a land transaction in Stratford, lol.
4. Resolve Ophelia question—did she take her own life? Was she or was she not responsible for her own actions? Thought I’d made that clear, but audience reaction poor.
5. Look for opportunities for sequels. Audience seems to love those. Maybe Richard III, Part II or Henry IV, Part II (Part II)?
6. More sonnets to Anne; fewer sonnets (none?—Nah, let’s not go that far) to You Know Who.
7. No more drinking parties with Ben and the boys. Might catch a fever and die one of these days if I don’t knock that out.
8. Donate that second best bed to charity so Anne will stop nagging me to get rid of it.
9. Consider starting New Year earlier—January 1?—will help scholars avoid confusion in future.
10. Stop letting the Earl of Oxford try to take credit for work that is clearly not his own.

Our thanks for this guest post to kj, the author of Bardfilm. Bardfilm is a blog that comments on films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare.

Ok, here’s a game for anybody that’s got nothing better to do than hang out on Shakespeare Geek over New Year’s :). I was looking over my year’s posts and saw that I made 67 posts in August of this year. Not bad, averaging over 2/day. But then I looked farther back and saw that in May 2008 for some unknown reason I made an insane *72* posts.
Here they all are, on one browsable page.
Many of you may not have even been around back then, so feel free to jump in Ye Olde Time Machine and see what we were talking about two and a half years ago. I like to think the quality of the post topics has gotten better, the site’s gone from entirely a “Hey look I found a Shakespeare reference on the Internet!” site to deep and serious discussion about some pretty heavy “What is the essence of what Shakespeare means to us?” topics. I haven’t given up on the former, though i have to say that the latter I think is more interesting to me.
Enjoy, and Happy New Year everybody!

Since we’re in that after-Christmas lull, let’s talk about Twelfth Night. I have a book on Twelfth Night queued up for review, I’ll see if I can get that posted tonight.
Until then, the floor is open. Do Twelfth Night productions ever have anything to do with Christmas? If not, do we have any idea where the name comes from?
What are your thoughts on this one compared to, say, the other popular cross-dressing comedy As You Like It? Is this one light and fluffy, or dark and twisty?

My freshmen roommate in college once told me that if you’re having a bad day, or something’s troubling you, you could flip open the Bible to a random page, and you’d find your answer.
Over the last couple days we’ve been hotly debating the underlying message in Shakespeare’s works – did he write himself into the plays, or are we just reading ourselves into it? It’s certainly true that many people over the years have taken comfort in the wisdom and philosophy they find in the words of Shakespeare, regardless of how and why they got onto the page in the first place.
See where I’m going with this?
We may *want* Shakespeare’s works to be some sort of recipe for what it means to be human, his gift to the infinite, a tome where you can, literally, open up to any random page and find the answers to all of your troubles. The Bible, on the other hand, is supposed to be exactly that. It was written, the story goes, by a group of people who *were* being guided by an overseeing force, expressly for the purpose of being just such a book.
So, then, what’s the difference?
Each book tells stories of people in situations similar to our own (albeit dated, usually, and often with language we no longer understand and must have translated). We watch as these people react, and then we get together and discuss why they reacted in that way, and whether we would do the same thing.   
So then how come one book is fiction and we assume that any universal message we get out of it must only be our own projection of ourselves into what we want the message to be, while the other is assumed to be true and any messages we find in it were put there for us to find in the first place?
Imagine if it was the other way around.