Hi Everybody!
I’m back from my cruise! Miss me? Anything good happen while I was gone?
No exciting Shakespeare news down in the Caribbean, though I did finish reading a hard sci fi novel “Ilium” that I’ll be reviewing shortly, which contains much Shakespeare and has a plot straight out of The Tempest.
I did also give out a bunch of business cards and bore the heck out of my dinner mates by talking at length about Mr. Shakespeare, as I tend to do. I like to warn people to just go ahead and walk away from me or otherwise change the subject, because I won’t stop unless you do. They tend to take me up on that. 🙂
-Duane

Hi Everybody,

Just a quick administrative note that I’m going to be on a cruise ship for the next week with no laptop.  What tends to happen in these situations is that posts tip over to less than a couple days, and then when people want to have a discussion they can’t because spam moderation kicks in.

In anticipation of this I’ll be turning off the “moderation on old posts” switch for the week.  This means that all your posts should show up without my intervention. It also means that a couple of spam posts will probably slip through, so please ignore them. It seemed like a fair trade off.

Ok, that’s it for me. I’m not leaving until Sunday morning so you may spot me on the Twitter between now and then, but I wanted to get this note out while I still had access to something that could post.  While I’m gone feel free to browse the merchandise, maybe check out the book.  You know the deal. 🙂

See ya when I don’t get back, assuming I don’t get shipwrecked!

Mensa candidate Andrew Garfield had this to say upon being cast as Spiderman in the latest example of how Hollywood can’t seem to get a movie right:

“I think the material is elevated, and it’s just as meaningful and just as important as Shakespeare.”

I appreciate the desire to give comics some credibility, and arguably they are a part of modern culture (though if we’re going to talk about cultural archetypes I’d lean more towards Superman than Spiderman). But Shakespeare? Really? When you’re doing little more than starring in a movie about Facebook, and now moving on to a reboot of a movie that’s only, what, less than 10 years old?

It’s a topic we speak of often, and everybody seems to love it, but nobody to my knowledge has ever made a definitive list of “songs inspired by Shakespeare” because, quite frankly, how do you define that? Do you need lyrics from the text? Character names? Plots?
365 Days of Shakespeare doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, she just offers her top 10. I link because there’s a couple in there I’d not heard of!
No Rufus Wainwright in the mix, by the way, but that may go back to “how are you defining this”. Putting an entire sonnet to music isn’t really the same thing as rewriting a Romeo and Juliet story. I have both the Dire Straits and Indigo Girls’ versions of Romeo and Juliet in my playlist, and she’s right, the Indigo Girls version is much better.

Stanley Wells was asked who, in his opinion, were The Ten Greatest Actors. I like how right off the bat he dismisses Burbage, not because he wasn’t any good but because frankly we simply have no evidence. He starts with David Garrick, for which there is plenty.
My title comes directly from Wells’ blog, because I have no idea what it means. Did Gielgud do a famously lousy Othello, or something?
The rest of our favorites – McKellen, Dench, Jacobi, Branagh, Scofield… all make the list. Who, in Wells’ opinion, is the greatest? He does say, but I won’t steal their thunder. You have to look for it though, because he drops an understated “for me he is the greatest” in the middle of the article and you’ll skim right by it if you’re in a hurry.