You may have already seen this but I couldn’t post about it until I’d watched the Enunciation Battle between Stephen Colbert and Kevin Kline. Colbert challenges Kline to a duel of Shakespearean acting, without the “crutch of words and iambic pentameter.”  Nothing but facial expressions and grunts.  Colbert’s Lear and Caesar are good, but Kline’s Falstaff kills.

I’ve waited far too long to write about Hyperion to a Satyr, where the author appears to be going through Hamlet scene by scene. Big deal, you say?  Let me clarify.  The author is locating every version of Hamlet he can get his hands on, from film to graphic novel, and is doing a post per scene per version.  How did Mel Gibson handle the ghost in Act 1 scene 5? What about Tennant, what did he do different? And so on.  It’s really quite intriguing, and makes for an amazing amount of content. Once upon a time we did a similar, though much smaller experiment where I tracked down as many film versions of the scene where Ophelia returns the gifts to Hamlet.  I loved that post, it remains one of my favorites. How did Kevin Kline perform the scene at that moment? What about Jacobi, or Burton, or Brannagh or Olivier? Now imagine doing that, one post per version per scene, for the entire play.  It is a crazy huge undertaking.

If you like your Shakespeare blog posts on the long and deep side, Geek has never really been the place (though we do tend to go for quite awhile in the comments).  If you’re looking for some deeper reading material may I point you to newish Shakespeare blogger Gayle and her own bard blog? I’d spotted Gayle’s efforts a little while ago, and I don’t quite remember why I didn’t link her then. I think she was switching domains, and I’m never sure when that happens whether the author will continue the site.   Given that she later wrote me to say Hi, I’m taking that as a good sign that she’ll be sticking around. What does Gayle write about?  Looking at what’s on her home page right now I see mostly Authorship posts (including Mark Twain commentary and two separate posts on Delia Bacon). However there’s also a neat slice of history where she speaks of the Ireland forgeries, something I used to (I thought) great success this past April Fool’s Day. Welcome to the club, Gayle!

We all know by now that Kenneth Brannagh, he of Henry V, Much Ado and Hamlet, is directing the new Thor movie.  Odd?  Not to him.  He gave Comic-Con a Shakespeare lesson last week:

"We know that we’re interested in superheroes, kings, gods, because of their sort of human-like failings. So it seemed to me not as much of a stretch as some people might think," Branagh said at last week’s Comic-Con, where he presented footage from the film. "The stretch part of it is embracing the whole world of digital effects. That’s been something I’ve just loved because it’s — if you can think it, they can do it. And that’s exciting."

I think it’s fascinating that there are directors today who see all the CGI special effects stuff as their “go to” solution to everything, and here you have a classic Shakespearean who thinks that’s the hard part.

There have been many, many attempts to categorize Shakespeare references in modern popular music, but I’ve yet to find anything I’d consider the master list. But since we haven’t done it for awhile, and this attempt seems new, I give you Shakespeare in Song, Categorized by Play, on The AWL. The choices in this list are interesting, ranging for instance from the background noise in The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus” coming from King Lear, to David Bowie’s habit of carrying a skull when he sings “Cracked Actor.” References to Sting (“Nothing Like The Sun” being a pretty obvious one) are nowhere to be found. Likewise no Dire Straits (“Romeo and Juliet”). I think the task is just too difficult.  Is it a Shakespeare reference every time somebody says Romeo? Or Juliet? I’d love it if somebody made a list of songs that contained actual Shakespeare text as lyrics. That’d be a great start.  Then we can go from there and debate whether Led Zeppelin’s “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold” is or is not a Merchant of Venice (“all that glisters is not gold”) reference.