McSweeney’s is at it again!

From the people that brought you Hamlet’s Facebook Page, the Romeo and Juliet Police Blotter and Lady Macbeth on Ambien, we now have “Macbeth and Macduff arguing over semantics”:

MACBETH: Wast thou ripped from a man?
MACDUFF: No…
MACBETH: Then thou wast of woman born, what’s the problem?
MACDUFF: I think, technically, to be “born” you need to pass through the birth canal.
MACBETH: No. If you exist, then you were born.
MACDUFF: I grant you it’s a bit of a gray area. 

I love these guys.

I’ve at times wondered if Shakespeare got much of his “pop culture” status simply by nature of the fact that he is in the public domain, and thus everybody rushes to his body of work for material whenever they need some.  I used to work with a guy who was a Hemingway Geek, and one of the things we’d always debate is how my readers could, at will, cut and paste large sections of the plays, while his could not. Hemingway is still very much under an aggressively pursued copyright.

Anyway, that’s a weird way of saying that as my kids go through the Muppets television show on Netflix, we keep running into Shakespeare references mixed in with a whole slew of other ancient comedy material.

In this case it was Season One, Disk 2 and Kermit the Frog was running a panel on the important questions of the day.  Miss Piggy was one of the guests on the panel.  I only had a brief moment when he said “important questions” to think, “I wonder if he’ll reference Shakespeare?” when he said, and I quote, “Was William Shakespeare Bacon?”

Well you can predict what happens from there – Miss Piggy takes offense at the word “bacon” (although Kermit does clarify that he means Sir Francis), but chaos soon erupts and puns go flying all over the place.  There wasn’t much Shakespeare beyond that, but I immediately told the kids “Oh I am so posting that on the blog.”

In a later episode on that same disk, Harvey Korman is playing the lion tamer to a “ferocious” beast that is actually a big cuddly blue monster.  “Speak!” he shouts at the monster, and I think “He’s going to quote Shakespeare, isn’t he?” but no, what he says is “Well I was reading Balzac recently, and I had some thoughts …”

Ok, I seem to have seriously dropped the ball on this one.  We’ve known about Ralph Fiennes doing a Coriolanus movie for some time.  What I didn’t know is that 30 Ninjas has a blog up detailing the day-to-day progression of the movie?! The site itself is a bit nightmarish on the eyes, and I can’t even find a subscribe link to get it in my daily feeds, but it certainly looks chock full of content! Coriolanus was never really my thing, but maybe that’s because it’s been so ignored.  Maybe a movie will change my mind?  I just wish they had a treatment like this for when Julie Taymor was doing her Tempest, I would have been all over that. UPDATE: Found the link to subscribe.

[ Found via http://www.shaksper.net ] I haven’t fully explored this yet, but the C-Span video archives are now open to the public and somebody’s beaten me to the “search for Shakespeare” button :). Definitely play around with the search features, as there are many of them.  I found that limiting to “academic topics” helps, and sort by least recent instead of most if you want to see some of the more historic stuff (like an interview with Harold Bloom).  Also included are things like mock trials (Hamlet for the murder of Polonius), which are probably where I’ll head first as I’ve often heard about those, but never watched/read one.