Here’s something I’ve always wondered.  I can’t remember what made me think of it recently, but what the heck.

King Lear.  Kent.  He’s the only one with the guts to stand up to Lear in his fury, and he gets banished for it.  But his loyalty still won’t let him leave Lear’s side, even after all that goes down.

So here’s my question – how old is Kent?   

I am not looking for a specific age, but rather, are we talking about a Kent who is young enough not to know better when he stands up to Lear? Or someone who has been around for a lifetime and thinks (incorrectly) that he can get away with it?  I totally see either of these working.  An old Kent comes off as Lear’s peer, an old man standing by his friend’s side as his friend descends into madness (Gloucester/Lear?). A young Kent, though, would be the son Lear didn’t have, a sort of Edgar/Gloucester parallel. Who knows.  Just rambling a bit.  Is there evidence in the play to suggest one of these theories over the other?

It’s been an interesting week for the importance of editors.  At the one end we’ve got the maybe-Cardenio, which has been through so many editors hands that it’s probably got little Shakespeare left.  On the other we’ve got Barton and his Playing Shakespeare, where every comma and line break means something in how you build the character so you’d better pick the right version. It’s a distinction I’ve never fully appreciated.  I mean, I have the Complete Works on my iPhone.  Similarly, if I need to lookup a quote while at my PC I will typically hit up the MIT collection.  For my own personal projects I also keep the XML-formatted versions handy (the geek in me likes to process structured files rather than plain text).  In none of these cases could I tell you *whose* version these are, or what that means. When people speak of carrying around a First Folio, what edition are they talking about? I mean, I know what a First Folio is, but somebody point me to it on Amazon or something.  How big, how much did it cost, who did the editing/publishing, etc?

As I continue through Playing Shakespeare I’m becoming more intrigued.  I don’t really know anything about this Barton who runs the show.  Are these people in his workshop professional actors who are doing him a favor, helping him to demonstrate techniques to a mostly off-screen audience of younger, less experienced actors? Or when Ben Kingsley asks a question, is he honestly the student to Barton’s teacher?  Yes, that Ben Kingsley.  Gandhi.  Holding a script and asking Barton questions about how to play a scene. There’s a moment I watched last night when his “students”, Kingsley among them, encourage Barton to do a passage to show them what he’s talking about.  They give him this speech, of all things: KING OF FRANCE

Where is Montjoy the herald? speed him hence:
Let him greet England with our sharp defiance.
Up, princes! and, with spirit of honour edged
More sharper than your swords, hie to the field:
Charles Delabreth, high constable of France;
You Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon, and of Berri,
Alencon, Brabant, Bar, and Burgundy;
Jaques Chatillon, Rambures, Vaudemont,
Beaumont, Grandpre, Roussi, and Fauconberg,
Foix, Lestrale, Bouciqualt, and Charolois;
High dukes, great princes, barons, lords and knights,
For your great seats now quit you of great shames.
Bar Harry England, that sweeps through our land
With pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur:
Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon:
Go down upon him, you have power enough,
And in a captive chariot into Rouen
Bring him our prisoner.

And at the drop of a hat he’s right there, boom, whole speech, in character, as a demonstration of what he’s talking about (in terms of his students “not going far enough”).  They even ask him about how he chose to pronounce certain words, and he specifies when he chose the Folio pronunciation. Who the heck is this guy? All of the other actors, Patrick Stewart included, refer to a script when doing relatively well known passages such as from Julius Caesar or Merchant of Venice.  And this Barton fellow riffs off the above, which is basically a whole sequence of proper names – French names, no less! – without so much as a pause?  Maybe it was a good editing job (this is video, after all), but it was quite impressive, I have to say!

The star of “300” and “Bounty Hunter”, Gerard Butler, will take on the role of a foul-mouthed leprechaun in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”

What?

Describing his role in the movie Butler said “I play the most perverse, disturbing, disgusting, foul-mouthed leprechaun you could ever imagine.” He also said that it will feature a lot of swearing.

Wait, what?

The project is being led by, “Shallow Hal” director, Peter Farrelly and is expected to be released this year.

Oh. [ via Irish Central , and I swear I thought this was some sort of weird St. Patrick’s Day variant on April Fool’s or something! ]

When comparing Shakespeare’s body of work to Robert De Niro’s (“frayed at both edges”) I failed to account for a particular factor that Frank Skinner points out in his comparison to Michael Jackson: Once the artist is dead, our attitude toward his work changes. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/frank_skinner/article7067745.ece So it is with Cardenio, or a new Michael Jackson CD, or a new Dr. Seuss book or Frank Herbert or Robert Heinlein, or a new John Hughes movie.  When a creator of things we like is taken from us, we’re sad because something in our brain says, “No more stuff from that person.”  So then we hear that there might still be more stuff and we’re all, “Hurray!  More stuff!”  We are so excited, in fact, that we are more willing to overlook the obvious (which kinda gets back to my point) – there may be a reason why this “lost” material was lost to begin with.  Maybe it’s just not any good.  Maybe the creator never intended for it to be produced.  Maybe it wasn’t finished. An even worse fate that the publishing of unpublished work is when somebody continues it for you.  We are so desperate for that new work that, when we hear it is unfinished and therefore we can’t have it, somebody steps up and says, “I’ll finish it!”  At this point it’s easy to be torn, because one side of your brain says “Hurray, I get more stuff after all!” but the other side is still able to say, “Hey wait a second, Eoin Colfer, you’re no Douglas Adams !”  But still, partial new content is better than nothing, right? Maybe? I expect this is where Cardenio ends up.  Assuming it is real, who knows what state it was in when Theobald got his hands on it?  He “punched it up” a bit.  It appears now that Brean Hammond and the folks at Arden have done the same thing.  So no, it’s not like somebody opened up a desk drawer and found a complete script for “Cardenio, by William Shakespeare ” sitting there waiting for the world to see.  But we knew that was never going to happen.  Heck, we don’t have *any* of the plays in that sort of form.  If it’s legit, this is really the closest we’d ever come to a “new” Shakespeare play.