http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6856891.eceThese lists come up frequently – 10 things you didn’t know about Shakespeare!  Most of the time it’s boring for geeks, half common knowledge and half not really true anyway.So I’m happy that this one includes, at least to me, some new stuff.

3 Shakespeare hid on Robben Island

There was a copy of Shakespeare on Robben Island prison that one of the Indian ANC inmates had disguised as a Hindu prayer book. It got handed around, and various inmates would read it and underline their favourite quotations and autograph them. Walter Sisulu underlined “For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”, Shylock’s line from The Merchant of Venice. Another ANC inmate underlined Caliban’s line from The Tempest: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother.” So you get very different spins on apartheid between those two quotations. Nelson Mandela’s favourite quote was from Julius Caesar, when Caesar himself says: “Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant only taste of death but once.”

Of special note is point #7, about Cardenio, where he says “We’ve found a bit and the RSC is going to produce it.”  The article was written in October, 2009 – so much for this week’s “discovery”, eh? :)I did know about the “raid” by Delia Bacon, the starlings, and King John in 1899, but a couple of the others were new (although a couple of them seem to be a stretch).

Just a quick question, looking for a quick, one word answer.  When you use Shakespeare as an adjective, what do you think it means? Does it mean quality, as in “Just write me a quick blog post, I don’t need it to be Shakespeare”? Does it mean sad, as in “Shakespearean in its tragedy”? Perhaps grand, sweeping, epic? A story of Shakespearean proportion! Or maybe difficult? “It all sounds like Shakespeare to me!” Perhaps pompous? “Look who we got here, we got ourselves a real Shakespeare!”  Maybe “pompous” isn’t the right word there.  Superior? The easy answer is probably “All of the above”, but where’s the fun in that?  Let me phrase it differently – when you hear it, what’s the first usage you think of?

All this recent talk of Double Falshood / Cardenio as Shakespeare’s legendary “lost” play brings up a very different question.  Not whether it is or not, but what if it is?  How would that change our opinion of Shakespeare’s canon of work if we really and truly knew, for sure, that there was a new play to add to the mix?  One that, by most accounts, isn’t very good? I wanted to put it in terms that the modern reader can understand.  It’s so easy to speak of Shakespeare as perfect, Shakespeare as god, that it’s easy to escape Shakespeare as working man.  So instead I want you to think about Robert DeNiro.  Know the name?  You probably do, at least if you’re in the US.  Now, can you quote something from the Godfather II?  I’m willing to bet that you can.  Or how about Goodfellas? Casino?  Maybe Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, for the purists.  You like his comedy better? How about Midnight Run, or Meet the Parents? Now what about Analyze That? Or how about The Good Shepherd?  Oh, didn’t see them?  Maybe something from his earlier work, could you tell me a little bit about Bloody Mama, or Jennifer on my Mind?  What about Stardust?  Surely I have to mention Stardust, I mean come on, the man played a character named Captain Shakespeare. (There may indeed be some DeNiro Geeks in the crowd who can, indeed, speak at length on all the movies I mentioned.  But bear with me here, people, I’m trying to make a point!) Any large body of work will naturally fray at the edges.  It takes time to hone one’s craft, and then eventually time dulls the edge of even the sharpest talent.  Robert DeNiro is quite arguably one of the best actors of modern times.  He’s certainly been a part of some of the best movies.  But does that mean that all of his work was genius?  Not hardly. I think people often forget that with Shakespeare.  We’ve likened the name Shakespeare to the work as a whole when really it’s probably more like a bell curve – we’ll all put Hamlet and Lear and Dream and such up at the top, surround them with Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar and so on…until down at the edges we have the Measure for Measures and Pericleseses….however you say it. So, would a proven Cardenio jump to the top of that pile?  Almost certainly not.  Masterpieces don’t tend to disappear.  Junk is what tends to be forgotten.  Maybe Shakespeare was phoning it in during his elder years.  Maybe he collaborated loosely just to pick up the pay check.  Who knows, maybe he never wanted the burden we place upon him, and his heart just wasn’t in it anymore.  People tend to forget this.  People think we’re going to find the next Hamlet.  We’re not.

Did everybody catch Jude Law, fresh off of Hamlet (and pimping the upcoming “Repo Men”) on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Thanks to the miracle of DVR I did not miss it, although I’m a bit late :). Luckily for us Shakespeare geeks he did a bunch of Shakespeare material! Sorry for the links instead of embedding, but I can’t figure out how to make Hulu go right in the post.  And while the vids are in YouTube, they are loaded up with spam and I can’t stand that. Opening Monologue All about his “impressions” of Hamlet, which for a Shakespeare geek were hysterical.

“These people came all this way, dressed up real nice, and I don’t want to get in trouble like Piven.” “Hamlet is sent to England, and this is my favorite part of the play because I get to go back to my dressing room, maybe play on Twitter, have a biscuit.  … And then I come back out on stage and Ophelia’s dead, I don’t really know what happened there I’ve never read that part.”

Interesting “mistake” there, as he says “Hamlet kills the guy in the hat and is sent to England by mistake.”  Clearly he means, “kills the guy by mistake, and is sent to England.”   Hamlet Auditions Jude waits for his audition spot along with Nathan Lane, Al Pacino, Nicholas Cage (irony!! Oh, the bees!), and Sam Elliott.

“How you gonna play Hamlet? I’m torn between black and Puerto Rican!”

Could have done more with this.  Then again, they could have done the whole thing with Al Pacino, if you ask me. 🙂

Ok, ok, ok, Double Falshood (spell it right!) is in the news this week, what with “new” evidence to support the case that it is indeed Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio. First of all, here’s the text of the play, something I first wrote about back in May 2007.  You can also read it at Google books. Likewise, in June 2007 the Royal Shakespeare Company did a project in Spain that also played fast and loose with whether it was Double Falshood or Cardenio. Additionally, Shakespeare expert Gary Taylor came out in support of the Cardenio theory in April, 2009. So, what exactly is this week’s news? 

Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.

Next summer Double Falsehood will become more embedded in the canon when the Royal Shakespeare Company mounts a production based on it as part of the first season back at its revamped Stratford-upon-Avon home.

So, there you go.  More support for the Cardenio argument, but proof?  Compelling evidence?  Who knows.