We’ve mentioned before that director Roland Emmerich, best known for his disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 , is taking on Shakespeare Authorship next. Here’s an interview with the man cast as Oxford himself, Rhys Ifans: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2010/03/04/rhys-ifans-says-roland-emmerichs-shakespeare-movie-anonymous-starts-shooting-in-april/ Who? Ifans is currently working on the next Harry Potter movie, but hasn’t been in any of the released ones yet.  Looking through his bio, trying to figure out what people would have seen … he’s really got nothing as lead.  Lots of supporting work.  I think I remember him best (and by that I mean, ‘at all’) as roommmate Spike in Notting Hill.  That’s going back a bit. Anyway, what do we learn in the interview? * Shooting starts in April. * Shakespeare himself isn’t cast yet, but is apparently an “illiterate drunk” in the movie. Sounds like a winner.

When I first saw the movie Hotel for Dogs with my kids, I spotted the Shakespeare reference to the two dogs in love – they were named Romeo and Juliet, obviously. Upon watching it on video with them, however, I noticed what had escaped me previously.  The brother and sister dog are named Sebastian and Viola. Anybody could have come up with the first one, but methinks one of the writers is something of a Shakespeare geek to have snuck that second one in there ;).  If we assume in context of the movie that it was the young kids who were naming all these stray dogs, and they were the ones that came up with the Shakespeare references?  All the better!

(Warning, this is about as related to Shakespeare as any other turn of any of his phrases, but it’s as good a place as any to braindump something I’ve been thinking about.  I’ll try to make it as Shakespearey as I can. :)) There’s an expression among writers, I’ve lost the original source, that goes “I don’t want to write, I want to have written.” In a strangely ironic twist I’ve often found myself using a related example in regard to books when I’ll say, “I don’t want to read it, but I want to have read it.”  The author of these books is almost always Dan Brown, by the way. :)   I once pitched to a friend a similar concept for movies, where you could rip the audio track from a dvd, and then listen to that the same way.  For dialogue heavy movies you could still get the general plot, recognize the famous quotes, and be able to say that you are familiar with it. Even though you never saw it. I realize this morning that this philosophy could be extended to just about anything.  I don’t want to eat, I want to have eaten.  I don’t want to sleep, I want to have slept. I don’t want to do, I want to have done. Is it the journey, or the destination?  Hamlet’s question is deeper, but precisely because we can’t experiment with it.  We can’t both be and not be and then decide for ourselves which is better, we can only hypothesize about it. In its own way, my question is quite related to his.  After all, doesn’t “to be” imply some level of awareness, of actually paying attention to your own life?  If you’re just going through the paces, always considering the future at the expense of the present, are you really “being”? I don’t really have anywhere I’m going with this, just wanted to throw it out there. I’ve had times when I’m awful at this, and I was reminded of it when speaking of audiobooks and I told the story of how I used to listen to them and 2x speed in the car for exactly the above reasons – I wanted to have read it, but not to read it.  Reading is supposed to be enjoyable, and yet here I am deliberately shortening that portion.  It’s just not right.

[ Ok, that’s something of a meaningless title but I thought it went well with my post from a minute ago about King Hapless. 🙂 ] Just how good is Dame Judi Dench?  Who else could reprise a role 48 years later? That’s precisely what’s happening at the Rose Theatre on March 20 when she takes on Titania once again, working with director Peter Hall – who also directed her in the 1962 version. In this particular instance I think I’ll let the original article speak for me, when it describes her as a “star that elicits affection from an audience busy purring its devotion from the minute Ms. Dench sweeps on stage.”  Yes, that’ll work. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/arts/24iht-LON24.html You know, until the moment when I went to look this up, I’d been under the impression that Dame Judi had played Queen Elizabeth simultaneously, both in Shakespeare in Love as well as in the movie Elizabeth, which was out in theatres at the same time.  I never saw the latter, obviously, as she is not in it.  Really weird trivia, though? I’m trying to figure out what special place in history Ms. Dench has, as I could swear there’s some sort of “award for playing the same role at different times” sort of thing that has to do with her and Queen Elizabeth.  So I google for it and end up on a question about “the only performers nominated for playing the same character in the same film”. Answer? Judi Dench and Kate Winslet – but for the 2001 movie “Iris”, having nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth. But now we get to play Six Degrees of Dame Judi, because Kate Winslet and she have both played Ophelia, who was also played by Cate Blanchett, who, you guessed it, played Queen Elizabeth in the 1998 movie.  Small Shakespeare world. One last thing – the “special place in history” that I’m confusing appears to be that Ms. Dench has the award for shortest amount of screen time – less than 8 minutes.  Because she’s just that damned good, apparently.  She’s like the Chuck Norris of Shakespeare.   Hey, that could be a fun series :)  Judi Dench’s Ophelia doesn’t drown, she walks on the water.

Quick! If somebody said “the most hapless of Monarchs”, in reference to a Shakespeare character, who are they talking about? All the fun is taken out of the question, though, when you get to the second half  : “This king is in the title of Shakespeare’s only trilogy,” and the answer is of course Henry, http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978062388&grpId=3659174697244816 Apparently it was a question on Jeopardy. I’ve always thought it would be great for Jeopardy to do a Shakespeare-themed show.  They periodically have a category for him, which is nice, but if you really tried I bet you could fill up the entire board, twice.  And then we Shakespeare geeks could Tivo it and watch again and again and again and again …. UPDATE: As clarified for me in the comments, the answer of “Henry” is hardly sufficient, as Henry IV/V/VI refer to different people, AND Henry VI is actually 3 plays by itself.  So the correct Jeopardy answer would have been, “Who is Henry VI?” It was early and I was blatantly reposting without thinking.  Sorry for the lapse in quality, folks.  Go read the Judi Dench post that came next, I promise I actually researched all my links for that one. 🙂