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 An even worse fate that the publishing of unpublished work is when somebody continues it for you.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.

Just to complete a thought from yesterday ..

P.S I hope it turns out that Geoffrey Rush’s lucky charm is the Daffy Duck, I like the idea of Daffy hanging out on the set of Shakespeare in Love.

Today I get to see the answers, and I was right? Geoffrey Rush : Daffy Duck figurine
Cate Blanchett : elf ears
Robin Williams : ivory trinket
Meat Loaf : two stuffed bears
Sharon Stone : crystal This post has nothing to do with Shakespeare, I just felt obliged to close that loop from yesterday’s post.

My 5yr old needs to work on her letter formation.  We’ve been encouraging her to copy sentences, monk-like, to practice word formation, spacing, punctuation and so on (as opposed to just writing the same letter repeated over and over). Hmmm…. I need something that my daughter can work on copying, a short sequence of short words.  Whatever shall we pick? No bonus points awarded for guessing the answer to this most obvious of questions: 🙂 This is actually the second copy that she did. The first, where I sat next to her and went over every letter, was accidentally thrown out.  I said “Can you make me another one?” and this is the version I got, without a single bit of help from any grown ups.  I think it looks even better. The story gets even better when you imagine the scene in my kitchen.  My wife and I are cleaning up after dinner, my 5yr old is at work on her letters, repeating to herself “To be, or not to be.” Her 3yr old brother wanders in, hears her and says, “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Love it! UPDATE : You know what? It’s only just now, some 8 hours after getting this, that I notice the extra “to” in there.  I love it even more.