I’m imagining Hamlet back at school, before news of his father’s death came in.  Do you think he’s the kind of guy (kid?) who was very social, had many friends? Or was that biting sense of humor and condescending tone too much for those around him? I’ve heard it argued re: Horatio that he was either a) Hamlet’s best friend in the world, or b) just a nice guy acquaintance who tried to pay his proper respects, and got caught up in the whole thing.  I honestly don’t know the answer either way. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I assume, fall more into that category of “I know them, but they are not my friends.”  I don’t see it as a very great surprise that they turn on Hamlet so quickly, as I have no reason to imagine them as close confidants to begin with. Thoughts?

http://www.edutopia.org/teaching-shakespeare-digital-media-language When I spotted an article entitled “Teach Shakespeare However You Want – Just Keep His Language Alive” I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.  When I noticed that the article comes from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, it almost makes me forgive him for Jar Jar Binks.  Almost. There’s not a great deal that’s new in the article, it comes off more as a plea to not forget the greatness of the language.  I’ll just paste one quote, which sums it up quite nicely for me:

Those who value the craft of writing do not take this lightly. C.K. Williams, an award-winning poet who teaches at Princeton University, told me, "The very thought of William Shakespeare being rewritten makes me ill."

Continuing on the music theme this week we have Lady Gaga Wrote Shakespeare’s Works from the American Shakespeare Center. I suppose you have to at least be familiar with who this chick is, to appreciate the funny.  Put it this way, 10 years ago I’m sure somebody wrote this exact article about Britney Spears.  Exact same idea.  Only here it’s all about “Poker Face”, the only real song of hers that anybody knows. Bonus points for recognizing the other music reference in my title :).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/03/classics.news Articles like this make me sad.  I don’t know the celebrity in question – Carol Vorderman? – but apparently she made a bit of a spectacle of herself on a television quiz show by missing a Shakespeare question and proclaiming him “dull as ditchwater.” Yawn. The points are all the same – what came first, his greatness or our worship of him? Is it all self-fulfilling?  And blah and blah and Harold Bloom and so on.  “The best Shakespeare is the Shakespeare we understand best,” the author writes. I like that line. Couple of interesting points, though, cheered me up: * The author noting that to decide for yourself whether Shakespeare is in fact dull, ideally you would have to know the plays in the first place.  Good point indeed, since this woman (the one on the tv show) failed her question.  Does that mean that she’s proclaiming Shakespeare dull from the position of someone who’s actually read him?  Or someone who has not? * “Toby Belch, as the name indicates, really is a pig; Shakespeare could as well have called him Fart.”  I love that the article’s not afraid to go there. 🙂 * “In my department, I’m happy to say, you won’t graduate unless you know all 39 well enough to take a six-hour exam on them.”  That could be fun.  Not sure I’d pass, but it’d be cool to live the life where I actually had an opportunity to try it. * “400 years on, no one will be watching reruns of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire…but will they still be performing and studying Shakespeare?  Nothing is more certain.” Damn straight. There’s also a pretty good Shakespeare test at the bottom, that I’m happy to report I got an average score (27 out of 55) on, just off the top of my head.  It’s somewhat unfair to we U.S.-bound (this being a UK article), as the final question is about modern English politics.

Ok, this one’s a little silly but I couldn’t resist. Whenever Cracked.com puts up an article that might have anything even remotely to do with Shakespeare, I go have a look.  Such is the case with “7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed The World”.   No, there’s no Coriolanus or anything that (the list is primarily science and religion books). However, I did find a reference that made me laugh out loud for the timing of it:

Ever heard of that Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? What about James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or Cold Mountain? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or William Shakespeare or Bob Dylan? They were all influenced by The Iliad and The Odyssey, and we could easily go on.

I used to mistakenly refer to such moments as “serendipitous”, but that’s not the right use of that word.  Instead I now call them “small universe” moments.   For an even more esoteric one that nobody but me could possibly get, I’ll tell you the story of reading Julius Caesar in…I want to say ninth grade English class.  We had a writing assignment which was to mimic a newspaper article reporting on the death of Caesar.  Well it just so happens that I was taking Latin as my foreign language requirement, and in studying ancient Rome I’d learned that their version of “A.D / B.C” for calendars counted from something called “Ab Urbe Condite”, which if I remember translates roughly as “From the founding of the city”.  So, I put that on my paper as part of the byline:  “Rome – March 15, 175 A.U.C”.  Nobody knew what it meant, and I had to explain it. ANYWAY, like I was saying … it’s the name of the #2 book on the Cracked list. 🙂