http://shakespeareplace.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-old-is-too-young-for-shakespeare.html Over at The Shakespeare Place, regular commenter JM has finally put up a topic that’s near and dear to my heart : kids and Shakespeare.  Regular readers know my answer.  Cruise back through the archives (sorry, I am way too busy at the day job to bring up the links) and you’ll find recordings of my kids – as young as 2 – reciting Sonnet 18.  Or my 3yr old naming her Barbie dolls Regan and Goneril, and asking to sleep with King Lear under her pillow.  Or my 5yr old asking me to explain Hamlet’s ghost.  Or drawing the shipwreck scene from The Tempest on the back of her placemat at breakfast. The all too common response to Shakespeare among schoolchildren is “Oh, no.”  What I get from my children is “Oh, cool!” I think that most people start late, and then only come to appreciate what Shakespeare really means later in life.  I am hoping beyond hope that my kids get the kind of jumpstart I never had, and who knows, maybe go on to discover depths as yet undiscovered.

[ ADMIN : For some reason I cannot access any of the key articles about this breaking topic, even though it’s all over my newsfeeds.  I’ll try to update this post with pointers when I figure out what the problem is. ] When I go on vacation, I like to seek out used bookstores.  When I find those, I like to seek out Shakespeare books.  I recently found a 100yr old Venus and Adonis that I have to get around to blogging more about. But once I saw Edward III, by William Shakespeare.  “Odd,” I thought, “Shakespeare never wrote an Edward III.” According to today’s news, that’s half right.  A researcher claims, with the help of his computers, that Shakespeare worked with Thomas Kyd to write this play. I want to see the original articles because I want to see how frequently people are saying “did write” and how often they’re saying “may have written.”  Because if it’s the latter, well then, didn’t we already know that?  And haven’t we proven nothing?  May have also implies may not have, after all. But if it’s pitched as conclusive prove, definitely did, then I think that’s just silly.  No amount of textual analysis is going to *prove* anything.  It’s going to raise your confidence higher, perhaps so high as to be indistinguishable from proof, but that still doesn’t make it proof. More info on the story when I get some links to work.

http://www.bardblog.com/vivacious-verse/ BardBlog’s got a good point, noting the difference between the prologue from Romeo and Juliet clearly saying “two hours’ traffic of the stage”, and with the more accepted feeling that Shakespeare must be 3 or 4 or even 5 hours long.  Why the difference? It’s all in how quickly you deliver the lines, apparently.  “Stop acting between the lines!” he tells us. 

Shakespeare’s plays (and most other classical works) are not natural everyday speech, it’s thought and action. When people criticize Shakespeare saying “nobody talks like that!” smack them. I mean, say, “That’s the point!” People think a lot faster than they speak, and if the verse is thought, then the words need to move a lot faster than natural speech.

Of course there are times when the verse should be spoken slower, and maybe even (gasp!) pause. I guess I’d have to see it.  Somebody show me a scene and say “These people are playing it too slow” and then show me that same scene and say “It should have gone more like this.”  Then I’ll understand better what’s being discussed here.

Now there’s a scary headline if I’ve ever heard one.  How bad is the world, exactly, if you’re defining it in Iago terms? The New York Times spins off the recent badly reviewed Othello, by Peter Sellars, to look at who Iago is and what he’s always meant. Focusing on the themes of “transparency” versus “secrecy”, the article takes  a number of interesting turns.  The new movie “The Invention of Lying” comes up, as does Michael Jackson’s death, David Letterman, and of course, Obama.

The moral agony of “Othello” is, in fact, that its bone-chilling villain is the only character who is in possession of the play’s truth. Through his machinations, Iago demonstrates that directness and honesty are, indeed, not safe — and in fact never are — because the overly transparent victim sometimes invites the predator’s manipulations and so becomes complicit with him.

Yikes.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/weekinreview/11siegel.html?_r=1

http://screencrave.com/2009-10-09/roland-emmerich-on-his-shakespeare-film/ More info about disaster-king Roland Emmerich’s new movie about the Authorship question.  Turns out that it’ll be a “political thriller” about Edware de Vere.  I like how the interviewer starts by asking “Marlowe?” rather than Bacon.  Of course, the answer when someone says “Bacon?” is “I’d love some, thank you.” More “disaster” jokes are just too easy.  But man, the Oxfordians are gonna be in seventh heaven when this comes out, aren’t they? “Pssst!  Dude, this guy dies before Macbeth is written.  How we gonna get around that?”

“Time machine!”