I’ll be off on a brunch cruise today, but I thought I’d check in to ask:  Who’s your favorite Shakespeare mom?  Much like Disney movies, the mom often gets the short end of the stick in a Shakespeare play (Lear and Tempest come immediately to mind…)  Lady Capulet?  Gertrude?  Tamora?? I’m trying to run through the list in my head and hate to miss a good one… How about this?  How about making a list of mothers first?  Who’s got the complete list of Shakespeare moms, so we can pick from them?

Ok, I’ve been challenged.  I stated on Twitter that I don’t like Sonnet #116 because it’s become so cliche as “the wedding sonnet.”  I always hope that I’m going to hear a different one, but I never do.  116 is nice enough in it’s own right, I just get the feeling that people think of that as “the” sonnet and never consider using any others.
Personally (and my regular readers know this whole story) I did Sonnet #17, almost entirely because I liked the whole bit about “the age to come would say ‘This poet lies, such hea’enly touches ne’er touched earthly faces’” bit.  (I did not love that being a procreation sonnet, it ends awkwardly with “so you should have a kid”. )
However, I did not have this one done as a reading.  Instead, I whispered it in my new wife’s ear during our first dance.
So on Twitter somebody asked me what a good wedding sonnet would be, and I thought it a good question.  If you’re going to have someone get up and recite a sonnet to everybody on the occasion of a wedding, which one would you pick?  Is 116 the best one?  Or is it only used because is says marriage right there in the first line?

UPDATED September, 2010 I liked this idea so much I wrote a book on the subject of Shakespeare wedding quotes, including an entire section on the sonnets.

Dom Deluise has died. In tribute, I went looking to see if the man had ever done any Shakespeare.  The closest I could find was Baby Geniuses. 🙂 However, I did find this interview where he brings up the subject:

I had to audition for the High School of Performing Arts because they wanted to see if you could, in fact, carry on and, you know, act a little. So my brother, who was older than me and not as wise as I thought, said the thing that I should learn was Shakespeare. So here I was talking, just barely talking when I was a young person, and my brother said you should learn "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely. They have their entrances and their exits and in their lives they play many parts. The mewing puking child…" And so here I tried to do… can you imagine, a Shakespeare thing? Then they said, "Now we’re going to improvise. Find that book on the table and there’s a piece of paper in it, and just ad lib." So I looked at the book and looked around and I said, "Oh, a letter!" And I took the piece of paper and I said, "If you don’t pass your…" I was reading the letter. "If you don’t pass your audition, you’ll never get into the High School of Performing Arts."

So I’m guessing that he never thought of himself doing Shakespeare.  Oh, well.  He might have made a good Henry VIII?  Falstaff’s an easy guess for a big jovial type, but I don’t think Mr. Deluise ever did “serious”.  Perhaps Merry Wives of Windsor?

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=5183214 In this week’s episode of “NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” they have a good deal of fun with actor Liev Schrieber who is currently playing mutant Sabretooth in the new movie Wolverine.  But he is also an accomplished Shakespearean, and they have a grand time with that.  Schrieber himself makes the X-Men / King Lear comparison, first noting that today’s comic book movies are very similar to Shakespeare, then later going with “Shakespeare is easier.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t say Snagglepuss.”
     “Also a fine Shakespearean actor, not a lot of people
       know that.  Exeunt, stage left!”
”I can’t believe I never squeezed that in.”

http://jezebel.com/5237970/william-shakespeare-dissed-by-people-magazine-readers People Magazine ran a “Historical Hotties” survey and, using the recently debated Cobbe portrait, 73% of readers declared him “Not.” The great thing about images of Shakespeare, though, is that there are so many to choose from. :)  Maybe they’d like Chandos better? Although I suspect that poor Will is going to lose this one to Marlowe regardless of which image you pick.