Didn’t want this to get buried.  In a very old post about memorizing Shakespeare, an Anonymous reader asks,   I don’t imagine you would have any advice for someone playing Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, do you?   Anybody help her out?

http://www.baltimoreshakespeare.org/Muse/ScaryFairies.htm I found this brief article interesting.  It’s all about how, prior to Shakespeare, “fairies” were actually scary little beasts that people feared.  It also puts Puck/Robin Goodfellow into a bit of context, for anybody why in the beginning of Dream one of the characters says “Hey, I know you!  You’re Robin Goodfellow!”  He is not a Shakespeare creation, although Shakespeare appears to made some changes to his story.

It’s the strangest thing, but “akfarrar shakespeare” keeps showing up very highly in my referrer logs.  I’m wondering if our own Alan K. Farrar has a fanbase I never knew about? 😉  Or if he’s just doing a huge amount of ego surfing!   🙂

http://www.aizawa.2y.net/sp/Tempest.htm Say it with me:  No matter how well, or how many different ways you translate Shakespeare, if you try to do it line by line, you are doing the source material a grave disservice. The value is in the *poetry* first and foremost, so if you take that away, then you’ve got no obligation to try and swap out the words (unless you happen to be doing a side-by-side, which most often people are not). Without the poetry, you’re left with plot and character.  So forget about the line-by-line stuff and just retell the story in your own way, if that’s what you really want to do.  If you want to get somebody interested in Shakespeare and you’re afraid of the language, that’s the way to do it.  Hook them with the story and the people, and then bring in the language.  Don’t take away the language and say “Trust me, the original is much better than this.”

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=133942&command=displayContent&sourceNode=244910&contentPK=21111793&folderPk=103546&pNodeId=244911   Rufus Wainwright already does a killer version of Sonnet 29, so much so that I’ve been on a hunt for “sonnets to music” ever since. The article above links an interview with the man, where he says he’s working on a compilation of 9 sonnets (to debut in April, in Berlin) for a potential album. Does anybody mind if I quote myself?     (Thanks to listenerd for the link, which I almost passed over because it looks too random to be valuable….wrong! :))