I’ve said it before, but hearing certain bits of Shakespeare spoken aloud makes lightning bolts shoot straight up my spine.  It’s like my brain suddenly tells the rest of my body, “Listen up!  Something good’s happening!  Get on the edge of that seat!” This makes the opening lines particularly special, as those mean “You’re about to get that feeling for the next 2-3 hours.”  I’ve heard it said that the opening sets the tone for the whole play.  The simple “Who goes there?” in Hamlet turns it into a great ghost story once you realize that the wrong guard says it.  Macbeth’s wyrd sisters start the play by confusing audience expectations, asking “When shall we three meet again”, as if we’ve just been dropped into the end of their discussion rather than the beginning.  I think my favorite, though, might be Romeo and Juliet, because I can really bring it all the way back to the first two words:  Two households.  Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I like things binary.  Shakespeare starts out the play by taking the universe of what’s about to unfold and dividing it right down the middle. You’re gonna have the X’s over here, and the not X’s over there.  Everything else is irrelevant, they are effectively the same thing in all variables except for one.  In this case their name, although it dawns on me that decades of directors portraying the conflict as a racial thing seems to diminish the value of the “What’s in a name?” series of speeches.  (For some reason that makes me think of the Star-Belly Sneetches.) What’s your favorite opening scene, and how fast does it hook you?  Do you have to wait for the “good stuff” or is it lightning bolts and edge of the chair action from the first time somebody opens his mouth?

Last thing I watched before dozing off last night was Slings & Arrows season 3, the one where they do King Lear.  I’m still early on, where they are rehearsing.  But sure enough didn’t I dream about being in the audience and watching those rehearsals? One crucial difference, though –  my brain had Patrick Stewart playing King Lear.  I like my brain.

No, not a hint of a new production coming…or maybe it is?  This morning while waiting for my commuter rail train (at the Anderson/Woburn station, for the locals), I noticed that somebody had slapped a Macbeth sticker over the word INBOUND, so that one of the billboards read MACBETH TO BOSTON.  I was intrigued, but the sticker had nothing on it other than the one word, and a little double triangle symbol like you might see on a train or airplane logo of some sort.

You know, all yesterday I tried to think of some reason to post about 3/15, the Ides of March, without being cliche and doing it just because. Well, I have no heat in my house now.  Something broke on the burner yesterday night.  It’s snowing, and the repairman tells me that we might not be able to get a part until Monday.  We’re in the process of packing up to spend the weekend at the in-laws as I speak. Beware The Ides of March!

http://www.jewcy.com/post/shakespeares_plays_were_written_jewish_woman Well well, isn’t this interesting, what with all the talk lately about Shakespeare’s depiction of Jews, and his own personal experience with them.  Today I spot this story about Amelia Bassano, a new candidate for the Authorship question.  Not only is she a she, she’s Jewish. Point #2 in the article is particularly relevant to our recent discussions.  Did Shakespeare really include spoken Hebrew in All’s Well That Ends Well?  I wasn’t familiar with that.    And #8 is all about the various “Jewish allegories” in the plays.  Oberon represents Yahweh?  What?? For the most part the article is just blatantly biased, as Authorship articles normally are.  For instance #4, “There would have been no way for Shakespeare to learn Italian in Stratford-on-Avon.”  And #6 is just plain funny, citing “over 99.999999% chance this is no coincidence!” Perhaps the funniest of all is that nowhere in the article does he mention Merchant of Venice.  At all.  Somebody explain to me why this Jewish woman would have written Shylock?   You know, the more I look at it, I wonder if the whole thing is a joke.  I almost think it has to be.