While listening to the In Our Time episode about King Lear, I started thinking about the emotional impact of the tragedies.  They are not created equal.  Which one “gets” you, the most?  Which one tears out your heart and stomps on it?  Has the answer changed for you in the past? For me, right now, King Lear would be the clear winner.  The whole “Daughter tries and fails to save the father, father tries and fails to save the daughter” storyline just crushes me.  And it’s easy to see why — I have daughters.  When I tell them the story I simply tell it as “And then Cordelia comes back to rescue her Daddy from the forest.”  And they are happy with that ending, it pleases them that the daughters can save the daddy.  So the fact that I know what comes next makes it that much more heart-wrenching.  I’ve been in the discussion with parents about when children should learn what happens to Bambi’s mother, but never at what age they should learn Cordelia’s fate ;). Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have said Hamlet.  Because I was the typical angsty/emo college kid doing the whole “What does life really mean?” thing.  I had a fascination with last words, dying moments, and that idea of drawing a line between “Ok, here you’re alive, and then over here, you’re dead, and right now you’re standing on the line, what do you do?”  So if you’d asked me back then, I would have told you that it was the “Flights of angels sing thee sweetly to thy rest” line that did it for me. But you know what?  Life is better now :).  When you step back from Hamlet you have to admit that he pretty much put himself in that situation in the first place.  It’s sad that he died, of course, but it’s not tragic for me in the same sense as a Cordelia, who really tried to do the right thing from beginning to end and still ended up dead.  Or Ophelia, who never really stood a chance. The others just really don’t do much for me, emotion-wise.  Sure it’s sad that Romeo and Juliet couldn’t live happily ever after, but happily ever after is a thing for fairy tales.  Then again, much like the Hamlet -> King Lear thing, maybe if you’d caught me back as a teenager in love, maybe I would have said R&J.  Who knows? This topic makes me want to go read Anthony and Cleopatra again, I haven’t read that one in a long time and I’m thinking I might find it better now (being married, and far from a teenager) than I did when I was in high school. Who’s next?

http://redshoesonathuuursday.blogspot.com/2008/03/take-few-seconds-to-save-new-globe.html Making the rounds on all the Shakespeare blogs.  I’d write more but I have to go actually do it instead of just talking about it.

Thanks to Alayne for this link to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time where they’re apparently discussing King Lear: Melvyn Bragg explores the dramatic themes and history behind one of
Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, “King Lear”. He is joined by Jonathan
Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick;
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College,
Oxford; and Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the
University of Wales, Swansea. The date on the file suggests that this is the newest episode of the show.  I often subscribe to In Our Time’s podcast feed, but then I fall behind because they hit on some topics I’m just not interested in and eventually I give up.  I’m glad when readers send me good stuff like this that I might otherwise have missed! Downloading now….

http://www.cracked.com/article_15959_5-books-that-can-actually-make-you-stupider.html Believe it or not, not only is Shakespeare on the list, he’s #1. Sort of. You’ll see what I mean.

I missed Slings & Arrows the first time around, and I’m very sorry for that.  I’d actually tried to check it out, but I must have watched a bad episode because from where I sat it was all about the politics of running a theatre and I didn’t see much actual Shakespeare content.  So I didn’t make much of an effort to follow up.  Boy, was that a mistake.  A coworker just let me borrow Season 1 on DVD (well, the first three episodes) and I LOVE IT.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the show revolves around the New Burbage Theatre festival as they go through their productions of Dream, Hamlet, and I’m presuming some others along the way.  There’s some sort of bad history at the place, particularly the director (Oliver) and the former star, Geoffrey.  Well, stuff happens, Geoffrey’s thrown back into the mix to re-open old wounds, and let the fun begin. I think the thing I love the most about the show in what little I’ve seen is that it reinforces what I’ve always said (and thought and hoped) about myself.  When the action on the screen is not about Shakespeare – like the politics between the corporate sponsor and the manager producer guy – I really deeply and truly don’t care.  BUT!  When the talk turns to Shakespeare, when somebody drops a line or a reference or describes a scene or just goes ahead and does a scene?  Lightning bolts shoot up my spine.  Every time.   There’s a scene where they haven’t even begun their table reading of Hamlet, and there’s name cards on all the seats – Bernardo, Horatio, Osric – and even that does it for me. One of the major themes of the show is about stripping away the commoditization of the theatre and getting back to how the words can so deeply impact your life.  Absofrigginlutely, if I do say so myself :).  I can’t wait to get the next set of episodes.  I’m probably going to just go ahead and buy my own copy anyway.