http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2423 Great article on the Arden Third Edition of the works, which has taken the bold step of publishing *three* different Hamlets (bad quarto, second quarto, and first folio) as separate texts, rather than trying to blend them.  The author of the post goes on to discuss how the separate scripts demonstrate that Shakespeare was first and foremost an actor who wrote scripts, and not some poetic genius locked up in a room by himself cranking out lines he never blotted.  On the contrary, there’s lots and lots and lots of rewrites. I think the major problem with this theory is that each change between the scripts does not necessarily represent Shakespeare himself saying “Ok, I didn’t like that, I’m changing it.”  There are many other hands at work, including his fellow actors, the typesetters, and so on.  For any given change between scripts you can’t say which one was what Shakespeare intended.

This is just barely a Shakespeare reference, but I liked it.  Raul Midon performed his song “All The Answers” at the TED conference in March, 2007.  The song is about how these days whenever we want to know something, we just Google for it.  He then goes on to intermix trivial questions where you couldn’t care about the answer with philosophical questions where all the googling in the world won’t get you the answer. One of the questions in the latter category is about Shakespeare, and I like the way it fits into the song. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/188

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23188937-5001021,00.html OK, I knew that Heath Ledger had died, and that Michelle Williams, mother of his children, was taking it very hard.  The linked story tells of his funeral, which turned into a giant beach party with everybody splashing in the ocean.  What caught my eye was that Williams read Sonnet 18 at the service.  An interesting choice, since folks have such a tendency to focus on the first part, the one all about “You’re so beautiful there’s really nothing for me to compare you to” that they often forget, or perhaps never knew, the ending and it’s thoughts of immortality. Normally I’m not one for overly quoted Shakespeare just to be deep (I cannot stand weddings where they bust out the old “Let not the marriage of true minds…” thing).  But given the setting for this particular case, it sounds like it must have been a nice sentiment.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15859_10-words-phrases-you-wont-believe-shakespeare-invented.html It’s true.  Take your typical “List of words Shakespeare invented” and add lots of Cracked.com’s famous … shall we say, “creative” language … and you’ve got their latest story.  Here we’ll learn the details on the etymology of eyeball, puking, skim milk, obscene, hot-blooded, afoot, epileptic, wormhole, alligator and others. Somehow I can’t help thinking that someday, someone is going to land on that page who Googled for exactly those words, all at once, and left the Cracked operations team with a giant “WTF?” to last them for the rest of their lives. NSFW Warning, if it wasn’t obvious from the first paragraph, the language is not even close to safe for work, and some of the pictures are a bit borderline as well.