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.

http://beplayful.org/the-creative-secrets-of-jesus-and-shakespeare/ I’m not really sure what to do with this article about unleashing your creative genius which uses the rather unusual pairing of Shakespeare and Jesus as its sole example.  All praise that is heaped upon Shakespeare is coupled with “and Jesus too!”

• William Shakespeare and Jesus Christ were two of the most creative people ever walk on this planet.
• Both Shakespeare and Jesus, like all truly creative people in all times and all places, took ideas from the world around them, the culture in which they lived, and added their own twist.
• Most of Shakespeare’s plays were retellings of contemporary folk stories or of plays that Shakespeare had watched or acted in…The same is true for Jesus.

I guess if you’re a strong believer in Jesus then you’re saying “Well, yeah, of course.”  It just sounds weird, and I guess it says something for our man Shakespeare, that the son of God  is the one apparently hanging on *his* coat tails. 🙂

http://www.prosperosbooks.net/2008/02/alas-poor-yoric.html Kenneth Davis has an interesting angle on the role of long dead Yorick in Hamlet.  Specifically he looks at the absence of a jester/fool character in Claudius’ court, what that means, how it disrupts the flow of information, and how Hamlet steps in to fill the role.  I found it fascinating.

http://www.bhs.schoolloop.com/tourse/note?d=x&id=1201795819088&group_id=1198786673734&return_url=1202265789633 Got a huge burst of traffic this morning from this site which was nice enough to point to my post on memorizing Shakespeare with the comment “decent but not great.”  Hey, given that I write these things off the top of my head and otherwise have no training in these arts whatsoever (I ain’t no actor, any memorizing I do is strictly for fun), that’s not bad.  I can only imagine the traffic I would have gotten if they’d written a more positive description! What I did not notice at first was the lengthy discussion the students had over which links were helpful, and I was very pleased to see a number of students saying that they liked the information.  Except for one at the end who said that she liked them all except mine.  Oh, well.