I’ve posted about computer animated Shakespeare videos before, but this is the first time I’ve seen a computer-generated creation try to actually act.  Pendulum Studios put together this scene of Marc Anthony doing the “All is lost…” speech (“triple turn’d whore!”).  Pretty intriguing stuff.  There’s an actor doing the voice, that’s not computer generated.  But it’s interesting to see how far the movements and facial expressions have come.  The graphics purists are already picking on things like the rendering of the hands, but I’m more interested in the face.  

Title says it all, really. 🙂  

Ed Friedlander, M.D. is a doctor who writes about Shakespeare.  I’ve linked to his stuff before.  Recently his page on Enjoying Macbeth came up (which I don’t think I’ve linked before) and it’s worth a look for it’s brutal description of the violence, if nothing else.  He comes right out in the first page and warns people that it’s not family entertainment, and goes on to not only point out every scene of violence, but to put them in proper historical context.  Yet he still keeps it very accessible, even pointing to oddities like why no one suspects Lady Macbeth, even when she comes out with her “What, in our house?” line.  Methinks the lady doth protest too much!  Wait, wrong play. Anyway, lots of great info on that page, far more than most I’ve scene.    Worth checking out.

We don’t get much opportunity to post graphic-intensive stories, so I thought that this link to Dressing Shakespeare would be fun.  Both male and female garments are broken down and described by their pieces.  I learned something — I always pictured the high female collar as something worn strictly by royals (probably since I’ve only ever seen pictures of Elizabeth in it).  Now I know different.  

I’m falling behind.  The other day a study came out that suggests reading Shakespeare is good for your brain.  “The brain appears to become baffled by something unexpected in the text that jolts it into a higher level of thinking.”  Ok, that makes sense.  That’s the same sort of logic that suggests that people do puzzles, play games, and so on.  in other words, exercise your brain.  Can’t say I have a problem with that! There’s a book coming out called “Shakespeare Thinking” on the subject.  How does someone get an entire book out of that?  I guess I acknowledge the value of the finding but I’m not sure that it’s all that related to Shakespeare specifically.  They’re basically saying that when you encounter word structures that are unfamiliar to you, your brain has to work harder to get them to make sense.   When trying to explain this to people I always used the example:  “I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth.”  Had Shakespeare said “I have lost all my mirth as of late and wherefore I know not”, it would have been more in tune with the way someone today would say it (“I’m bummed out lately and I don’t know why”).   But as written it’s got a much nicer cadence to it (something that we all recognize as iambic, ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH..) that the typical reader wouldn’t necessarily know, but would still be able to process.  The obvious question to ask is what happens to those of us for whom reading Shakespeare is not “something unexpected”?  Do we no longer get the cerebral kick that folks more in tune with more “pedestrian” reading get?