[ADMIN : Highly insanely crazy busy these days, so sorry for the lag.  Trying to get back into the swing of things with a bunch of short, linky posts so people know I’m not dead.] CreditSlips.com has a creative article up about Shakespeare on Bankruptcy.  I like the quote, “Every law professor believes that every other subject is a subset of his own. I agree: there is a bankruptcy angle to everything.”  Although I think it’s true for more than just law professors!  

Marginal Revolution offers a glimpse into Rosenbaum’s “Shakespeare Wars” with this post on how to appreciate Shakespeare.  More specifically he examines Rosenbaum’s list of the best Shakespeare performances, including Orson Welles Chimes at Midnight which I’d never even heard of. And it does not go unnoticed that Kenneth Brannagh is not even on the list.  

I don’t know about you all, but probably the most pitiful part in all of Hamlet comes when Ophelia enters to pass out the flowers to her family, and we get to see what’s happened to the poor girl:

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts,” said Ophelia to her brother Laertes. “There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.“

Anyway, the San Francisco Chronicle has a lengthy article detailing what each individual herb meant.    It’s quite a detailed article, explaining what each one means, how Shakespeare referenced it, and a guess at why Ophelia speaks of it.  But I’m not sure of all the leaps it makes.  For instance, rosemary is for remembrance, repelling witches, and chasing away bad dreams.  But for Ophelia, “distraught and depressed over her father’s death and Hamlet’s odd behavior, the mention..indicates…her brittle self-image and lack of confidence.”  What?  Huh?  I suppose maybe there’s some sort of “This is all a bad dream I’m having, and I want the rosemary to protect me from it”, but that’s a stretch. 

More About Ophelia…

• Ophelia’s Imaginary Flowers
• Why did Ophelia break up with Hamlet?
• Hamlet vs Ophelia (video)
• Violets?
• Ophelia Was Pushed!

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. 🙂