Shakespeare makes life better.
I knew about the movie Scotland, PA, which is a retelling of Macbeth at a hamburger joint. JoeUltimate has a quick writeup where I learn that Christopher Walken is in it. I can’t really see myself going to hunt it down just to see, but if it makes the rounds on one of the assorted movie channels (it apparently did Sundance) then I’ll have to make sure to Tivo it.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Ron Schuler’s Parlour Tricks: ‘I Started at the Top and Worked Down’:
I’m digging this Ron Schuler’s site — there seems to be lots of Shakespeare related stuff without specifically being a Shakespeare blog. Here he provides a bio of Orson Welles, which contains a number of choice Shakespearey bits. I did not know, for instance, that he had authored a Shakespeare text (“Everybody’s Shakespeare”) or that he did a movie called “Falstaff” which blends together a number of pieces of all the Henry plays.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech is an interesting discussion point for Romeo and Juliet. Technically, as last as far as the plot goes, you can skip it altogether. It goes more toward character development. When I was in school we had lengthy discussions about what the speech tells us about Mercutio. I know one high school teacher of Romeo and Juliet who simply skips it.
I noticed this blog entry about Queen Mab, which includes link to an audio of the spoken word, the speech transcript itself, and some commentary. It’s short, but it’s nice to see a whole post about just Queen Mab.
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Philocrites: Bush and Colbert, Lear and the Fool.:
Did everyone Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent’s dinner by now? The man was brilliant, but the performance was so cringeworthy that I almost felt bad for him. The humor was vicious. And Bush was sitting about 4 feet from him.
I’m happy to see Philocrites’ comparison of this situation to Lear and his Fool. Many people don’t understand the Fool as comic relief, wondering where the goofy, fall on the floor hysterics are. The Fool’s lines are usually much darker, and more along the lines of “When the king makes a mistake, I will show it to him.” I like this line : ” Their exchanges aren’t funny haha, they’re funny oh-no.” Yes, that sounds about right for Colbert’s routine.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, stephen colbert
QCTimes.com – The Quad-City Times Newspaper Features:
When I saw “Write mom a sonnet for Mother’s Day” show up in my Google alerts I got an evil grin on my face, rubbed my hands together fiendishly and prepared to blast whatever article I found for surely thinking that a sonnet was little more than 12 lines of iambic pentameter and a rhyming couplet. I get there and see that the article is written by Garrison Keillor, who has a little bit more experience as a writer than I do. 🙂 There is no dissection of what a sonnet is all about. The article is essentially a smack in the side of the head to tell people “Your mother deserves something for Mother’s Day that shows how much you appreciate her, and there’s no excuse in the book good enough because with just pencil and paper you can make like Shakespeare.”
(His sample first line doesn’t really scan, but I think he was in it more for the punchy ending ;))