Quiz: What Shakespeare character are you?

I can’t remember if I ever posted this, but I’m pretty sure I never took it. Just did, and it told me I’m Iago. Dang!

Iago- Sneaky and devious.

You befriend and betray.
Get a grip!
Which Shakespeare character are you?
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

I like this post because I appreciate that somebody can break out the Shakespeare to support their position (even if I may not agree with the position). Arnold Schwarzenegger has denied clemency for “Tookie” Williams, so this user over at Talk Politics suggests that maybe the governator should have read his Merchant of Venice.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

I had never before seen this parody entitled Shakespeare and Christmas, by Max Beerbohm. The premise chosen is that since Shakespeare only ever mentioned Christmas once in his entire body of work – and even then, in not very flattering light — therefore he must have utterly loathed the holiday.

I think it’s funny.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

Is Squidoo the next big thing? Created by Seth Godin with the premise that “everybody is an expert in something”, Squidoo attempts to take all the best elements of the Web2.0 world (RSS, blogs, flickr, tags, etc…) and wrap it all in a user friendly, build-it-up-from-pieces way so that anybody with a desire to make a place for information on topic X can do so.

I know that most blog approaches, like this one I’m using, are limited in the “and what else can it do?” sense. For instance, if I find another RSS feed that I might want to include here, can I do it? I have yet to figure it out. And if I want to add some Links to a section on other Shakespeare sites, I have to go edit and publish the template by hand. Nasty. With Squidoo, everything is build into the dynamic GUI where you drag and drop sections around the page.

Naturally I’ve already hooked myself up: ShakespeareStuff. Tell me if you like it. Where would you normally visit – there (where they have an RSS feed back to here), or here? Why?

Technorati Tags: business, idea, squidoo, RSS, Shakespeare, startup

Music of Shakespeare’s Plays, New CD by Ensemble Chaconne:

Don’t know anything about it, but people were interested last time I had a story about the music of Shakespeare.

Among the many selections are “Willow, Willow” sung by Desdemona before her murder in Othello; “It Was a Lover and His Lass” (As You Like It); “O Mistress Mine” (Twelfth Night); “Hark, Hark! The Lark” (Cymbeline); “Take O Take Those Lips Away” (Measure for Measure); “Full Fathom Five” (The Tempest), “Go from My Window” from Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet; and “Greensleeves,” Shakespeare’s best-known ballad tune (quoted in The Merry Wives of Windsor), an allusion to women of ill repute, recognized by their green sleeves.
I’m curious about the Ophelia song. I wrote the beginning of a play once that I called “Ophelia’s Song”. The idea was that, like R&G Are Dead, it focused on the scenes between the scenes, what Ophelia was up to when she wasn’t on stage. The story was that she and Hamlet definitely had a relationship going, and he’d convinced her that he was just “playing” mad. I like that scene where she enters and gives the flowers to everybody. It might be the most tragic bit in the whole play, short of Hamlet’s final deathbed speech. Especially if there was a little more meat there to work with. Shakespeare didn’t really give her much depth.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare