No good Shakespeare news stories or sightings to report recently so I might as well start up with more personal stories. Last night for the first time in a long time Kerry and I were able to sit on the couch and read the newspaper in the evening, both kids asleep. “Oh hey,” she says, “Henry the Eighth.”

“That’s a Shakespeare play,” I say, curious.

“No, wait,” she says, reading, “Is that eight? What’s V?”

“V is five. Probably Henry the Sixth, then.”

“Nope, just V.”

“Eh?”

She hands me the paper. Sure enough the headline is, “Highschool performs Henry the V.”

Henry “The” V? Never heard it called that before :). Methinks the writer is perhaps not a Shakespeare fan.

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SavageChickens is just the kind of comic I like. It’s small – written on yellow stickies. The humor is in the joke, not the artwork. And there’s lots and lots and and lots of Shakespeare references. Go check it out.

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I just found ShakespeareComics.com so I can’t say I know much about it. But I like the idea. As the newspaper article I saw put it, “Half a loaf of Shakespeare is better than none.” In other words, even though many hardcore fans (like myself) would normally insist that you have to stick with the original language, if the choice is between giving up the language versus losing them completely, I’ll give up the language.

Plays include Midsummer’s, Macbeth, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night. The site even has screenshots which is very cool. I see that the “modern english” version is literally right next to the original, so at least they haven’t totally foregone the source.

Their summary of Macbeth is weird. Is he really an essentially good man? Where’s the evidence of that? Sure, his wife is the one that pushes him into all the really bad acts, but is it true to say that we know he was all that good in the first place? He didn’t take much convincing, after all.

I agree with them, though, that his speech on learning of his wife’s feath is “amongst the most powerful and haunting in literature.” It is so completely and totally unexpected for where it is that (when done justice) just hits you like an emotional freight train.

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Wow, wish I’d thought of this Shakespeare-O-Lantern! Very cool indeed.

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Oh no no no no, tell me that this story about digging up Shakespeare’s body is a Halloween joke. Apparently some American scientists have become convinced that Shakespeare was murdered by his son in law? Would that be the one who married the younger daughter, where Shakespeare deliberately rewrote the will at the last minute to make sure that the son in law wouldn’t get anything? The son in law who was involved in some sort of scandal where he got another woman pregnant?

I don’t think it’s cool to go digging up bodies just to satisfy your own curiosity.

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