While Googling around for shakespeare trivia I ran into the mother of all Shakespeare quiz repositories. They’re categorized by play (three quizzes on Titus Andronicus alone??) and difficulty.

I’m working my way through the “tough” ones. Getting about a 7 or 8 out of 10 on average.

Weird – attempting to identify the play in which a dying character says “A plague on both your houses”, which obviously we all know to be Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, I ended up getting it wrong because I typed “Merchant of Venice.” I totally don’t remember doing so. My only guess is that I started typing “Mercutio”, but my fingers knew that the category was plays, not characters, and ended up filling in the name of a play that started with Mer. I hate when that happens.

Big news of the day is that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is stepping down. The only reason it’s mentioned here, though, is that fellow justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is quoted referring to O’Connor’s surprise appearance in a 1996 production of Henry V. In particular, the quote “Hap’ly, a woman’s voice may do some good” is what makes it relevant :).

Anybody think she’ll be replaced by another woman? Another woman who’s done Shakespeare?

Here’s a loaded question – if Bush ever did Shakespeare, what role do you think would have suited him best?

I thought this story, analyzing the Philadelphia Phillies’ (baseball) season entirely in Shakespeare quotes was entertaining enough to merit a link. If somebody in Boston was literate enough to do that for the Red Sox, I might even have something to say on the subject. But … it’s the Phillies.

The new movie “Yes” by Sally Potter could easily have slipped under most people’s radar if not for the unusual fact that the whole thing is written in iambic pentameter. That’s a pretty neat trick.

Other than the straightforward “star-crossed lovers” theme lifted from Romeo and Juliet, there are no other particular parallels to the bard. As a matter of fact I got to the point in the review that says Potter wrote the movie “as a response to 9/11” and pretty much stopped reading right there. I go to movies to be entertained, not preached at.

This is the second time I’ve stumbled over a review of 1599:A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare so I’m putting up a link. The reason I didn’t in the first place is that given my recent reading I’m not sure of the value of something that says “Let’s take a specific year and look at all the details of what happened.” For instance do we truly know for a fact that this was the year that he wrote Hamlet, As You Like It, Henry V and Julius Caesar? Or is that just the accepted timeline? If it’s the latter, that’s cool – but it’s pretty hard to then write the book like a calendar of events, since it’s really only by mutual agreement that this is the case, not any cold hard facts.