If you’re a reader of science fiction at all then you must known Ender’s Game, Card’s classic story of a boy genius who (reluctantly?) saves the universe. (Later Card expanded it to a many book series, but die hards will tell you the original should have been left as it was :)).

His newest is Magic Street, where “The residents of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class African-American L.A. neighborhood, get caught up in a battle between the king and the queen of the fairies in this wonderful urban fantasy…” Points for you if you said, “Hmmm, that sounds like Midsummer Night’s Dream” because that’s exactly what the author has done, putting Oberon, Titania and Puck straight into the book.

“What was fun was fitting them into black culture and sort of back-writing onto Shakespeare’s story that they were black all along and the conceit that William Shakespeare actually knew Titania. That was too much fun. I couldn’t pass up the chance to do that,” he says.

Found this review in the NY Times about a London production of The Tempest where “…there seems to be little question that everything that happens occurs in one man’s mind. Or that this Prospero, who conducts conversations with the figures on a chess board, is experiencing something like a nervous breakdown in iambic pentameter.”

I just love that idea. Poor old Prospero, abandoned to die on this distant island, hallucinating about a life where he has the power to exact revenge upon his enemies and watch over and protect his daughter as she grows into a young woman, as fathers are supposed to do. It’s sad, but it’s a great interpretation. Puts all the fairy/seamonster/magic-book stuff right into perspective if you consider that it’s all just the ravings of a man going crazy.

I found this article that poses the time travel question amusing not because Gina Accorsi says “probably towards the time Shakespeare lived,” but because of her rationale: “There seems to have been less conflict back then.”

Methinks she doth assume too much. From what I understand it was quite the battleground at the time between the Catholics and the Protestants, and more than one biographer has tried to make the case that one reason we know so little about Shakespeare is that he deliberately kept a low profile for fear of being branded a traitor and meeting quite a nasty fate.

Freud may have done it first, but in this article from Psychiatric Times the notion of psychoanalyzing Hamlet returns, looking at literature as a basic science of psychiatry.

I love this idea. You know that your characters have acquired the sort of depth you’re striving for if psychiatrists can analyze them using the same techniques they might use of non-fictional people.

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.