Waitress:
…or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and Shakespeare.
Wife:
Have you got anything without Shakespeare?
Waitress:
Well, there’s Shakespeare egg sausage and Shakespeare, that’s not got much Shakespeare in it.
Wife:
I don’t want ANY Shakespeare!
Man:
Why can’t she have egg bacon Shakespeare and sausage?

With apologies to Monty Python, the question on the table is “What’s your favorite movie with Shakespeare in it?”
I do not mean movie versions of Shakespeare plays, like Branagh’s Hamlet.  Nor do I mean movies based on Shakespeare, like Ten Things I Hate About You.
I thought about this one after seeing Prince of Players, about the Booth family.  It’s a regular movie about regular people, who just happen to be famous Shakespeareans.  So it’s got a good amount of Shakespeare in it, without being specifically a Shakespeare movie.
Make sense?

New reader Ken sent me this link to the Shakespeare Trading Card (can you really call it a baseball card?) that’s part of the 2010 Topps Allen and Ginter set known as “World’s Wordsmiths”. There’s not a whole bunch of content to talk about, so go check it out and pay the $4 if you simply must have one.  I do like, though, how they write about the “almost 200 surviving works” of our Stratford man.  I guess they’re counting every individual sonnet as a separate thing?  Would have been cooler if the back had actual stats like a baseball player – date of birth, number of plays, number of sonnets, words invented, number of children, etc… Thanks, Ken!

I’ve told this story before, but this time I want to turn it into a discussion. Eons ago, when I was working at the supermarket during my college-ish years (that’d be circa 1988-1994 for anybody that wants specifics), I got into a discussion about Shakespeare with one of the ladies that worked with me, who I think was an English teacher in a past life.  I asked her what she thought of Shakespeare, or whether she was a fan, or what her favorite play was … I can’t remember the question.  But I’ve always remembered the answer:

I think that if the entirety of human civilization were to end tomorrow, and only one book survived that might show whatever comes next what once was, that book should be King Lear.

High praise.  But do you agree? Let’s put that out there as our sci-fi hypothesis.  Mankind?  Wiped out.  Maybe some of us blasted off on a rocket and came back around again a few thousand years later, or maybe it’s the aliens coming to see how exactly we blew ourselves up. They’re picking through the rubble, and they find a book.  What book?  Shakespeare?  If not Shakespeare, then who? Hold your horses, before everybody jumps in with “Bible!” I will extend the question – are you picking a book that is supposed to represent human civilization the way it *was*, good and bad? Or the way you wish it was? Do you see this as an opportunity for a historical record of what was, or a recipe book for how to change the future?

I was surprised to see this one attributed to Shakespeare, but there’s even an Ask Yahoo where somebody says “Is this really Shakespeare?” so apparently it’s out there as being by him.  What’s funny is the “best answer” is “Yes it’s by Shakespeare but I don’t know which play.”

That’s because it’s not by Shakespeare, it’s by Andy Warhol a few hundred years after the fact.

I swear I did not see this article on 20 Classic Closing Lines from Literature when I posted Best Ending Lines.  Who knows, maybe they stole my idea? 🙂 Anyway, what’s interesting about this article is that Mr. Shakespeare *does* appear on the list for a change.  Before looking, anybody want to guess? Because you’ll never guess.  I never would have.  I still don’t understand why they picked the one they did. (True story, I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was in second grade.  I was in the hospital for a period of time, and a well-meaning aunt knew I liked to read. So she brought me some books.  One of them happened to be Hemingway.  <shrug>  Not claiming I understood it, just that I read it.  Guy goes fishing, and it takes him so long and out so far to get the actual fish that by the time he gets home all the other fish have eaten it, right? Something like that. ;))