Times are tough for everybody.  The Globe has gone bankrupt, and the Bard of Avon is now trying to eek out a living doing freelance work.  In reality he’ll take whatever he can get – advertising copy, humor pieces, whatever works.  The only problem is that while his command of the language might technically be “modern”, it doesn’t “pop” for today’s audiences like it once did, so he’s having to find his voice all over again. Sound interesting?  Such is the premise of the new blog Will for Hire, a new poetry experiment from Mike Southern. If you’re serious about your Shakespeare, and only the master’s blank verse will do it for you, then you may not want to read on.  But if you like poetry in general and you don’t mind a bit of a laugh at dear Will’s expense, you get to find such gems as this ode to Hershey’s chocolate:

An ode to chocolates dark; I write this day
Of sweetness tinged with bitterness sublime,
Like life itself. You draw my hungry gaze.
Impassioned, overcome, I lust for you.
Despite your grams of fat – in number, twelve,
And of those, seven saturated are –
Yea, burdened though you be with sugared vice,
These you transcend; your soul is naught but health. …

That is not complete, I didn’t want to snip too much of his content. I’m not a big “poetry for poetry’s sake” guy, but I admire the creativity.  I’m sure there’ll be some folks here that get a real kick out of it.

I’m a sucker for lists that might have anything to do with Shakespeare.  Greatest books of all time, books you must read, most controversial, most popular … I see a list, I go scanning for Shakespeare. So when I spotted “The Fictional 100” I was very pleased to see a whole set of Shakespeare characters, including some obvious choices (Hamlet, Romeo+Juliet) and some unusual ones (Troilus and Cressida). Here’s my problem, though, and why you’re not finding a link to it.  The choices don’t actually have any *reason* for why they are the choices.  Each page is just a quote from the character, and then a list of books about the character – all Amazon affiliate links, of course. I *think* that the actual book (yes, there’s an actual book) contains more information.  However, I don’t see any samples of that on the web page.  I think this is a giant mistake.  Use your web site to promote your book, not to try and pick up a few pennies by selling other people’s books. So, I’m disappointed.  I would have liked to see why Falstaff was placed on the list where he was, but I didn’t get that.  So, I don’t see much value on that web page for Shakespeare folks.  You can google for it if you want, but they won’t be getting any link love today.

Here’s something I’ve always wondered.  I can’t remember what made me think of it recently, but what the heck.

King Lear.  Kent.  He’s the only one with the guts to stand up to Lear in his fury, and he gets banished for it.  But his loyalty still won’t let him leave Lear’s side, even after all that goes down.

So here’s my question – how old is Kent?   

I am not looking for a specific age, but rather, are we talking about a Kent who is young enough not to know better when he stands up to Lear? Or someone who has been around for a lifetime and thinks (incorrectly) that he can get away with it?  I totally see either of these working.  An old Kent comes off as Lear’s peer, an old man standing by his friend’s side as his friend descends into madness (Gloucester/Lear?). A young Kent, though, would be the son Lear didn’t have, a sort of Edgar/Gloucester parallel. Who knows.  Just rambling a bit.  Is there evidence in the play to suggest one of these theories over the other?

It’s been an interesting week for the importance of editors.  At the one end we’ve got the maybe-Cardenio, which has been through so many editors hands that it’s probably got little Shakespeare left.  On the other we’ve got Barton and his Playing Shakespeare, where every comma and line break means something in how you build the character so you’d better pick the right version. It’s a distinction I’ve never fully appreciated.  I mean, I have the Complete Works on my iPhone.  Similarly, if I need to lookup a quote while at my PC I will typically hit up the MIT collection.  For my own personal projects I also keep the XML-formatted versions handy (the geek in me likes to process structured files rather than plain text).  In none of these cases could I tell you *whose* version these are, or what that means. When people speak of carrying around a First Folio, what edition are they talking about? I mean, I know what a First Folio is, but somebody point me to it on Amazon or something.  How big, how much did it cost, who did the editing/publishing, etc?

As I continue through Playing Shakespeare I’m becoming more intrigued.  I don’t really know anything about this Barton who runs the show.  Are these people in his workshop professional actors who are doing him a favor, helping him to demonstrate techniques to a mostly off-screen audience of younger, less experienced actors? Or when Ben Kingsley asks a question, is he honestly the student to Barton’s teacher?  Yes, that Ben Kingsley.  Gandhi.  Holding a script and asking Barton questions about how to play a scene. There’s a moment I watched last night when his “students”, Kingsley among them, encourage Barton to do a passage to show them what he’s talking about.  They give him this speech, of all things: KING OF FRANCE

Where is Montjoy the herald? speed him hence:
Let him greet England with our sharp defiance.
Up, princes! and, with spirit of honour edged
More sharper than your swords, hie to the field:
Charles Delabreth, high constable of France;
You Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon, and of Berri,
Alencon, Brabant, Bar, and Burgundy;
Jaques Chatillon, Rambures, Vaudemont,
Beaumont, Grandpre, Roussi, and Fauconberg,
Foix, Lestrale, Bouciqualt, and Charolois;
High dukes, great princes, barons, lords and knights,
For your great seats now quit you of great shames.
Bar Harry England, that sweeps through our land
With pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur:
Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon:
Go down upon him, you have power enough,
And in a captive chariot into Rouen
Bring him our prisoner.

And at the drop of a hat he’s right there, boom, whole speech, in character, as a demonstration of what he’s talking about (in terms of his students “not going far enough”).  They even ask him about how he chose to pronounce certain words, and he specifies when he chose the Folio pronunciation. Who the heck is this guy? All of the other actors, Patrick Stewart included, refer to a script when doing relatively well known passages such as from Julius Caesar or Merchant of Venice.  And this Barton fellow riffs off the above, which is basically a whole sequence of proper names – French names, no less! – without so much as a pause?  Maybe it was a good editing job (this is video, after all), but it was quite impressive, I have to say!