To be, or not to . . . Oh, never mind - Health - Times Online

To be, or not to . . . Oh, never mind - Health - Times Online

Did Shakespeare have his bad days when he wrote just to get the wordcount up? Did he wake up hungover, look at a half finished page and think "Where was I?" Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director at the Globe, thinks so. He shows a number of examples (specifically from The Tempest, Macbeth and King Lear) where he feels that the Bard wasn't quite firing on all cylinders.

It's an interesting position to take. If you take the position that every word was perfect, then you're just being silly - Shakespeare was a man just like everybody else. But if you cite specific passages and say "This is awkward" then people will come out of the woodwork to defend that particular passage and tell you that you simply didn't understand it. At least this opinion is coming from somebody who is in the business of staging Shakespaere, so when he says "There's no way to deliver a line like that with any passion" he's got some degree of experience with it.

Does this remind anybody else of Polonius? "The most beautified Ophelia? That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase..."

Shall I Compare Scarlett Johansson to a Summer's day?

Well, this is interesting. Anybody want to see Sonnet 18 done as an animated tribute to actress Scarlett Johansson?

David Hasselhoff Wants To Do Shakespeare - Starpulse News Blog

David Hasselhoff Wants To Do Shakespeare - Starpulse News Blog

Title really says it all, don't it? The only real question is what role he should play? Maybe he and Jessica Simpson can start out with a Troilus and Cressida or something. See if either of them realizes that there's more to Shakespeare canon than just the biggies.

The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1968) - Ghost Dance Sequence - Google Video

I have no idea what to make of this. The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1968) - Ghost Dance Sequence is something that BoingBoing refers to as "Ethnic psychedelia by India's filmic Shakespeare". If somebody wants to comment and clarify the connection to Shakespeare, feel free. I'm guessing that "filmic Shakespeare" is like "Kenneth Brannagh."

Studio 60, Tom Stoppard, and Shakespeare.

I never followed West Wing, so I don't plan to follow Studio 60. But if you did (and/or you do), you might enjoy Just Eat the Damn Peach's idea that there should be a new version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, starring Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry.

Tags: Shakespeare Studio 60 West Wing

Yarrgh, the Bard would be pleased

Savage Chickens does Shakespeare Like A Pirate to celebrate National Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Grammar Lessons, Shakespeare Style

Shakespeare's Grammar: Rhetorical Devices is really something out of a high school English class, but I love the use of examples from Shakespeare to show such vocabulary lesson concepts as alliteration, anaphora, and onomatopoeia. Ok, I'll admit some of the terms are new to me, too. Fair is foul and foul is fair? That's your basic "chiasmus" right there, ya see. And "Take thy face hence?" What you've got there is a synecdoche.

Did I ever tell you about the time I tried a new Mexican restaurant, and told the waiter, "I'd like the chicken and cheese chimichanga, because you can't pass up an alliteration like that." He didn't appreciate the poetic significance.

How do you spell onomatopoeia? Just like it sounds.

Tags: Shakespeare

The Shakespeare Code

Interested in the Francis Bacon theory of Authorship? The Shakespeare Code is a $3.95 ebook, coming soon, that aims to be "the one true history of Francis Bacon."

Tag: shakespeare

I .... don't really know what this is

I don't know what Light of Truth is, exactly, but it's definitely Shakespeare, and definitely geeky. I'm not even going to try to describe it, because I don't understand it.

Tags: shakespeare

Lego Shakespeare Comics : Why I Blog :)!

Ok, I've got to show some love to Irregular WebComic, a comic strip that's basically Lego characters with dialogue balloons over their heads. I'm digging it because he didn't just do a Shakespeare gag, he has a whole Shakespeare theme.

(I do wish it was a bit funnier, though! Lord knows I love a good Shakespeare pun, but they have to be quick and off the cuff, you can't think of the pun first and then fit the comic to the punchline. Then again I haven't read every one so maybe some of them are better than others.)

Thanks to whoever stumbled me, by the way! I hope people stick around and browse awhile!

Shakespeare Searched

I got a message today about Clusty's Shakespeare Searched engine. Althoug such things exist all over the place, it's nice to see some major search engine love bestowed upon our favorite bard.

It appears to work well enough, allowing you to break down your search by play (or sonnet) as well as character, which is a nice touch. For kicks I just told it to picK Rosencrantz and sure enough it gave me every line of his. Reads like a Tom Stoppard play :).

Unfortunately this one fails in the same way most others do, and that is spelling. Shakespeare often got creative with his spelling, particularly when doing his iambic pentameter thing, and often would skip lett'rs complet'ly. So if you search all the works for "If it were fill'd" you'll correctly get Sonnet 17, but if you didn't know that and searched for "If it were filled" then you get nothing.

Failing #2 is when to use quotes and when not. Search for "to be or not to be" and the appropriate Hamlet soliloquoy pops up - but search it without the quotes and you get King John and Timon of Athens before Hamlet shows up at number 5. But on the other hand search for "is this a dagger that I see before me" with the quotes and you'll get nothing. Search it without the quotes and you'll properly see that the word is "which" I see before me, not "that". So depending on what you're searching you'll often have to try both ways.

shakespeare

How to Retire Rich and Happy

Couldn't resist a link to this article on How to Retire Rich and Happy, mostly because it starts out by using Shakespeare's cash management strategies to make a point. Cute idea.

Technorati Tags: money, shakespeare, retirement