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Everybody loved that video of the Beatles doing Pyramus and Thisbe. How about William Shatner doing a pretty funky rendition of Marc Antony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..." speech? Halfway through it turns into a rap video. His take on "Let slip the dogs of war" is nothing compared to how his arch enemy General Chang did it in Star Trek VI.
Weird. It's from Free Enterprise, which I've never seen.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, video
I like this article on "Enjoying La Belle Dame Sans Merci", by John Keats. It's here because of the nice reference to Shakespeare:
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Hey, it turns out that people are indeed putting the sonnets to music. I am both pleased and disappointed to discover Rhythm of the Sonnets which puts 12 of them to music, but only offers Real Audio clips for download. So I have no idea if they're any good or not. If the author's listening, how about some MP3? If I can't put it on my iPod, I'm not listening.
Technorati Tags: mp3, Shakespeare, sonnet
I'm still looking for more examples of the sonnets put to music. But since I'm trolling through the videos this morning, here is the link to a short film somebody made of Sonnet 65. Interesting. Sometimes the sounds effects (the running water in particular) were too loud for the narration, and in general it was read rather fast. But still, a cool idea. I'd be happy to find a collection of such things.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, sonnet, video
Doing a little searching of Google Video turned up this "obscure gem", a silent movie version of Twelfth Night apparently from 1910.
Actually there's lots of free Shakespeare video in there, so have a field day. Lots of it seems to be from "60 Second Shakespeare" which is some sort of BBC workshop. And a number of high school productions.
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So, my traffic spiked yesterday and I had no idea why. Turns out that I'm the lead-off quote in a Google Book Search story about Shakespeare. Apparently they liked the whole "Sonnet 18 by David Gilmour" story. Thanks for the link, Arielle!
She (I assume?) called Troilus and Cressida and "obscure gem". Not sure which, if either, of those words I agree with :).
Technorati Tags: blog, booksearch, Shakespeare
Ok, this is just painful. On this week's edition of NPR's "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" there was an item about the changing curriculum of Shakespeare in England. Apparently (looking for a news item to back this up) they're officially making it "easier". Ready for the quote they gave? From Macbeth, they use the example: "Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come let me clutch thee...I have thee not, and yet I see thee still." Apparently this is being translated, and I'm not making this up, into "Oooooo, wouldya lookat that?"
At least one line in Romeo and Juliet, as well, is translated into "Hey, how 'bout a snog?"
It's almost too silly to believe, but they reported it as a true story. Gotta find me some confirmation!
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Excuse me while my head explodes, in the good way. When I saw this blog's headline, "David Gilmour - Sonnet 18", I first skipped past it. Then said "Wait a minute...the Pink Floyd guy?" I got excited. Everybody hopes to hear the sonnets put to music, could it be that there's audio of Pink Floyd doing it? Talk about your head exploding in the good way.
Sure enough, the link (head for "download") offers an MP3 of David Gilmour singing Sonnet 18. I won't lie -- the iambic pentameter model does not lend itself well to music -- but who cares! It's got that Pink Floyd sound, there's nothing bad about that.
I'm trying desperately to find out if there are more like this, but so far coming up with just the one (even "download this entire playlist" only has the one entry). Anybody know where this came from, and if there's more like it? I see "Bonus" in the title so I'm assuming that it's an extra track on one of the DVD collections or something.
Update: Found it - it is indeed the bonus track on David Gilmour in Concert. Unfortunately that means it's probably the only one.
Technorati Tags: mp3, pink floyd, Shakespeare, sonnet
Just found this blog post where the author claims that Shakespeare, in his opinion, is overrated as a playwright. Just thought it was something my readers might want to go check out.
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Promptbooks are copies of the script with a whole bunch of handwritten notes inside that the actors would have used to detail exactly how a scene would be played. This site has scans of a number of Shakespearean prompt books, including Macbeth. Fascinating stuff. It's a little hard to navigate at first. Head for the images, basically. If you find yourself on a page that says "Hand" a lot, it's actually describing in detail who wrote what on the page -- but there's probably an image of the page that you can click on.
Technorati Tags: macbeth, Shakespeare
Shakespeare - Other Sites:
There are far too many links on this page for me to just pick a couple, so I'm linking the whole thing. Something for everybody!
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A friend sent me the link to yesterday's Word A Day word, asking if I'd ever heard of it through the Shakespeare connection. Apparently a character in Love's Labour's Lost says it, but no, I did not remember it. Additionally, if you scramble the letters a bit you end up with a Latin phrase that means "These plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world." Which of course means nothing, but it's neat nonetheless :).
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
In general, I have no opinion on the authorship question. I'm familiar with the players in the game - Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and so on - it's just that I'm more interested in what was written than in who wrote it. So when I was asked to write a review of Robin P. Williams' book, "Sweet Swan of Avon : Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?" I said sure, why not. I figure I can be as unbiased as the next guy. If I'm going to read one of the authorship books cover to cover, this sounds like a good one.
Williams supports the argument that Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, wrote Shakespeare's works (both the plays and the sonnets). The most educated woman of the day (rivalling Queen Elizabeth herself), Sidney was a recognized force in the literary movement of the day. Honestly I can't sit here and do justice to all the points of Sidney's life and how they map to the Shakespeare canon, so I'm not going to try. She was intimately connected to the right people, had the writing ability to hold her own among the best of them, and the events of her life (romantic and tragic alike) sit closely on the timeline to when the plays and sonnets were written. If this subject is your thing, there'll be plenty here for you to dig through. With 40 pages of appendices and another 12 of endnotes, there's plenty of cross reference material to keep you busy fact checking the author's argument.
Luckily the book comes at the question in a fun, almost lighthearted way. It is certainly not the stodgy tome of archival detective work it might have been, were it written fifty years ago. Instead, the author comes right out and admits that she's not trying to prove anything, but merely to demonstrate how strong a case can be made. How her theory "answers more questions than it creates". I could just imagine the author interrupting a cocktail party argument between an Oxfordian and a Baconian, waiting for her moment to drop in, "Why couldn't the author have been a woman?" and waiting for the sputtered, indignant cries of "Nonsense!" to begin.
As a matter of fact the book does feel like it's organized as a quick reference cheat sheet for winning exactly such an argument. Take chapter 5, "Introduction to the Sonnets", which addresses the whole "Then surely Shakespeare was gay, right?" question by offering up the 4 most common arguments (i.e. "Everybody talked like that back then!") and providing quotable material to shoot down each of those arguments. Chapter 9 lists every literary work known to be a source for the plays, how it connects back to the Mary Sidney, and how in most cases there is no way to associate Shakespeare with the work. And so on. Why did Shakespeare write such strong female characters and write, in general, such awful men (murderous, insanely jealous husbands, overbearing fathers...)? Chapter 12 has some thoughts on the subject.
Every chapter starts with a summary of documented evidence, and a timeline (there is even a giant pullout timeline at the end of the book). Many of the chapters are giant tables listing multiple pieces of evidence (or lack thereof) and comparing Sidney versus Shakespeare. Chapter 9 in particular, documenting the sources of the plays, is one big 15page table. I'm a bit disappointed that she barely attempts to map the plays to Sidney's life (having done such a thorough job with the sonnets), using the "Anyone can make a case for any author" argument. She then goes on to make the case for Titus Andronicus, All's Well That Ends Well, and Love's Labour's Lost. But the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear are left with the summary that "This was indeed a difficult and disappointing time in Mary's life." I would have liked her to choose something a little deeper for her demonstration, if it's truly that easy to make the case for any author.
For good or for bad, much of the book is dedicated to "Shakespeare can't have written this" or "There's no evidence that Shakespeare wrote that", rather than in support of Mary Sidney. Imagine an authorship argument like a political campaign commercial. You don't win any points by saying "Yeah, the other side had a good point there." You spend part of your time supporting your own case, and part of your time (often, the larger part) bashing the other guy's position. So naturally the book is so lopsided that unless you're personally invested in the case for Shakespeare you can't help but come away thinking that it's so obvious that Sidney wrote the works that why didn't somebody think of this sooner? Personally I noticed the implication that most of the books in support of Shakespearean biography play fast and loose with the facts (including a swipe at Greenblatt's Will in the World, a recent, popular addition to that category), while we're expected to believe that books such as this one are always letter perfect, never exaggerate their case and can back up all of their statements with objective evidence.
Then there's the case of William, Mary's son. Williams mentions the recent (1935) discovery that he had two illegitimate children, almost 300 years after the fact. Gary Wroth, in "The Sidney Family Romance", calls it a "total cover-up by the Sidneys". Whose to say that one of these years we won't find those crucial bits of evidence that reveal the answer to the big question once and for all? There's a world of difference between "There's no evidence" and "It didn't happen", and the Sidney example demonstrates that.
When I told people I was reviewing this book, and its premise, one of them said, "Oh, so, fiction?" I explained the authorship question and how really, other than the fact that Shakespeare's name is on the plays, there's surprisingly little evidence that the man wrote them. It dawned on me after doing that a few times that I'm wiling to believe it. I don't explain it to people with an eye roll and liberal insertion of the word "crackpot", but rather as a valid question in the world of Shakespeare. It is indeed quite possible that somebody other than the man William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, as far as the evidence shows. Was it Mary Sidney? The Earl of Oxford? Christopher Marlowe? I don't think we'll ever really know, at least not until some decisive evidence shows up. What would be fun, I think, is to watch some people from the different camps go at it. As I mentioned, the "Shakespeare versus ______" argument is too one-sided to be much fun, since the folks defending Shakespeare don't often feel obliged to do a point by point analysis like his detractors do.
I do definitely recommend the book. I realize that this review has focused primarily on the book itself and not the content within, but like I said at the beginning, I'm not much of a scholar on the salient points of the argument. That's why I like the book, really. I keep picking it up, opening it at random, and learning something new. Whether or not every assertion is true, I don't really know. But it's going to make for a fun debate in a few weeks when Shakespeare in the Park comes back to town and I get to talk about my favorite subject some more. :)
Technorati Tags: book review, Shakespeare
A friend sent me the link to yesterday's Word A Day word, asking if I'd ever heard of it through the Shakespeare connection. Apparently a character in Love's Labour's Lost says it, but no, I did not remember it. Additionally, if you scramble the letters a bit you end up with a Latin phrase that means "These plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world." Which of course means nothing, but it's neat nonetheless :).
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Shakespeare - Other Sites:
There are far too many links on this page for me to just pick a couple, so I'm linking the whole thing. Something for everybody!
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Shakespeare Authorship:
Following up my recent book review I discovered the Shakespeare Authorship site, which is clearly dedicated to supporting the case that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Although it takes aim directly at the Oxfordian argument, it's nice to see some support of the standard arguments (many of which appear in Robin P. Williams' book), such as the "fact" that Shakespeare's death went unnoticed. Mary Sidney's name does not appear on the page, in case anybody's curious.
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The Shakespeare Book of Lists:
I don't love this list of 150 Shakespeare cliches. They're presented in such a brief format that most of them lose their original flavor. Example? "Dog will have its day" does not sound nearly as interesting to me as "Cat will mew and dog will have its day," or even "Every dog has his day", which would be an incorrect quote, but closer to the cliche as people know it. The source play is referenced, but not the act or scene, so good luck looking them up on your own.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project:
Candian Adaptions of Shakespeare is exactly what it says it is: an as-close-to comprehensive (and ever-growing), digital archive of performances, productions, playwrights, and other materials that date from pre-Confederation times to the present day.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare
Box Of Books: SHAKESPEARE FOR AMATEURS, "Two Gentlemen Of Verona":
I can't remember if I've linked "Box of Books" before. The author appears to be going through Shakespeare's works one play at a time, and makes no excuses for her opinions. Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare's worst play, apparently. She hated it.
Technorati Tags: blog, Shakespeare
In general, I have no opinion on the authorship question. I'm familiar with the players in the game - Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and so on - it's just that I'm more interested in what was written than in who wrote it. So when I was asked to write a review of Robin P. Williams' book, "Sweet Swan of Avon : Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?" I said sure, why not. I figure I can be as unbiased as the next guy. If I'm going to read one of the authorship books cover to cover, this sounds like a good one.
Williams supports the argument that Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, wrote Shakespeare's works (both the plays and the sonnets). The most educated woman of the day (rivalling Queen Elizabeth herself), Sidney was a recognized force in the literary movement of the day. Honestly I can't sit here and do justice to all the points of Sidney's life and how they map to the Shakespeare canon, so I'm not going to try. She was intimately connected to the right people, had the writing ability to hold her own among the best of them, and the events of her life (romantic and tragic alike) sit closely on the timeline to when the plays and sonnets were written. If this subject is your thing, there'll be plenty here for you to dig through. With 40 pages of appendices and another 12 of endnotes, there's plenty of cross reference material to keep you busy fact checking the authors argument.
Luckily the book comes at the question in a fun, almost lighthearted way. It is certainly not the stodgy tome of archival detective work it might have been, were it written fifty years ago. Instead, the author comes right out and admits that she's not trying to prove anything, but merely to demonstrate how strong a case can be made. How her theory "answers more questions than it creates". I could just imagine the author interrupting a cocktail party argument between an Oxfordian and a Baconian, waiting for her moment to drop in, "Why couldn't the author have been a woman?" and waiting for the sputtered, indignant cries of "Nonsense!" to begin.
As a matter of fact the book does feel like it's organized as a quick reference cheat sheet for winning exactly such an argument. Take chapter 5, "Introduction to the Sonnets", which addresses the whole "Then surely Shakespeare was gay, right?" question by offering up the 4 most common arguments (i.e. "Everybody talked like that back then!") and providing quotable material to shoot down each of those arguments. Chapter 9 lists every literary work known to be a source for the plays, how it connects back to the Mary Sidney, and how in most cases there is no way to associate Shakespeare with the work. And so on. Why did Shakespeare write such strong female characters and write, in general, such awful men (murderous, insanely jealous husbands, overbearing fathers...)? Chapter 12 has some thoughts on the subject.
Every chapter starts with a summary of documented evidence, and a timeline (there is even a giant pullout timeline at the end of the book). Many of the chapters are giant tables listing multiple pieces of evidence (or lack thereof) and comparing Sidney versus Shakespeare. Chapter 9 in particular, documenting the sources of the plays, is one big 15page table. I'm a bit disappointed that she barely attempts to map the plays to Sidney's life (having done such a thorough job with the sonnets), using the "Anyone can make a case for any author" argument. She then goes on to make the case for Titus Andronicus, All's Well That Ends Well, and Love's Labour's Lost. But the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear are left with the summary that "This was indeed a difficult and disappointing time in Mary's life." I would have liked her to choose something a little deeper for her demonstration, if it's truly that easy to make the case for any author.
For good or for bad, much of the book is dedicated to "Shakespeare can't have written this" or "There's no evidence that Shakespeare wrote that", rather than in support of Mary Sidney. Imagine an authorship argument like a political campaign commercial. You don't win any points by saying "Yeah, the other side had a good point there." You spend part of your time supporting your own case, and part of your time (often, the larger part) bashing the other guy's position. So naturally the book is so lopsided that unless you're personally invested in the case for Shakespeare you can't help but come away thinking that it's so obvious that Sidney wrote the works that why didn't somebody think of this sooner? Personally I noticed several questionable spots, like the implication that most of the books in support of Shakespearean biography play fast and loose with the facts (including a swipe at Greenblatt's Will in the World, a recent, popular addition to that category), while we're expected to believe that books such as this one are always letter perfect, never exaggerate their case and can back up all of their statements with objective evidence.
On the other hand, Williams mentions the case of Mary's son William and the recent (1935) discovery that he had two illegitimate children, almost 300 years after the fact. Gary Wroth, in "The Sidney Family Romance", calls it a "total cover-up by the Sidneys". Whose to say that one of these years we won't find those crucial bits of evidence that reveal the answer to the big question once and for all? There's a world of difference between "There's no evidence" and "It didn't happen", and the Sidney example demonstrates that.
When I told people I was reviewing this book, and its premise, one of them said, "Oh, so, fiction?" I explained the authorship question, and how, really, other than the fact that Shakespeare's name is on the plays, there's really not much other evidence that the man wrote them. It dawned on me after doing that a few times that I really believe it. I don't explain it to people with an eye roll and liberal insertion of the word "crackpot", but rather as a valid question in the world of Shakespeare. It is indeed quite possible that somebody other than the man William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, as far as the evidence shows. Was it Mary Sidney? The Earl of Oxford? Christopher Marlowe? I don't think we'll ever really know, at least not until some decisive evidence shows up. What would be fun, I think, is to watch some people from the different camps go at it. As I mentioned, the "Shakespeare versus ______" argument is too one sided to be much fun, since the folks defending Shakespeare don't often feel obliged to do a point by point analysis like his detractors do.
I do definitely recommend the book. I realize that this review has focused primarily on the book itself and not the content within, but like I said at the beginning, I'm not much of a scholar on the salient points of the argument. That's why I like the book, really. I keep picking it up, opening it at random, and learning something new. Whether or not every assertion is true, I don't really know. But it's going to make for a fun debate in a few weeks when Shakespeare in the Park comes back to town and I get to talk about my favorite subject some more. :)
Technorati Tags: book review, Shakespeare
