R.I.P. Sally Ride

1951-2012
First American woman in space.

Shakespeare and Chocolate

Chocolate had been imported to Spain early in the 16th century and chocolate beans were given as part of royal dowries all over Europe by the 17th century, so of course Shakespeare knew about it, and had probably partaken of the hot beverage that would later become an addiction alongside tea and coffee. He would not, however, ever tasted a Cadbury bar or a silky Godiva truffle.

Shakespeare's Chocolate in Davenport, Iowa, sells chocolate, pretzels, do-it-your-self s'mores kits (although that sounds kind of redundant) and more. One of their best sellers is a trio of "ice cream cones" crafted out of white and dark chocolate, tagged "Candy Crunch."  Definitely a company to check out if you buy mail order sweets for Christmas (or other holidays).

Even the greatest writer ever can have an off day!

Like any writer, Shakespeare had his ups and downs. He is generally  believed to have written 37 plays (in only 20 years) but if you look at the plays that show up in rep year after year after year, you start to see the same 15 or so plays over and over. Someone's always reviving Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, the Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing. You can take your pick of Macbeths and Henry Vs and any number of Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Just try, though, to find a production of Pericles.  According to some sources, Shakespeare was just a co-writer on this play, responsible for roughly half the lines. (The other writer is supposed to be a man named George Wilkins. Not much is known about Wilkins. He was apparently an inn-keeper who was into some dodgy activities.

The basic plot is that a man offers his daughter's hand in marriage to anyone who can solve a riddle but those who fail to solve the riddle will die. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, understands the riddle but ... well, it's not that simple is it?
Welsh actor Mike Gwilym, who played Dick Francis' jockey hero Sid Halley in some early adaptations of the novel The Racing Game, played the prince in the BBC adaptation of the play. Welsh-Canadian actor Geraint Wyn Davies, now a mainstay at the annual Stratford Shakespeare Festival (he's in Cymbeline this year), played the part for them at least two decades ago. (My friend Susan Garrett, who did a lot of fan fiction based on his cult series Forever Knight, had a photo of herself taken with a standup of the actor in his Pericles armor. It's a great picture but I can't find it.)
I've never seen this play performed live. I did see the TV adaptation with Gwilym but remember almost nothing about it except that Gwilym had the most intense eyes.

Enough is Enough--It's time for gun control

"Blood will have blood." --William Shakespeare, Macbeth

I grew up in a house with a gun in it. When I was younger, I went target shooting with a .22. I have fired large caliber handguns at a shooting range.  I am, in fact, a decent shot, more than good enough to pass LAPD standards.
 I am not categorically opposed to private ownership of handguns. I am not a knee-jerk liberal on the subject.I am not advocating mass confiscation of projectile weapons.
But for the love of God, we have to stop mail order gun sales, particularly of automatic rifles, and we need to close the loopholes on sales at gun shows. "Guns don't kill people," gun rights advocates are fond of saying, "people kill people." This is an argument that has been going on since 1963 when a mail-order rifle in the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy.  Fifty years people.
Enough.
Police in Aurora are now trying to trace the weapons used by a man to kill and wound dozens of people. (As I write this the death toll at the Dark Knight Rises screening is being variously reported as 12 and 13, with the number of wounded between 38 and 50.)  I'd be willing to bet the suspect picked up at least some of his arsenal either through mail order or from a gun show, where sales protocols are riddled with loopholes.

Feminist Fiction Friday--the founding feminist edition

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Best in-your-face feminist quote ever:  "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."--Ti-Grace Atkinson. I haven't read a lot of Atkinson. At some point in college I read her pamphlet "Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterical Survival Response" at some point, probably at the urging of my gay roommate (Atkinson was a member of "Daughters of Bilitis," and advocated specifically political lesbiansim.) Atkinson was exactly the sort of feminist that sexists have in mind when they say feminists have no sense of humor.

Atkinson was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex is at the top of the list of any woman's studies curriculum.  Simone, the life-long companion of Jean Paul Sartre, is one of the most interesting of the early founding feminists. She's been quoted on everything from retail therapy ("Buying is a profound pleasure") to love and attraction ("Why one man rather than another? ...

Turning Shakespeare Inside Out--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I first saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on stage in the 80s, but Tom Stoppard wrote it in 1966. I loved it.  I loved it not just for the clever way that the playwright inserted his characters' point of view into the story, using a sort of theatrical kaleidoscope that showed something completely different (a technique used in later plays like Wicked) when the view shifted, but also for the language.  R&G is very much a play about language. The play is full of quotable lines--"Who is the English king?" Rosencrantz asks. "That depends on when we get there," Guildenstern responds. The Player has a great speech about the kind of entertainment he and his players provide, offering up love, blood and rhetoric in various combinatins, but always with blood. ("The blood is compulsory," he says.)

In 1990, Stoppard directed a film version of his play starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon himself). Both men look impossibly young (Roth was 29, Oldman was 32) and Oldman actually has a scruffy Heath Ledger-in-the-Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus-thing going on.   Oldman plays Rosencrantz as an innocent fool,  with Roth playing the only slightly more savvy Guildenstern. The two play off each other really well, especially in an early scene when they're trying to remember what they're doing riding toward Elsinore and when they're trying to figure out exactly what's going on with Hamlet. 
The movie is currently streaming live on Netflix, or you can buy it used from Amazon for less than $5.

Drink like Shakespeare

The Beer Connoisseur Online has an interesting post about what Shakespeare drank. (The conclusion is that he was a fan of ale but not of beer.) I remember a line in one of the Henry plays where the bard is dismissive of people who have "a taste for small beer,' which I assumed was something like Miller Lite.Shakespeare Online goes beyond beer and ale into the wine that would have been available to Shakespeare and his characters. (Falstaff was very fond of sack.) The article is sprinkled with quotes from the plays. The blog Not PC has a "Beer O'Clock" entry from 2008 about shakespere and beer.

Beer Advocate has rated Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout a 94 (exceptional), while their colleagues have given it a 97, making it a world class beverage.
The United Nations of Beer offers a Shakespeare t-shirt with a beer quote on it.