Shakespeare for Slackers

I was on the Library Thing site this afternoon, looking over the new list of books available for early review and spotted Shakespeare for Slackers: Romeo and Juliet. Turns out it's part of a series that also includes Macbeth.(And I would bet that the next book in the series will be Julius Caesar because those three plays are the ones most read in high school. (And if you ask me, having to read Julius Caesar is one of the things that turns students away from Shakespeare. But that's just me. I also think it's a bad idea to read Moby Dick in high school. I didn't read it until I was in college and I loved it but if I'd had to read it sooner, I probably would have hated it as much as everyone else.)

Guillermo del Toro's Book of Life

I am not a huge fan of animation. I grew up with Disney of course, and am a big fan of what Pixar is doing, although I was bored by Brave.  (Mostly I just kept thinking that the princess looked like a troll doll, but then, I'm several years past the demographic that movie was targeting. Frozen in on my "to be viewed" list, mostly because everyone tells me it's a great story about female empowerment but I'm having a hard time working up the enthusiasm. But today I saw the trailler for Guillermo del Toro's new movie, Book of Life, an animated, Day of the Dead story that looks...magical. If you haven't seen the trailer, you're in for a treat.

For the Shakespeare Summer reading list...Dark Lady of Hollywood

Diane Haithman's Dark Lady of Hollywood offers Shakespeare and snark. Could you ask for anything more? I was tipped to this book by Shakespeare in L.A. and it's already on my To Be Read Bookcase.  (The "to be read" pile long ago outgrew mere pile status.) The book is reviewed o the Shakespeare in L.A. site, and on Amazon the book has13 five- and four-star reviews so far. You can read the review here. I'll have my own review up later in the summer.

Free French Fiction!

Well, not quite, but close. Gastien, the cost of a dream, free on Kindle today. Part of a series. (And don't we all love series?) Eye-catching cover. I always like seeing the Eiffel Tower on a cover. And free offers on books with a lot of good reviews.  (History! Sex! Artistic dreams!)  Author Caddy Rowland is a painter herself, and I love the way she describes painting ("Making love to the color.")

Blogging Shakespeare--All Shakespeare, all the time

One of the things I love about the Internet is that even if your interests are really fringe, you can find your tribe. So if you're  a  shakespeare geek (which really isn't that weird) who wants to talk about different productions of a favorite play--say, The Tempest--you can always go online to find someone who has an opinion about the Ellis Rabb staging of the play in San Diego versus the Stratford festival version with Christopher Plummer as Prospero. And somewhere out there is someone else who saw the L.A. production of the play starring Anthony Hopkins, Stephanie Zembalist, and Ken Marshall, who was then hot thanks to a television miniseries on Marco Polo.

In 20111, the Education Portal has a great list of Top Ten Shakespeare blogs here. The list begins with Blogging Shakespeare (run by the people at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) and is rounded out by the Bard Box, a collection of online Shakespeare videos. Bard Box shuttered a couple of years ago but the site is still up and many of the links work. If nothing else, it's a great place to start looking for online videos. (Last year I stumbled across an online posting of a Hamlet production with a young, unknown Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Laertes. He was just coming into his prime when he died, the age of all Shakespeare's really great parts for middle-aged men.  And we'll never get to see him perform them, damn it. But I digress.

I'm just a Shakespeare geek wannabe compared to the bloggers who post all Shakespeare all the time. Check them out!  And while you're at Shakespeare geek, check out some of their t-shirts, like the one pictured, 'It's all fun and games until somebody captures Gloucester and puts his eyes out."

the Play Shakespeare Never Wrote

Shakespearean actor Geraint Wyn Davies as King Arthur

Or did he?
I always wondered why Shakespeare never wrote his version of the King Arthur legend. It has all the elements he loved--a tragic love, ambitious men (Mordred is Iago's ntural son!)m a flawed hero.
the Bard borrowed from all kinds of sources but never wrote his version of England's national myth. And that seems a shame.
But as it turns out, there is a significant community of scholars who think he DID tackle the subject. I found this interesting articleon Tyler Tichelaar's "Children of Arthur" blog  about a play called The Birth of Merlin that may very well be a "lost" play, one of almost 40 plays with disputed authorship.
Wikipedia calls the play "Jacobean" and attributes it to one William Rowley.  If you're saying, "Who?" you're not alone. I looked Rowley up and according (agani) to Wikipedia, Rowley was mostly known for plays he wrote in collaboration with other, more successful authors.
According to the synopsis, the play was full of magic, 17th century special effects (devils!!) and and was a fast-paced crowd pleaser.
It seems to me that the Arthurian story cries out for an epic play that is serious and important. I sometimes find myself impatient with the rough humor of Shakespeare's comedies (and I purely hate Falstaff), so the notion that The Birth of Merlin is kind of wacky is a bit disappointing.
If you're curious (I am), you can download the play's text here.

Coriolanus...Hiddleston versus Fiennes

Coriolanus is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and I didn't come to appreciate it until long after I was out of school.  (My introductory Shakespeare class was taught by a noted Shakespeare scholar who was hands down, the most boring teacher I ever had.) In a way, the title character, a Roman general who hates the plebian rabble, is a hero for the one percent. In one of the play's most famous lines, he compares the idea of plebians controlling patricians  as crows pecking on eagles. Caius Martius sees himself as an eagle and his inability to deal with the "crows," much less respect them leads to his downfall.

There is currently a very good versions of the play available on dvd. Tthe 2011 version directed by and starring Rafe Fiennes as the title character is terrific. It costars Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, one of the great middle-aged female characters in the Shakespeare canon and Gerard Butler as the enemy who becomes an unlikely ally. (He's good too.) Fiennes is terrific. I don't think he's been this good since Schindler's List. It's a ferociously masculine peformance and his rage at the rabble is mesmerizing.

there's also another version of the play currently making the rounds of the specialty movie circuit, a filmed play version from England's National Theatre starring Tom Hiddleston. I missed it when it played locally, and I can only hope that it'll be available for home viewing soon. I would have said Hiddleston was a bit too young to play the character, but as you can see from the trailer below, he inhabits the character like he was born to it. (Anyone who saw him in The Hollow Crown already knows what a strong Shakespearean actor he is, and his Coriolanus looks like a treat.) Cojpare the two trailers and you decide.