Monday, November 14, 2011

Monday, November 14 2011

Now it's ready to post, the text on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Finally! A play that I feel that I'm getting to know quite well and that many people have read or seen. It will now probably be several weeks before the next play analysis is posted but as I have promised before, I'm going to start writing about the various Shakespeare books I've read. But that's next week. This is this week. So on to...

  • Shakespeare sightings –
    • Still reading Herman Hesse's Under the Wheel and in chapter 4, the boy Hermann Heilner, refers once again to the comfort he gets from Shakespeare.
    • Coriolanus is being shown on Wednesday in the Stockholm film festival The other major daily newspaper Svenska dagbladet tells us that Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave are magnificent. The movie isn't being released until January. Oooh I'm tempted to go now.
    • This sighting and the next one are actually from last Monday's Dagens Nyheter but these days I read the paper at suppertime instead of breakfast so I saw them too late for the Monday report. Thus now: In the review of the third part of Haruki Murakami's trilogy 1Q84 the reviewer Jonas Thente emphasizes the novel's narration qualities and writes that “there are people who think that William Shakespeare's Hamlet is meaningless if they know beforehand that Hamlet dies in the end.”
    • Same day same newspaper: columnist Ingrid Hedström discusses being a language cop. She's all for changes and loan words but uses Ophelia to show how the word “character” is not the same as the Swedish “karaktär” and shouldn't be used that way. I do so agree!
    • Hal got Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom for his birthday (belatedly) and he showed me the quote from A Winter's Tale on the title page. I didn't recognize the quote partly because it's a Swedish translation and partly because I don't know the play that well.
Further, this week:
  • Reading aloud with Hal: Romeo and Juliet
  • Book ordered: Jean Howard's Companion to the Tragedies.
  • DVDs ordered: Two more offshoots of Shakespeare plays, mentioned in film book. Well, I had to order the last Harry Potter movie because it's going to be released on Wednesday this week, so I might as well take some more Shakespeare offshoots when the opportunity arises, right?
  • Text posted on blog: A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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