It's been an eventful Shakespeare week so I'll get right to it.
- Shakespeare sightings –
- A review in Svenska Dagbladet of the modernized Othello at Lund's theater. The reviewer wasn't impressed, called it a Swedish TV detective story.
- Watching one of our current favorites “The Big Bang Theory”, we came to the end of season one so watched the accompanying extra feature in which Kunal Nayyar, the actor who plays Raj Koothrappali, says that he'd like to play Shakespeare.
- Listening to an old favorite, we heard Bruce Springsteen once again sing in “Tougher than the Rest” that he isn't a “sweet-talking Romeo”.
- In Jasper Fforde's novel The Eyre Affair we are told on page 5 that “time is out of joint”. And that is the understatement of the millennium. Those of you who think you remember 1985, think again. What really happened was...well, let's say, time is seriously out of joint in this alternative version of 1985. The heroine, Thursday Next, is a cop in the LiteraTec offices of London and Swindon. Her job? To investigate crimes against literature - forgeries of original manuscripts, changing the ends of old classics, kidnapping and holding for ransom of characters in the classics, to name a few. Other cops have to quell the riots between Renaissance fanatics and, for example, the Surrealists, as well as mop up after shootouts at book buying deals gone bad. Thursday grew up begging her mom for coins to put into the Will-Speak machines, officially known as the Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton. There is a division of the police authorities dealing with all crimes regarding Shakespeare. People are annoyed when Baconians go door to door trying to convince them that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Bacon. When people refuse to listen, they politely ask if they can leave their pamphlets. Thursday easily quashes the arguments of the Baconian who knocked on her door. These are only some of the Shakespeare sightings in this really funny novel and I'm not even half-way through.
- Reading aloud with Hal: Romeo and Juliet
- Book ordered but not yet received: Jean E. Howard's Companion to the Tragedies.
- DVDs received: Two more offshoots of Shakespeare plays, mentioned in film book, and the last Harry Potter movie.
- Posted on my Facebook: some of the photos from our trip to Stratford in July. More to come. Technical glitches make it a picky job.
- Received with great interest – Kalle's brilliant comment on my blog text about A Midsummer Night's Dream. Don't miss it!
- Text posted on blog: the first text on Books of Interest – Frank Kermode's Tha Age of Shakespeare.
No comments:
Post a Comment