Monday, September 26, 2011

No new play posted this week. I've spent the morning frantically finishing the rough draft to my essay about The Comedy of Errors, which Hal and I finished reading this week. So now three plays are fighting for my attention in my head, Henry VI Part One, Richard III and The Comedy of Errors. I'll deal with them properly, one at a time, in coming weeks.

• Shakespeare sightings –
  • In the novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, two of the high school characters discuss Shakespeare, seeing his plays, and studying him in English class.
  • In a crossword in Dagens Nyheter the clue was “Shakespeare king”. A common enough occurrence in Swedish crosswords as elsewhere.
  • Careful readers of my Monday report will be aware of my current nostalgia for the musical “Hair.” In the book order mentioned below was a book of easy piano versions of some of the songs from “Hair”. Even easy versions are too advanced for my pathetically bad playing but I enjoy it. One of my favorites has always been the last medley “Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine in.” Imagine my surprise when I saw in this book that the text of “Flesh Failures” is adapted from Romeo and Juliet”! However, even upon looking closely I couldn't find any of the song's text in Romeo's last soliloquy. Am I blind or what? Feel free to help out on this!
• Now reading aloud with Hal: Having just finished The Comedy of Errors, nothing, but we hope to start Love's Labour's Lost this evening or tomorrow.
• Shakespeare movie watched this week: BBC's The Comedy of Errors.
• Book order received:
  • Materialist Shakespeare
  • Shakespeare's Words
  • The Daughter of Time (a detective book about RIII)
• Just finished reading half an hour ago: Contested Will by James Shapiro. Don't wait for me to start my book reviews. Read it now!
• Also read this week: The Daughter of Time by JosephineTey (the detective book – more comments when I post the RIII text).
• Text posted: None

September 19, 2011

• Moving right along here...Today I'm going to post my text on Titus Andronicus. We've started reading A Comedy of Errors. After that comes Love's Labour's Lost and finally after that, one that most people have heard of, seen or actually read, A Midsummer Night's Dream. And then! One of the biggies – Romeo and Juliet. So patience out there, Shakespeare lovers, progress is slow but steady.
• Shakespeare sightings –
  • In the old “Black Adder” series, season 3, episode “Sense and Senility”, jokes about Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Caesar. One of the funniest episodes so far.
  • In Dagens Nyheter a supplement about the fall season in theater:
    • “Romeo and Juliet” at the Royal Dramatic Theater – to see or not to see...?
    • “Romeo and Juliet the Musical” - see last week's report
    • “King Lear” at the 123 Schtunk theater – would like to see this one
    • “Othello” in Dalarna
    • “Romeo and Juliet” in Uppsala
• Now reading aloud with Hal: A Comedy of Errors.
• Now reading: Contested Will by James Shapiro
• Text posted: The Nastiness of Lucius or How the Hero Causes All the Bad Stuff in Titus Andronicus

September 12, 2011

• It's been a Richard III – intensive week. Having finished reading the play last week we got busy on the various versions, thus not having time for our current favorite evening activities: Wallander (Oh Kenneth, when are you going to come back to Shakespeare??), The Flight of the Conchords, The Big Bang Theory, the rest of the Blondie CD's. O! What sacrifices one makes for Shakespeare! Anyway, we've watched/listened to the following
  • the BBC production
  • “The Trial of Richard III” - an extra DVD with the Olivier edition.
  • Pacino's “Looking for Richard”
  • McKellan's RIII
  • CDs of the whole thing with Kenneth Branagh – see that's what you should be doing, Kenneth, not waltzing around southern Sweden play a burned out Swedish cop, even if you do a great job at it!
  • Olivier's RIII
• Shakespeare sightings – not much this week
  • In Sheila Kohler's novel Becoming Jane Eyre, it is written that brother Branwell read lots of classics, “even Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and Twelfth Night.” Meaning the sisters didn't? I find that hard to believe.
  • In Suzette Haden Elgin's “feminist science fiction classic” (according to the cover) one of the main characters repaid [her boss's] years of kindness with murder most foul!” Served him right too....
  • “Romeo and Juliet, the Musical” still going strong in one of Stockholm's theaters. Could have reported it long ago but didn't think of it. Haven't seen it either, because the guy playing Romeo is such a pretty boy pop singer. Unfair I know... Should see it!
• Books ordered:
  • Materialist Shakespeare
  • Shakespeare's Words
  • The Daughter of Time (a detective book about RIII)
• Text written: about RIII, should be ready to post in a few weeks.
• Text posted: Well, Make Up Your Minds Already! Side-Switching in Henry VI Part Three also confusedly called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth (unfortunately I can't claim that the title is longer than the text. The text is embarassingly long and I promise to try to write shorter ones from now on.)

September 5, 2011

• Shakespeare sightings
  • Oh no, now they're making a movie about Shakespeare not writing his plays. Of course it's by the same director who did “Day After Tomorrow” and “2012”, which, admittedly were pretty exciting but not terribly serious. So this one will probably be about as believable, that is to say...not. But how exciting can a movie about some other guy writing Shakespeare's texts be, I wonder. I used to say, and still do sort of, what difference does it make, somebody wrote the plays and they're brilliant so who cares? But I find I care, partly because as a history teacher I take historical sources seriously, and the ones we have really do indicate that Shakespeare wrote his own stuff, often not alone but still he did it. And partly because it's so insulting to claim that a relatively uneducated (at least formally) guy from the lower classes and rural England to boot can't be a genius. Come on!
  • In Juliet Nicolson's interesting book The Great Silence, about the two years after the end of World War One and how people adjusted, I've so far found two mentions of Shakespeare:
    • In the general anger towards and hatred for the Germans after the war, George V of England changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (a good German name, the king was after all the Kaiser's – and the tsar's for that matter – cousin) to Windsor. According to Nicolson, the Kaiser joked about it by saying that he was on his way to the theater to see The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Ha ha.
    • On July 19, 1919, a large parade and festival were arranged in London to celebrate the signing of the treaty and A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in Hyde Park.
  • A non-sighting: I love the movie Hair, and have seen it many times, most recently this Saturday evening with friends, and every time I ask myself and the world, “Why????” was “What a Piece of Work is Man” deleted? It's on the soundtrack so evidently it was going to be included at some point. I first heard this song on the Broadway soundtrack and it was probably the first time I fell in love with Shakespeare, and I didn't even know it was Shakespeare at the time. It took years and years before I figured out what play it's from. For those of you who have never heard it, or don't have the soundtracks: here they are:
    • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTBKjtfd2w from Broadway soundtrack, 1 minute 35 seconds
    • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6lxQiGR2qI from movie soundtrack
  • Book finished this week: Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language. A brief report will appear on this blog when I get to doing books.
  • Play finished this week: Richard III. Hal and I have also started reading various analyses of the play and have watched the BBC version. Five more DVDs to watch this week. Today I started taking notes for my text, to be posted on this blog in a month or so.
  • Meantime, I'm still working on my text for Henry VI Part 3. I hope to post it next week.
  • Technical tips – if you've been trying to post comments on the blog and it doesn't seem to work try going into Google Chrome (easy to do, go to Google, about Google, our products...download Google Chrome) or Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. That's worked for me.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Not a lot to report this week. It's been pretty quiet on the Shakespeare front.

• Shakespeare sightings - They're everywhere. We don't even think of them, they're so much a part of our lives. But starting this week I'm going to take note:
  • in Dagens Nyheter (for you non-Swedes, one of the two major daily newspapers) on the 28^th, a notice on Shakespeare's insults. It refers to the site http://www.william-shakespeare.org.uk/shakespeare-insults-dictionary.htm (although I had to search a bit because the address wasn't complete in the notice.)
  • Upon listening to the remastered CD's of Blondie's LP's, Hal noticed the listing of ”Once More into the Bleach” which turns out being a remix album released in 1988. So here's a contest: What's the original quote? In which play? The first to post a comment with the correct answer (not you, Hal!) wins a big prize (a gold star in my soon to be started book of gold stars).
  • A very minor character in the novel I'm reading (Self by Yann Martel) has a cat named Shakespeare. Said cat sat in the main character's lap while he was watching TV. Sorry. Not much of a sighting, I agree, but a sighting nevertheless.
  • That's it for sightings this week.
• Books ordered and finally received: The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Not a guide to each play as I had kind of expected but a series of essays about various subjects by a bunch of different people, for example Stephen Greenblatt, ”The Traces of Shakespeare's Life”. Looks interesting.
• Website to Shakespeare Calling has now been sent to several friends and colleagues. Hoping for responses. I got an email from one colleague but he doesn't want to comment on the blog itself. Too bad! It was interesting!
• Now reading
  • still Kermode's Shakespeare's Language. Should finish it this week.
• Now reading aloud with Hal
  • still Richard III. We'll finish it this evening and then we have lots of intros, essays etc to read plus six movies to watch; three are the actual plays and three are other related stuff. Who knows when I'll get to writing my analysis and what I'll write about.
• Posted today
  • ”From Anticipation to Disappointment and Exasperation - Margaret's Marriage to Henry” in The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, or Henry the Sixth, Part Two

Monday, August 22, 2011

So here it is. My first official day of leave. For the coming fifteen Mondays I will not go to work but stay at home and work on my Shakespeare blog. It feels great!

This will be a rather long report, not because it's the first one but because it has been an unusually active Shakespeare week.

• I happened upon a novel of interest – The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, borrowed from the library. I held the book in my hands for awhile, wondering if I should bother. It's about dogs and I'm not fond of dogs. But it got rave reviews, including one by Stephen King, who I sort of like, and it takes place in Ashland, Wisconsin, where I've actually been. My father lived there for awhile. And it used the word Shakespearean in the blurb. How Shakespearean it actually was I didn't discover until about halfway through when the teenage boy's dead father came to him as a ghost and told him to investigate uncle Claude...ending with the words, ”Remember me.” Hmmm, that sounds familiar. And the mother's name is Trudy? And so it goes. Suddenly the book is a Hamlet book with a trace or two of Macbeth and The Tempest. That's OK, Shakespeare stole from everybody so it's fine to steal from Shakespeare. And the novel was kind of interesting. Exciting at times. It's not a must-buy-for-my-Shakespeare-collection but it's readable.
• Preparing to hang on doors in the apartment – freebie poster of the life and works of Shakespeare included in the T-shirt (”Will Power”) bought in Stratford at the Shakespeare gift shop and poster of the entire (!) Hamlet received from dear friends after their trip to New York.
• New DVDs acquired with the help of above mentioned dear friends: ”Richard III” with Ian McKellen, ”Hamlet” with Ethan Hawke, ”O” and ”The Good-bye Girl” (about an actor plating RIII).
• Looked, once again, and admired once again, our photos from our trip to England (returned two weeks ago today) – especially those from Shakespeare's birthplace and grave.
• TV production of the sonnets! Written by Rufus Wainwright! His ”When in disgrace...” is one of the top tracks of all time so Hal and I were eager to see whatever this was. What can I say? It was great. A bit confusing hearing Shakespeare in German with Swedish subtitles (it was the Berlin Ensemble) but we got the idea. We aren't familiar enough with the sonnets to immediately recognize the Swedish translations but we caught the drift, and once in awhile they were even in English. The production itself was visually very exciting with a lot of dramatic lighting and minimalist sets. It was roughly about various characters including Shakespeare himself and Queen Elizabeth I and II reciting/miming/singing some the sonnets in roughly chronological order. Whimsical, tragic, dramatic, dreamlike. Gender crossing, mixed ages, puzzling side stories – it certainly is a production to be seen again and again. There's just too much happening to take it in all at once. Highly reommended for those who understand German and/or Swedish. Why doesn't somebody do something like this in English? Or maybe somebody has?? Some of this one can be seen until September 18 on http://svtplay.se/v/2504851/veckans_forestallning/fyra_vintersagor__rufus_wainwright_och_wills_sonetter and parts can also be seen on YouTube. Don't miss it!
• Just discovered today, less than an hour ago while searching on IMDb for the credits to the Taming movies – Coriolanus! Release date December. With Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave. Wow!
• Used for the first times our Shakespeare mugs (two with portraits, one with insult quotes and one with love quotes) bought in Stratford.
• Now reading: Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language.
• Now reading aloud with Hal: Richard III.
• Posted today: “The Breaking of Katherine's Spirit”