Monday October 8 2012

A bit of an interim week, having finished reading Julius Caesar and watching two movies as well as starting, but not finishing my text. Hopefully the first draft will be finished today so that it can be posted next week.  For now, this Monday report:

From Gregory Doran's Shakespeare Almanac:

• Nothing this week.

Shakespeare sightings:

• From The Accidental again (see last Monday's report):
• A girl working in a supermarket has the name tag “Miranda – Brave New World” - any guesses on the play?
• And one of the characters is thinking of questions to ask Ask.com (it really exists, I checked) and one of them was: Did Shakespeare really exist? (their answer: absolutely) (I checked that too.)
• Lynne Truss has written a humorous (honest!) book about punctuation called Eats, Shoots and Leaves – the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation and of course anything that has to do with language use has to include Shakespeare.
• Truss notes that Peter Hall (I assume she means the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company) thought that Shakespeare used too much punctuation (well, he did use a lot).
•  Further, in a discussion on the American use of “period” and the British use of “full stop”, it is pointed out that Shakespeare called it a period in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• Thirdly a quote from the book: “Remember that comical pedant Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost saying, 'You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the accent'? Well, no, of course you don't, nobody remembers anything said by that frightful bore, and we certainly shan't detain ourselves bothering to work out what he was driving at.” Her point is simply that Shakespeare used apostrophes to indicate that he'd left out some letters. Just like we do, but he did it all the time.
• And finally she quotes George Bernard Shaw who uses the title of The Merchant of Venice to prove you should – or shouldn't, I couldn't figure out what he meant – use italics in titles.
• In the outrageous but rather hilarious new comedy series by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, some of series star Warwich Davis's clients in his agency Dwarfs for Hire complain that they're not offered rolls as Hamlet or Othello.
• In the third season of The Big Bang Theory Leonard and Penny are having romance problems and Romeo and Juliet are mentioned a couple of times.
• I just started Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth – the Evidence for Evolution – and have already come across a sighting. I'm sure there will be more.  This one: in explaining the genetic process of breeding he mentions the Ophelia rose. I Googled that too. It's a pale pink rose and looks like the one on our balcony.

Further, since the last report:

·         Read aloud with Hal: Harold Bloom's chapter on Julius Caesar

·         Watched: The Marlon Brando version of Julius Caesar

·         Worked on text.

Posted:

·         This Monday Report