Monday, January 21, 2013

Monday January 21 2013


Hamlet is going to dominate the blog for quite a time to come, but he’s worth it, don’t you think?

From Gregory Doran's Shakespeare Almanac:
  • Nothing this week
Shakespeare sightings:
·         In Katherine Anne Porter’s classic novel Ship of Fools one of the many Nazis or Nazi sympathizers on the ship, Professor Hutten, glares at the rude Cuban students on board who have taken “in vain the name of Goethe…[b]esides lesser yet still vulnerable names such as Shakespeare and Dante.”  This thoroughly disgusting person, who shouldn’t speak Shakespeare’s name aloud, is one of many in this dark and pessimistic but totally fascinating novel.
·         Mats Strandberg, in his odd novel Halva liv (Half a Life), has one of his narrators consider her sham marriage to her brother’s gay lover with the words, ”Nåja. Några Romeo och Julia var vi då sannerligen inte.” (Well. Romeo and Juliet we certainly weren’t.)
·         In Dagens Nyheter on January 17, there was a long article about the Blackfriar Theater in Staunton, Virginia, the only copy in the world.
  • In Dagens Nyheter yesterday, the 20th, there was an ad for a package tour to southern England.  It includes the quote – in English - from Richard II: “This happy breed of men, this little world,/This precious stone set in the silver sea…/This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”  Of course the tour goes to Stratford. If we didn’t already have our trip to London in June booked this would be very tempting indeed.
  •  Is it a Shakespeare sighting if it’s deliberately sought out?  Last week I didn’t include the Hamlet quote from the film Withnail and I because we watched the whole movie just to hear it. That and other such movies will be included in the list of Hamlet films at the end of the text I’m going to write eventually. Well, on Saturday we watched Star Trek VI: The  Undiscovered Country for the sole purpose of seeing its connection to Hamlet.  And what I really can’t wait to share with you is one of the best movies quotes and Shakespeare movie references ever: “You can’t really experience Shakespeare until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.” Ha ha! that’s a good indication of what’s to come. But even more to our surprise, in the extra feature about Shakespeare in the movie we found not only that an entire language of Klingon has been created but that Hamlet has been played in it.  This is just too bizarre for words. But here it is, “To be or not to be” in Klingon… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRMGYQfXrs

Further, since the last report:

Posted this week:
·         This Monday report

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