Monday April 28 2014

There’s been a little bit of this and a little bit of that in this week of Shakespeare. We finished a play, I started a book, sightings have been sighted, links have been shared, and comments good and bad have been made on the blog to last week’s Contested Will.

From Davis and Frankforter’s The Shakespeare Name Dictionary.

• Ben Jonson, contemporary, colleague and friend of Shakespeare, maintained that “drama should adhere to Aristotelian principles and avoid such practice as the blending of comedy and tragedy.” Aren’t we glad that Shakespeare didn’t always do as his friends suggested?
• Jove is the Roman name for Jupiter who is known in Greek as Zeus and he is the Indo-European sky god. He appears in almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, as does Jupiter, often as a substitute for “God”.

Shakespeare sightings:

• In London a Social History Roy Porter ends with the economic crisis in London at the end of the1990’s and mentions that due to a sharp decrease in public funding the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican had to close.
• In the book we’re reading at work to make us all even more brilliant teachers, Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam (the Swedish translation) (it’s a very good book, we will become even better teachers if we follow its advice) it mentions how a teacher uses Shakespeare’s plays in her classroom work.
• In the novel Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler ( very good book!) one of the two main characters, Alice, is going through her late father’s things, among which is one of her late mother’s books of Shakespeare poetry.
• Dagens Nyheter has Rickard III as number two on the best on stage list this week too.
• DN’s weekly Friday two-page crossword always has a theme and this week in honour of his birthday the theme was Shakespeare.  I almost never complete these crosswords because usually the themes are obscure or uninteresting to me but on this one I got all of the Shakepseare clues except for a four letter word from a quote from Julius Caesar. It was in Swedish of course and we don’t have the Swedish version of the plays.  There is, in fact, no Swedish translation of the complete plays of Shakespeare currently available on the market. Shame on Sweden! But the crossword was fun.
•  Agent Jessup: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are....” Peter: “Wow, really? Butchered Shakespeare?”  In the second season of Fringe.
• English Proverbs Explained by Ronald Ridout and Clifford Witting, borrowed from MM of the library’s English Book Circle, had a few more Shakespeare proverbs:
• “The truth will out” is compared to “Murder will out” – The Merchant of Venice
• “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” – Henry IV Part Two
• “What’s mine is yours and what is yours is mine” – Measure for Measure
• In Edward Rutherfurd’s rather magnificent 1,300-page novel London Shakespeare shows up, not unexpectedly, in the chapter called “The Globe”. He flits in and out of the story as a pleasant fellow, a good but not yet quite great playwright.  The main character of the chapter intends to fulfil that role and usurp Shakespeare but that doesn’t quite happen. He falls into disgrace and obscurity and Shakespeare goes on to the heights we know he achieved.  Thereafter in the novel he’s mentioned now and then.

Further since last time:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: Coriolanus
• Started reading myself: Shakespeare and the American Musical by Irene G. Dash
• Comments received on the review of Shapiro’s Contested Will, one supportive, one decidedly against. Take a look and add your views (if you dare throw yourself into the maelstrom!) http://rubyjandshakespearecalling.blogspot.se/2014/04/contested-will-by-james-shapiro.html
• Link of interest seen on blog follower Anneli’s Facebook: http://www.newscientist.com/special/shakespeare Thanks, Anneli!

Posted this week:

• This Monday report.