Big Daddy Falstaff, Ballet Bugs, and Two Pucks
Plus: Which "Pitt" actor uses First Folio pages as home decor?
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and the footnotes will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible but you may encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive. If you enjoy this newsletter, please send it to your friends, romans, countrymen! Use the button below or your most reliable friar.
Quick Links
Happy Father’s Day, I’m not sure how I feel about calling Falstaff “Daddy.”2
So much Shakespeare on CBS Sunday Morning: modern appeal and Maureen Dowd plus vintage Jacobi and Rylance.
Edie Falco will play Gertrude in a new play called Gertrude.3
Reddit roundup: a “World of Warcraft” Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Goodreads rankings, and an upcoming AMA.
Adorable bugs for Midsummer the ballet and dandelion-heads for the opera.
How Briseis became Briseida became Criseida became Criseyde became…
Jonathan Pryce’s inspirational “moronic football fan” of a Sly.
King Lear and Maoist China: “How did things get so bad?” (more.)
Even disguised…Kent is recognizably Kent. He is someone who strategizes for the good but can only ever react to wickedness. He is always, to some extent, surprised by sin.
Ralph Fiennes and David Hare on their new play Grace Pervades about 19th c. Shakespeare power couple Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.
Which Much Ado character has a “thick mustache serving Tom Selleck realness”?
Things I learned from this article on the much-maligned (and briefly cancelled) Hamlet at the Taper which is “entirely from Hamlet’s perspective”4
Patrick Ball at one point “held the record for the most Shakespeare productions at the Yale School of Drama.”
“It is impossible to be too tired to play Hamlet.” -Chuk Iwuji
Noah Wyle is a big Shakespeare guy and uses First Folio pages as home decor.
More on the new audio Hamlet from CBS and the Lit Hub podcast.
Tom Hiddleston on Cassio and Prince Hal (with puppies!)
A Macbeth scheduled to open on Friday the 13th was abruptly postponed.5
“I do think Bertram has gotten that rep of being not necessarily a likable character.”6
“I had just as much fun doing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ but it’s airtight. It’s clean. It’s sharp. Shakespeare gives you a freaking roadmap and you follow it. With this play, you have to find your way a little.”
Tracy Young on The Winter’s Tale and Play On! "– “I have no complicated feelings about the rightness or wrongness of it.”
Anna Deavere Smith’s approach “may be closest to John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare teachings…”
Telenovela Hamlet! “The Princess Bride” but make it Shakespeare!
“The producers noted that giving them foam swords was the safest amid a tense political climate.”
“Shakespeare Corrected” documentary about prison work in Macon County.
Recommendations
Alexandre Dumas on pizza. (via )
Sense & Sensibility and dual mating strategy. (via The Common Reader)
The croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes in Scots.8
“Every part of his name is wrong and it should read Decimus Meridius Maximus.”9
The Senior Editor at the Met Opera gets a (surprisingly un-disastrous) shave from the Barber of Seville & its “diva whisperer” retires, lamenting that “the common man does not understand this job.”
Like this one.
“Do thou stand for my big daddy and examine me upon the particulars of my life” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
If Hamlet isn’t onstage, the scene is cut. Exploring the play from the perspective of individual characters is fundamentally interesting (hello Stoppard). The Folger has a nifty tool called witScripts that let you pick any character in a Shakespeare play and read the play from their perspective i.e. “the play text only when that character is on stage.” If Tim Crouch isn’t available and you want to choose Midsummer through Peaseblossom’s eyes…
I don’t believe in curses but this feels like poking the bear.
My favorite talkback of all time featured a bunch of elderly ladies berating the actor playing Bertram for being an absolute jerk.
Altogether fitting and proper but not the only recent rectification.
“Brek-ek-ek-ex, ko-ax, ko-ax!” used to be a feature of Yale football games. Bring it back, I say, or at least enjoy a gentleman from the class of ‘49 absolutely killing it.