Jane Austen, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Fairy Daddies
Plus: Who the %#&$ gave Puck heelys?
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Quick Links
One year ago: “Psycho ninjas, Salt-N-Pepa, and lotto-winning ex-monks.”
Featured link: The cast of a disastrous 1986 amateur production of “Macbeth” in a church re-enacts the events 40 years later.
You know those BabyLit books? More are coming, including Macbeth and…Walden?2 (Or you could just…)
I wish I could tell you how much I despise this Annie/Macbeth mashup. But I can’t. I love it. It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. *(slow) claps to the marketing team*
I’ve heard this story multiple times from folks who were there and it never gets old. (Also, there’s a raccoon mascot now.)
“…when I said, “The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath,” I had my hands out…and this big drop flopped into my hand. And then it was a downpour. And the audience made a sound unlike any sound I’ve ever heard. I had my hands out and, like, caught a rainstorm. It was unbelievable.”
“Reasons to Do Outdoor Shakespeare #937” – this rave review of Pericles:
“Among Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s impressive summer ensemble, one collaborator with impeccable timing remains uncredited in the program: the wind. Right as five soldiers were grunting, stamping their feet and pounding their pecs in a bid to impress a group of nearby ladies…a gust picked up through the eucalyptus trees that encircle the Audrey Stanley Grove at DeLaveaga Park. Scythe-shaped leaves rained down, as if bowing before the force of the dancers’ masculinity.”
Elizebeth Friedman, my favorite Bacon troll, also fought rum runners.
Jane Austen hated the name “Richard” because…Shakespeare?
“One commentator [F. B. Pinion] speculates that the popularity during this period of Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose title character is a monster of iniquity, may have created a general animosity toward the name.”
Sam Quinones3 on Stephen Greenblatt’s classes:
“One of the things this book conjured up to me was a lecture that I had in college about the literature of the Renaissance. And the professor gave one entire full class lecture on sh*t in the Renaissance, how everybody was surrounded by it – there's no escaping it. And we don't we don't have any conception of what that was like – the smell and the health hazard was just massive…obviously I never forgot that thing.”
Brad Lander’s Shakespeare in the Park sonnet was not his first. (nor shall not be his last?)
A good old-fashioned Midsummer double headbutt (or slap fight if you prefer)
I’m a huge fan of the folks who created this but the graphic design hurts my soul.4
You can now use Google’s virtual research assistant NotebookLM to explore the Complete Works.
“Close readers can ask for explanations of specific passages or scenes, or even enjoy more creative interpretations, like Hamlet retold as a series of newspaper articles.”
Sometimes the costume renderings look delightful and the actual costumes don’t match up. Romeo and Zooliet is not that show. (Check out red panda Mercutio!)
Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t steal the “Shakespeare in Love” script from Winona Ryder’s coffee table, okay?
There is example for't: Strachey on St Elmo’s. (related)
What happens when an actor has an “unhealthy love affair with properties.”
“This heavy-set, ginger fellow with a Manchester accent had decided (in consultation with Gregory Doran) that his Puck ‘would not run’. He had asked for a pair of Heelys…”
“My character's name is Oberon, but as my cast likes to call me, I am a ‘Fairy Daddy.”’5
Using Shakespeare to sell soap, I’ve seen. Bleach is new.
There are three Shakespeare plays on the high school English Top 10 list. (2/3 are the same as 1989 but Macbeth replaced Julius Caesar.)
“What do we do with great art by bad people?” Eric Gill / Prospero and Ariel edition. via The Culture Dump
The future George IV and his mistress Mary Robinson as Florizel and Perdita.6
Recommendations
A pamflyt compiled of cheese. (yes, there is a full transcription!)
Average walking speed (in Boston, Philly, NYC) increased 15% from 1980 to 2010.
Privacy and the invention of the corridor:8
“There was a commonplace analogy in seventeenth-century lit erature that compared a man's soul to a privy chamber," but it is hard to tell now which became more private first, the room or the soul. Certainly, their histories are entwined…”
Like this one.
Dreamland is an incredibly good and incredibly tough book. Folks in NYC can get free training and naloxone here.
Is #ShakespeareDaddy a thing? Can it not be?
Also contains my new favorite Cotton Mather fact:
“To prevent useless intrusions, he inscribed in large letters above the door of his room these admonitory words: ‘BE SHORT.’”
For the Domestos ad, "all the perfumes of Araby" is RIGHT THERE. I was going to say, "What senna, what purgative drug will scour these English hence?" but that's more about laxatives than bleach (so it ties in to the Elizabethan odor entry).
And for the MacAnnie mashup: you're never fully dressed without eye of newt!