Month: September 2013

While getting ready to send my oldest off to middle school this morning, the following conversation took place:

Daughter : “Daddy, I was talking to one of my friends about Shakespeare at school yesterday…”

Me : “Oh?  What about?”

Daughter : “She said she read a book and she doesn’t think Shakespeare wrote Sh…”

Me : “You punch her!  You punch her right in the face!”

Daughter : <starts laughing hysterically>

Me : “I am completely and totally serious, you say ‘This is from my Dad!’ and then BOOM, right in the nose.  And then when her hands go up to protect her bloodied and broken face?  BOOM! You give her the ol’ upper cut to the solar plexus.”

DISCLAIMER : Do not punch Oxfordians in the face. They’ve already got enough personal problems without having to worry about their health insurance premiums increasing.

I did go on to offer at least the basics of the authorship issue (which we’ve certainly covered in my house before), suggested that she almost certainly read a book about Oxford (to which my daughter bless her geeklet heart said, “I thought it was Francis Bacon?”), and that she could explain to her friend should the conversation come up again that there have been about 77 contenders for the Shakespeare throne, and if it’s all the same with her, we’ll stick with the guy whose name is on the front of the book.

My wedding anniversary is coming up on Monday (September 30).  Happy Lucky 13th Anniversary to my beautiful and ever patient and supportive wife Kerry!  Love you!

My book, Hear My Soul Speak : Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare
, was not available when I got married.  I wanted Shakespeare in my wedding, but I was just so tired of Sonnet 116 that I did my own thing, whispering Sonnet 17 into my new wife’s ear during our first dance.  Why 17?  I liked the bit about the eyes.  I love my wife’s eyes.

I wondered how many people recite Sonnet 116 entirely because that’s the only romantic/ wedding/ marriage Shakespeare quote they’ve ever heard?  Thus was our idea born.  I collected every quote I could get my hands on that might be useful in a wedding.  There’s a section on readings, on giving toasts and speeches, even for the guests on what  you might like to write in the guest book.  A little something for everyone.  Most importantly, I think, is that I sat down and explained all of them.  There are plenty of quote dictionaries you can grab that do little more than search the complete text for the word “love” and spit back the quote at you, but how useful is that?  I wanted a book for people who wanted to quote Shakespeare because they love Shakespeare and want to get closer to the subject.

In celebration of my own wedding anniversary I’m offering free copies (Kindle edition, MOBI format) of the book to my readers!  If you like the book, please please please consider coming back to Amazon and writing a review?  Those make all the difference in the world and are tremendously appreciated by authors like me.

How Do I Get It?

Honestly I’d rather have your Amazon review than a retweet so I’m not going to make this complicated.  Between now and end of day on Monday, Sept 30, 2013 (eastern standard time for those that plan on coming in under the wire) just email me.  Simple.  Email me, remind me that you’re emailing me because you want the book, and when I get the whole list together I’ll send them out early next week.

You would be doing me a tremendous favor if you helped get the word out by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, or the social network of your choice.  Tell your family and friends.  Surely you know somebody that knows somebody that’s getting married in the near future.  We want some Shakespeare in that wedding.

I wrote, in the introduction, “I believe very much that life is better with Shakespeare in it,” and I truly truly mean that. If you read the book, like the book, and maybe even use the book, please drop me a note and let me know. The idea that there’s more Shakespeare in people’s lives because of something I created gives me endless joy.

Part 2 of the Hollow Crown series, Henry IV Part 1 (got that?) is this Friday.

I feel like I don’t know where to begin with this monumental Shakespeare event, and quite truly can’t get my own head around it. I’ve never really studied the history plays, and now here they are played out in front of me with pretty much every modern Shakespearean actor I could imagine (including Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, some guy named Patrick Stewsomething, and many many others). I started watching Richard II earlier , but became so engrossed in it so quickly that I had to remember that I had a family who had no idea what they were watching. So instead I promised myself an evening of nothing but the bliss of watching hour after hour of Shakespeare after they’ve all gone to bed.

Know what I did do? I broke out my First Folio, and started reading Richard II. I don’t know why people say “Don’t read the plays, see the plays” because the combination of the two is insane. You see it, and then you read it, and it’s like your own personal recorder fires up inside your brain and starts replaying the movie for you, whenever you want. Love it love it love it.

A day doesn’t go by as of late that I’m not sent a link to either the Star Wars Shakespeare thing (which I still need to post myself), or the recently posted Shakespeare Terminator 2 thing.  Of course we can go back even farther (further?) and include Two Gentlemen of Lebowski on this list as well.   I’ve taken to using the term that Bardfilm used, “novelty” Shakespeare.

Here’s my question:  what’s the point? Who is this for?

On the one hand you’ve got the audience that easily recognizes T2 and can spout all of Arnold’s best lines, but probably has no clue about much Shakespeare.  “Wow!” thinks said audience member, “Shakespeare is old and difficult but we all know how brilliant it is, so to retell an entire movie like T2 in nothing but Shakespeare lines must be an amazing accomplishment!”  So this person goes to the show, “sitting through the Shakespeare to recognize the T2 references” to steal a phrase from Orson Welles.  Is anybody learning anything about Shakespeare from this?

On the flip side are the Shakespeare geeks who are excited about the idea of Shakespeare’s words being used to tell a “new old” story, old in that we know the story, new in that we don’t yet know how Shakespeare would tell it.  Kind of like J.J. Abrams directing a Star Trek movie. And we go, and we listen to John Connor shout “Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” and we laugh and we clap and we turn to the person next to us and whisper, “Julius Caesar.  Act 3, Scene 1.” because yay we recognized that one. Are we paying attention to the T2 story? Can our brains let us just cut and paste all the most recognizable quotes and reshuffle them at will like that?

Thus we come back to that word “novelty.”  Is that really all there is to this?  People spot it and say, “Oh hey, that’s new, I’ve never seen that before!”  Is that the entire audience?  Because eventually there’ll be so much of this that it’s not new anymore.  Then what?