This is in NO WAY autobiographical. Honestly.
Eminently Quotable Edgar
A friend of mine was just cast as Edgar in a local production of King Lear, a prospect I find both exciting (because Edgar is an awesome role) and alarming (because, if you're Edgar, you have to spent most of the evening capering about half-naked and covered in mud, muttering some of the most ludicrous gibberish). So... good luck with that, buddy!
Shakespearean Selfies, part 1
Oh, if only they had had Instagram back in Shakespeare's day.
Hamlet: Dramatis Personae
I put this together ahead of a planned project to render the entirety of Hamlet (or at least an extremely distilled entirety) in stick-figure form. It's a handy-dandy reference guide to all the characters in Hamlet , including the ones nobody remembers. Nobody ever remembers Voltemand and Cornelius. Cornelius doesn't even have a line of his own - he just says "In that and all things will we show our duty" along with Voletmand. Voltemand has all the longer solo bits about Norway. Poor Cornelius.
Lobster Shakespeare, part 1
This is labeled "part 1" because I cannot help but think that there will be a sequel at some point in time. Sometimes I worry about me.
Time Travelling Records
It's going to shock those of you who don't work in libraries, I know, but book records aren't always correct. Even *gasp* the Library of Congress sometimes makes mistakes. Honestly, if you can't trust the Library of Congress, who can you trust?
I need to thank my co-worker Leigh for providing me with most of my "cataloging disasters" material.
Shakespeare's Spooks
Poor old Banquo. He gets killed, comes back as a ghost, and doesn't even get to say anything spectral. He just sits there at the table, shaking his gory locks. (Pardon the pun - I could never resist a bad pun.)
Anyways, happy Halloween! Curl up on the couch with a bowl of candy and watch some Macbeth.
Jon Finch's Macbeth
Ian McKellen's Macbeth
Patrick Stewart's Macbeth
Not Quite Normal
I saw the National Theater not-quite-Live broadcast of Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth last night, and realized that, for some unfathomable reason, when I think "three witches in Macbeth", the first line that pops into my head isn't any of the good ones that rhyme or sound awesomely spooky; it's this stupid line in 1.3 where the first witch is telling the others how she tried to bum some chestnuts of some woman, who told her to get lost. My only explanation is that I must have really liked the sound of the word "aroint" when I first heard it, and it stuck in my brain. Try it! Arooooooint aroint aroint aroint aroint.
Anyways, I enjoyed Branagh's Macbeth a lot, even though they cut the whole "aroint" bit. The staging (basically involving people churning through a long pit of mud running down the nave of a deconsecrated church) was really fun to watch, and the performances of Branagh and Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth, while not as bone-chilling as those of other filmed Macbeths, were very engaging in their vulnerability and brittleness.