Via the Shakespeare Geek we learn that Kenneth Branagh is to direct Thor:

In a departure from his normal cerebral choices for directing, it seems British actor and film-maker Kenneth Branagh has decided to take on something a little less complex, the Marvel Studios version of “Thor”. “Thor” is based on the well known German/Norse God of Thunder, but in the Marvel Universe and prospective film, he has an alter-ego, a disabled medical student called Donald Blake, which makes the god have a more human/vulnerable side than some superheroes. The film has a scheduled released date of 2010.

We all have to eat. On to the Question of the Week!

Which Shakespearean role would you cast with which superhero (or super villain) and why?

I’ll get the ball rolling by casting The Flash as Puck. Who else could “put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes”?

Enjoy!

From Henry VI, Part Three:

Nay, stay, Sir John, awhile; and we’ll debate
By what safe means the crown may be recover’d.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

McCain wanted to bail. He’s shy!

Obama wanted fresh eyes. Joy!

Lehrer wanted a brawl. Envy!

I did this one already, but I wanted to respond to a search that brought a reader here yesterday:

“how did queen elizabeth feel about shakespeare play king henry the 8th”

It’s a good question, since Henry was Queen Elizabeth’s father, and it would be interesting to get her reaction to the play that bears his name. But Elizabeth died in 1603, and it is believed that the play was first performed in 1613, so we can only speculate as to how she might have felt about it.

The play retains the pro-Tudor slant on history that characterized Shakespeare’s earlier history plays, and whitewashes some of the uglier aspects of Henry’s story. As for Elizabeth, her birth is depicted at the very end of the play, and the happy father swells with pride at the event.

From Henry VIII:

O lord archbishop!
Thou hast made me now a man: never, before
This happy child, did I get any thing.
This oracle of comfort has so pleas’d me,
That when I am in heaven, I shall desire
To see what this child does, and praise my Maker.

But if you shift around the letters, you probably get much closer to what he actually would have said:

O lord archbishop!

Fact: I wanted to have a son.

So I, cross Henry the Eighth, must kill this wife, Madam Anne Boleyn, with promptest speed.

So I shall, in a flash, remove and discard her doomed head apace!

I am Henry the Eighth, I am!

I’m always curious to see what search terms bring people to this site. Here is a list of all of the search terms that brought people here yesterday:

how shakespeare demonstrated “religion” in his plays

presidents with the letter y in their name

king henry viii shakespeare for children

who are the present day descendants of ann boleyn

king henry the eighth for kids

modern day descendants of henry the eighth

free shakespeare for kids

shakespeare did math

math – coins – line drawings of

saddam hussein vs. iago

textual analysis of elizabath i letter to king james vi

what play of shakespeare hads the word shyster in it?

characterize ophelia in act 3 scene 1

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The word “shyster” does not appear in Shakespeare. There is a character named Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and a popular anti-lawyer quote in Henry VI, Part Two.

Several United States presidents have had the letter Y in their names. First name: Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter; Last name: John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy; First and Last Name: Zachary Taylor; Commonly Used Middle Name: John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison.

As for the Ophelia thing, do your own homework.

From Much Ado About Nothing:

…an two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Biden (DE) was rumored a shoe-in for the mention.

From Much Ado About Nothing:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Edwards believes in two Americas. He held a hot lover in each one.

No, it’s not so funny. You find one more ninny no longer monogamous.

No, honest voters have no tendency to let bygones be bygones, turning enthroned heroes into nothing.

I’ve been trying to think how I could top last week’s Shakespeare Anagram, where I took Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech and anagrammed it into adapted versions of five other Hamlet speeches. I decided to attempt to anagram one entire scene from Shakespeare into an adapted version of another scene from Shakespeare.

I thought it best to use two scenes with the same characters, so that the letters in the speech prefixes would even out, and of course I needed to find two scenes of roughly equal length. I went for two scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the one just before the murder of Duncan and the one right after. (I’ll call the two scenes Beforekill and Afterkill, which I think has a clarity that calling them I.vii. and II.ii. lacks.)

Well, I did not get very far. In fact, I didn’t get past the very first step, which is to do a letter inventory. It turns out that Beforekill has over 30 more instances of the letter W than Afterkill has. This is a lot, considering that the scenes themselves are only about 90 lines long a piece. So, unless I want to add a bunch of web addresses, it’s probably not going to work. There are only so many times you can work “How now!” into conversation before it gets tedious.

It’s not a length issue, as Afterkill is rich in Rs and Ss, letters that you would expect to appear frequently in a given passage. Also, Afterkill has quite a few extra Ys than Beforekill and, oddly, about 20 more Gs! So why such a big W disparity in the other direction?

Part of it is a deliberate use on Shakespeare’s part of W alliteration in Beforekill, as in “which would be worn now” or “will I with wine and wassail,” but I think it’s more than that.

W is the letter of question words. When? Which? Why? How? Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are debating and planning the murder and are challenging each other with questions. W also the first letter of We. They are in this together. “If we should fail?” “We fail.”

After the murder, it’s all about Get this and Go there and Give me the daGGers. The soft W is used for coaxing and hedging. The hard G is used for scrambling and panicking. Awesome.

So there won’t be any full-scene anagrams, at least not right now. But I enjoyed discovering the reason why not, and thought you might enjoy it too.

Ironically, the title character in what many consider to be Shakespeare’s central dramatic work is most famous for his long speeches. One speech in particular stands out as almost interchangeable with Shakespeare and perhaps even the theatre as a whole. The soliloquy manages to sum up, in just thirteen letters, the fundamental question of existence itself. Once we agree to tackle that question, then the rest of the speeches, well, they may as well just be anagrams of the big one…

From Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life…

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not set
His precept ‘gainst self-slaughter! Rebuke! Rebuke!
How weary, foul, puffed, and abominable
Seem to me the questions of this place.
Fie on ‘t! O fie! ’tis a once heeded garden,
That’s left to pot; the rank and weed in nature
Possess it merely. But he should come to this!
Not four months dead: nay, half as much, but two:
As superior a man; so as, to this step,
Hyperion to a satyr; so caring to my mother
Permit he not beteem the beams of stars
Access her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 133).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

I have of late, – but wherefore do not seek, – lost all my cheer, ashamed that the oddest mood upsets me so seethingly that our lush frame, at the earth, soon seems to me a detested sterile promontory; this aesthetic roof toasted by stoked mythical golden fire truthfully appears to me therefore as such a both foul and pestilent congregation of bath vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! in theme, how impressive and truthful! in action as an angel! and apprehension as a god! the beauty of the world! the crest of beasts! But, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

You can compare it to the original speech here (around line 250).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I:
Is’t not monstrous that this player here,
Could force his soul so to the best esteem
That from her working feebled all his looks,
Have tears in eyes, add a tempest of bombasts,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to top esteem? and all for nothing!
Frets Hecuba to him for he to tear
That he so pretty sobs? What would he do
Had he not the uttermost cue for passion
As by me? He could drown the stage in tears,
Atone the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the temperate, and to quite impress
The seemly faculties of eyes and ears.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 382).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What’s a man,
If his chief hope and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a helpless beast, thou.
Sure he that made us with much large esteem,
He looked from before to after, gave unto us not
That potential and smoothest reason
To fust in us effetely. Whe’r it be
Bestial petty sloth, or some softer scruple
To foresee too precisely on a theme,
A knot, which, quarter’d, hath but one part hero,
And also three parts coward, I see not
Why yet I be to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and lots of strength and means
To do ‘t.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 37).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of endless mirth, of most splendid fancy; he hath paraded me on his shoulders a thousand separate times; and now too detested in the greatest depths of my imagination it is! Here hung those lips that I have oft kissed. When be you at fatuous gibes? at gambols? at accents? at those deftest flashes of espoused merriment, that were wont to burst the tables on a roar? But not one to be sped now, to renounce reverence? quite chapfallen? Foot you to my lady’s chamber, tell her, let her protest, of this favour she must come; see her laugh at that.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 80).

Well, I am pleased to report that the Cymbeline project turned out very well.

For their video project, the 8th grade class I was working with decided to create a modern-day talk show (instead of a reality show) with characters from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as guests. The show includes scenes from the original play, an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game… all written, performed, and produced by the students!

They presented their video at an in-school film festival, and represented their school at a citywide film festival hosted by my organization. And now, through the magic of the Internet, I share the video with you:

If you want to share this video with others, you can link directly to this post or embed the video from its TeacherTube page (where you can also watch the video if you have trouble loading it in here). We will also be featuring the video on the school’s home page.

UPDATE: The kids put the video on YouTube. It’s a much higher quality than what I was able to post to TeacherTube, so if you want to embed the video on your site, you should use that one.

Via The Shakespeare Geek, we learn of Madeline, who has made good progress on a project to record herself reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets on YouTube.

These recordings stand out very favorably among the many who have put themselves speaking Shakespeare online. She doesn’t feel the need to over-emote, but instead trusts and enjoys the words of the poet. Shakespeare’s language seems to come very naturally to her, and the videos are a pleasure to watch. Also, I think because she’s so young, she brings a freshness and vitality to her readings, and makes the old poems feel relevant for a new generation.

Here she is doing a favorite of this blog, Sonnet LV:

More here.