Darnit, Tivo tells me that I don’t get the Sundance channel and thus can’t watch Slings and Arrows over the next few weeks. Check out this blurb from the article:

“Slings & Arrows” takes us backstage at the New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, a fictional setting that will ring hysterically true for anyone who’s spent time in the world of not-for-profit theater. Torn between mercenary corporate sponsors, who want to erect a ”Shakespeare Village” with themed hotels and costumed fudge vendors, and precious artistes who think ”Hamlet” is a dead text that can be revived with pyrotechnics and grunge, the festival is full of familiar but freshly imagined eccentrics. They’re types, but they’re so sharply written that they become real even as they remain laughable.

I can’t believe I’m going to miss that. I have to check more carefully, I thought I had Sundance. Maybe I’m confusing it with the IFC.

So the week’s movie gossip is that Marilyn Monroe wanted to do Shakespeare. Tapes to her psychiatrist reveal that Laurence Olivier had told her to get acting lessons with Strassberg, and that she planned to take him up on his offer of help.

The more interesting question is what sort of role do you think she would have / could have played? This apparently happened “shortly before her death” in 1962, so figure she was what, 36? She’s probably not doing Juliet. But she’s Marilyn Monroe, for pete’s sake, she needs a romantic role. Cleopatra? Could she pull off the shrewish Kate? Liz Taylor didn’t do hers until 67 – Marilyn could have defined the role ;).

Patrick Stewart’s the sort of guy that, when he does Shakespeare, you want to go check it out. (When he does “A Christmas Carol” you want to check it out, too). Anyway, he’s got a new project — Merchant of Venice, ala Las Vegas. He’s already got Ian McKellen signed up. Apparently he’s not getting rave reviews so far, though, as people feel that he’s “trying too hard”, and “hitting it with a sledgehammer.”

What the article doesn’t say is whether this is a movie he’s filming or an actual production someplace. I’d be surprised to see a movie, after Al Pacino just did his Merchant this year.

There’s a line in Hamlet during the bedroom confrontation that I go right to whenever Hamlet comes up. Something in it just hooked me once upon a time and it’s been a personal favorite ever since. It’s when Hamlet says to Gertrude, “You have my father much offended.”

In my head, that line summarizes the entire play. A major part of Hamlet’s anquish lies in his feelings toward his mother. He wants to confront her, but hasn’t (yet). He wants to tell her the truth about what he knows, but he can’t. And yet here he does both. I don’t see it as a throwaway line in their little banter (“Come come, you answer with an idle tongue….go,go, you question with a wicked one…”) It’s more cathartic than that. I can just picture him screaming it at her – “YOU have MY FATHER much offended!” Is he talking about her o’erhasty marriage, or the fact that she married the murderer? Both, probably. There’s agony in the poor kid at this point, absolute torment. His mother is sharing a bed with the guy that killed his father. He’s trying desperately to ask her “What the $%^&* are you doing?? Don’t you see how sick this all is?”

My question is, am I completely off in hanging so much on that one line? When it’s performed, is it usually done as a throwaway just so they can get through the banter? I suppose “You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, and would it were not so you are my mother” is the “better” line in the sense that it climaxes the little back and forth and begins to make things happen. But I like the line I cited. It just captures the essence better to me, because only three characters are mentioned in it — Hamlet and his mom and dad. It brings the play completely back to them makes the play accessible to any parent or child. The “You are the queen…” line makes the situation too complicated.

Lord, I’m talking too much. ok, I’ll stop.

I’ve got an art project I’m working on (a gift, really) and I need to do some text so that it looks like Shakespeare wrote it. I could probably go with any generic script-like font, but I’m geeky like that, I want to know that it looks like Shakespeare’s script, even if I’m the only one that recognizes it :).

I’d like to pretend that I have the time to learn enough calligraphy and get enough samples to fake it myself, but that’s not gonna happen. So now I’m on the hunt for a font I can pop into Microsoft Word or something and get something close. Anybody know of such a font that can save me all that hunting time? Thanks!