So, I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting mobile Shakespeare apps. Even more so since I switched from Apple to Android, because my kids’ Kindle Fires run Android and if I can find Shakespeare apps for those, then, well, score.

Brand new on the scene is MicroShakespeare, where you get an animated talking Shakespeare character who laughs and dances when you touch him, and swings his arms dramatically when speaking his quotes.  Cute.

The app itself contains :

• touch Shakespeare to have him recite a quote.  That’s probably the main purpose and the thing everybody would use this for.  I haven’t yet explored whether he’s only got the most common quotes that we all already know, or if the database is bigger than average
• a “test your knowledge” game.  More on this in a bit.
• a mini-biography of Shakespeare (pointless for this crowd, really) which is just a page of text.
• a “magic 8 ball” feature where you’re supposed to ask a question and then shake your phone, and have Shakespear give you an answer. Amusing, I suppose, if you like such things.

It’s quote clear that they have an engine for generating these things, and there’s a whole line of “Micro-” famous people that you can get.  I assume that there’s just a little database they’re filling up with trivia questions and famous quotes.  Then they get a designer to whip up an animated version of the famous person, and presto, new app!

Let’s get back to the game, which I find the most interesting part. You’re asked 10 multiple choice questions and then given your score out of 10. I did keep getting new questions, so that’s good. That means I can play until I’ve seen all the questions.  Unfortunately, if you get one wrong all it does is say you got it wrong – there’s no spot where it tells you the right answer, and most importantly why that one is the right answer.

My problem is that I think it’s getting some of the answers wrong.  Maybe I’m having a senior moment, but could somebody please tell me whether I’m understanding the following questions correctly?

1. A question asks how many of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts exist, and it tells me that the answer of “none” is incorrect.  Is there a way to interpret that question so that the answer is more than zero?
2. A question asks when all of Shakespeare’s plays were performed, and the answer of “daytime” is considered the correct answer. But didn’t Blackfriar’s and its candles allow for performances at any time?
3. A question asks which play contains the line “A horse, my kingdom for a horse.”  Tells me that Richard III is not the right answer.

For the asking price of $1.50 it’s a cute thing for Shakespeare fans to have.  I’ll probably see if I can contact the developer to ask about the questions, once one of you good folks tells me that I’m not losing my mind.

Then again, given that I learned of this app just this week within days of its launch (because someone named “RK” posted a comment on an old Android post of mine), I’m going to assume that the guys that wrote it are trying to get the word out and may actually see this post.  If so, hello developers!  The game’s only been out for a few days and even though the market says it’s been downloaded less than a few dozen times, it’s already got multiple 5 star (and only 5 star) reviews.  That makes it pretty obvious that you are writing your own reviews (or having friends do it).  My favorite is how all 5 reviews were all posted from a Samsun Galaxy devise.  That’s one heck of a coincidence!  You may want to tone it down a bit and try to generate some real positive reviews from real users.  Just a suggestion. 🙂

Is there anyone out there who reads a blog like this one and who hasn’t seen Shakespeare in Love? Well I know you haven’t seen it in shiny new high definition Blu-ray, because it just came out this week :).

In case you haven’t, let me recap a bit.  Joseph Fiennes (yes, Coriolanus’ brother) plays a Shakespeare we never really think about — a struggling playwright with a serious case of writer’s block.  Worse, all he’s doing is banging out whatever he can sell for some quick coin.  He has no grand plan, he’s just scraping out a living in the shadow of men like Christopher Marlowe.  The play he’s working on right now?  “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” which of course becomes Romeo and Juliet.

Enter Viola, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who for a change is madly passionately in love with Shakespeare’s work rather than Marlowe’s.  So much so, in fact, that she dresses up like a man for a chance to play a role on his stage.  See what they did there?  A movie about Shakespeare that has a girl dressing like a boy?  A girl named Viola? You have to love it already. 😉

Shakespeare develops a strong bond with this character of hers (who goes by Thomas Kent), and it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare meets and falls in love with Viola as well (breaking from the Orsino parallel), putting her in that odd…well…Viola-like state of being in love with the man she works for, who happens to think that she’s a boy.

How will it all end?  It’s a mystery! 🙂

The movie is just beautiful on all fronts.  The costumes are beautiful, the scenary is beautiful (both even more so in high def like this). The script is beautiful (if the name Tom Stoppard doesn’t mean anything to you, it should!), the pacing is beautiful. There’s an amazing sequence where Shakespeare and Viola are going over lines in bed together, intermixed with Viola as Thomas Kent on stage delivering the lines in public.  Later, when the play begins, we keep cutting back to several interest parties who are racing to put a stop to it.  What will happen? Will the show go on? You’ll find yourself gasping every time the Globe audience gasps.

Of course, like all these movies I have my standard complaint – I don’t care about the not-Shakespeare parts.  There’s a whole story about how Viola has been betrothed to a random nobleman weasel whose name I don’t even remember, and other than as an obstacle I just don’t care anything about him. When Shakespeare’s not on screen and there’s nobody doing Shakespeare lines?  I might as well hit fast forward for how much I’m paying attention.

There’s some special features on the disc, although I’m unsure if they are new for Blu-ray or were on the original DVD release.  I watched “deleted scenes” (not a blooper reel, just scenes that did not make it in) and listened to the audio commentary track from “the whole gang”.  I’m not used to doing that, that was weird.  I kept thinking “Stop stepping on the lines!” 🙂

In the end, though, I was serious when I said I expect that most of my audience has seen this movie.  The question is whether you want to add the Blu-ray edition to your collection. Right now Amazon looks like they have it for about eight bucks, so why wouldn’t you?

Score one for my mom, who has apparently been paying attention when I talk.  A few weeks ago she handed me Arliss Ryan’s The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare
, which she’d picked up at a yard sale for fifty cents.  “I saw Shakespeare and thought of you,” she told me.  I enjoy that this is the response to Shakespeare people in my life have, “Oh Duane would like this.”

I thank her for the gift, and based on the cover art I assume that it is a young adult piece of fiction that I can hand over to my daughters.  Nevertheless I decide to read it.  It does not go past me that a) I blogged about this as a new arrival in February of this year, and b) it’s still got it’s $15.00 price tag on it from Borders, and my mom found it for 50 cents.  So I do not have high hopes for a book that tumbled so quickly out of sight.

I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised.  First of all it
is not young adult.  It does not take long at all for Mistress Hathaway to meet young Master Shakespeare, and all sorts of things are being unbuttoned and unlaced very quickly.  My kids aren’t seeing this one anytime soon.  So forget the young adult thing, this is more of I guess what you’d call a “historical romance.”  (Although I am left wondering, since the book basically starts with them getting married when Anne was what, 28? Why is there a young teenage girl on the cover?)
Once I realized what I was reading, everything fell into place.  This is to be your classic “behind every great man is a woman” story.  Will Shakespeare, forced into a loveless marriage and unhappy with his life in Stratford, runs away to London to make a name for himself.  What does Anne Shakespeare do?  Why, follows him of course.  Leaving her children to the care of the Shakespeares, forever loyal Anne (who continually repeats her mantra that she married for life) packs some belongings, hitches up her skirt and heads off to London as well.

What happens next?  Why, she writes Shakespeare’s plays, of course. 🙂  I’m only half kidding.  Using the story that she is Shakespeare’s sister, not his wife (thus allowing both of them many freedoms a married couple would not have been allowed), she quickly gets a job copying scripts for him, which turns into a job (unknown to anyone else) helping him edit and, soon, write the plays.  How many?  I won’t spoil it.  In this book’s world, her contribution is … not small.

I am very pleased with the amount of detail that’s gone into the biographical portions.  All of the details of Shakespeare’s life that I would expect are accounted for – Greene’s Groatsworth, the back story behind the sonnets, Marlowe’s bar fight, the night time raid on the Globe, Hamnet’s death, etc… The author appears to have done some research.

The downside, however, is in the treatment of the plays. It looks pretty obvious to me that the author took her own opinion of the plays, and pasted that over her storyline.  Falstaff and Hamlet are their greatest creations (makes you wonder what role Bloom played in the research, doesn’t it?), while King Lear gets nary a mention, other than to say that it’s the saddest of the lot, and is part of a comedy sequence involving Shakespeare trying to figure out how to make it rain in his theatre.  Most of the later plays are dismissed as “not our best work.”  Coriolanus is singled out with “no one will be quoting that one in twenty years.”  And it is a fairly obvious modern woman who heaps her scorn upon Two Gentlemen of Verona, and not a historically accurate Anne Hathaway.  The author may hate that one, but the words she put into Anne’s mouth seemed pretty out of place for anybody that pays attention to more plays than just “the big ones.”

Oh, and the Dark Lady of the sonnets gets completely brushed off, which to me screamed simply that the author didn’t want to take a stand on that one (or, did not have the research to do so).  From her perspective, she knows that her husband has women on the side, so if he writes about one in particular in his sonnets, so what is it to her?  The only obvious thing here is that the sonnets are supposedly autobiographical. Take that how you please.

Another disappointing bit is that she seems to just plain get bored detailing how the plays came to be.  They start out strong, and there’s good back story for why the Henry plays were written, and in that order.  But it’s not long before the plot chugs along as quickly as “Oh, the new Scottish king likes witches, does he?  Here, let’s bang out Macbeth” or “I’m feeling a bit jealous today, oh look there’s a new Italian story on the market nobody’s done yet let me just run home and whip up Othello.”  But even then, later in the book the two Shakespeares will bemoan that they’ll only be remembered for “the great ones like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.”  Other than with Hamlet and Falstaff (and maybe a little Romeo and Juliet), there is very little time spent on “Wow, we wrote a masterpiece that will be spoken of for centuries to come.”  It’s all just “Shakespeare became a successful playwright by giving the audience what they wanted.”

It is an entertaining book, don’t get me wrong. I want my wife to read it. I think it’s written for a very specific audience.  Clearly a romance novel.  Anne, the ever loyal wife stuck in a loveless marriage, tries everything to make it work.  But darn it she’s still a woman, she still has needs, and she finds ways to fill those needs.

This is an good book not precisely for a Shakespeare fan, but for someone close to a Shakespeare fan.  You want your family and your friends to get the details of Shakespeare’s life? To share a little bit of your passion for the subject with them, without boring them to tears or talking over their heads?  That’s where a book like this comes in.  The details are basically right. I would much rather have somebody start with this book and explain to them where the story is not historically accurate, than for them to fall victim to any number of Authorship theories and have to start them over from scratch. This book knows that it is fiction.

Pick it up
and give it to a loved one, like my mom did, and like I’m going to do.

My first time seeing All’s Well That Ends Well!  Good night for it – the rain held off, and we got the best seats we’d ever had (in the “tall chair” section, right up against the edge of the VIP section, who all have low chairs).

It’s an amusing little play, kind of all over the map.  They open with a huge funeral scene looking like something straight out of New Orleans the way everybody was costumed.  Bertram has flung himself across the coffin of his father, and is eventually the last to leave the service as people come and remove the chairs around him.  It’s a nice idea, but … at any point in the rest of the play is there any mention of his relationship to his father? At all? Other than “This guy’s dead,” what is the purpose of that extended scene?

Let me see how I do with the plot, for those that don’t know it:  Bertram’s father has just died.  He is taken in as a ward by the King of France.  Bertram’s mother, the Countess, has a ward of her own, Helena, whose father was a famous doctor.  Helena loves Bertram.  (When the Countess says “Think of me like a mother,” thus making Bertram her brother, Helena’s all, “Ewww, no, can’t do that. That’s nasty.” So they have a bit of a go-round on whether she can be a mother-in-law instead.)

Anyway, the King of France is deathly ill, and convinced that nobody can cure him – if only the famous Doctor so-and-so (Helena’s father), was still alive!  Sure enough Helena comes and says, “I have my father’s medicine, I can cure you.”  She offers a deal that if she cures the king, she can marry anyone in his kingdom.  Done and done – she cures him, then promptly picks Bertram.

It’s at this point that we discover that Bertram is a pig. He doesn’t think she’s good enough for him, being just the daughter of a doctor.  I do love a good scene in Shakespeare where somebody pisses off a king, because it never ends well (hello, Cordelia?)  The King at first gently hints to Bertram, “You know what she did for me, yes? She cured me, you know that, right?” and then more sternly, “It is only her title you don’t like – and I can change that.”  But Bertram’s having none of it, and has no interest in marrying Helena.

For the briefest moment here I felt sympathy for Bertram, for one simple reason – if he really has grown up in the same house as this girl, and his mother really does think of her like a daughter, then maybe he sees her as a sister?  In which case, even a king saying “Marry your sister!” would cause you to disagree with the command.

Anyway, Bertram grudgingly agrees to marry Helena, but is then promptly convinced by his cowardly friend Parolles to run away and join the army (an honor that was previously denied him).  And so he does, sending home a note to his mother and “wife” that says, “As long as a wife is in France, there’s nothing for me there.  It’s a big world and I’ll keep as much distance as I can.”  He also writes (paraphrased), “You never got a ring or a baby from me, so until you have those things, we’re not married.”

What comes out of Helena next, surprisingly, is a speech that sounds like something from Les Miserables where she blames herself for all of this, and that if he dies in battle, it will be all her fault.  I liked it, I thought it was very telling about the character, but like many things it seemed to come out of nowhere, and then never any followup.

The plot gets a little twisty here and I can’t say I followed it all entirely.  Helena says that she’s going on a pilgrimage – and somehow rumor circulates that she’s died.  I don’t know where that part came in.  So Bertram either has a wife, or…has a wife who has died? When he starts talking up the ladies of town (Diana in particular) I got lost.  If they know he is married (they do), then yeah, he’s a rat for cheating on his wife.  But if everybody thinks that his wife is dead, is he still a bad guy?

Helena, it turns out, has arrived in town and has spoken to Diana and her mother about her history with Bertram.  Specifically about Bertram’s “ring and baby” thing, which she has taken as a challenge.  They come up with the famous “bed trick” where Bertram thinks he’s going with Diana (to whom he has given his ring), only it is Helena (pretty sure that’s known as “rape” these days).  Badda boom badda bing, everything works out in the end – Helena’s pregnant with Bertram’s child, she managed to get his ring from him, so he says “Ok, fine I’ll marry you.”

I don’t know if it was the production or the source material, but most of the comedy seemed to fall flat.  Poor clown Lavatch got nothing from the audience at all.  Parolles, played by the same guy who did Bottom for Commonwealth a few years ago, felt like he was really trying to force something out of the material that wasn’t there.  The funniest bits came from the Countess, who as the mother character could get an easy laugh of of the slightest eye roll or arched eyebrow, and the King.  The funniest line of the night came in the final scene when it is discovered that Diana is wearing a ring that belonged to Helena, given to her by the king.  He is demanding to know where she got it:

KING

Thou hast spoken all already, unless thou canst say
they are married: but thou art too fine in thy
evidence; therefore stand aside.
This ring, you say, was yours?

DIANA

Ay, my good lord.

KING

Where did you buy it? or who gave it you?

DIANA

It was not given me, nor I did not buy it.

KING

Who lent it you?

DIANA

It was not lent me neither.

KING

Where did you find it, then?

DIANA

I found it not.

KING

If it were yours by none of all these ways,
How could you give it him?

DIANA

I never gave it him.

LAFEU

This woman’s an easy glove, my lord; she goes off
and on at pleasure.

KING

This ring was mine; I gave it his first wife.

DIANA

It might be yours or hers, for aught I know.

KING

Take her away; I do not like her now;

That last “I do not like her now” was delivered with just the right comic timing, it had me in stitches.

The production, as always, was quite nice.  The costumes were very impressive, from the initial funeral scene to all the hospital attendants to the king (dressed in pure white, top to toe).  All the military men were in uniform.   The stage – with this cool rotating ring in the middle of it – was equally the king’s palace, the countess’s living room, a tent, a battle ground.  A couple times it even seemed to pass as just some generic street corner.

Was it me or does this play in particular have a crazy amount of back and forth in it?  We see the countess – we see the king – we see the countess – we see the king.  You send a letter here, I send a letter back here…  Once upon a time here on the blog we talked about “split screening” a play, and sometimes I wondered if this would make a good candidate.  What were they sending these letters by, rocket ship?  They kept getting where they needed to go awfully quickly.

As always, glad I got to go, and glad I got to add this play to my list of seen-its.  Not one of my favorites.  I can’t really think of anything where I’d point to a particular scene as an example of something.  (Compare The Comedy of Errors, for example, where I’ve at times used Dromio of Syracuse’s description of his fat new wife as one of Shakespeare’s funniest scenes.)  When one play is being performed and I catch myself thinking, “I wonder what they’re going to do next year?”  I guess that’s telling enough. I don’t remember thinking that when I was watching their Othello.