I love a good puzzle. Even got dragged to one of those puzzler’s league conventions, once. And everything’s better with Shakespeare, right? (Seems like there’s a Bacon joke in there somewhere.)

Whenever Andrews McMeel Publishing asked me if I wanted to review a Shakespeare puzzle book from The Puzzle Society, I got all excited. I didn’t think such a thing even existed – as a matter of fact I’d even given thought to seeing if I could piece together and distribute one myself. So I quickly said yes.

What was I expecting? I think, when I think “puzzle book”, I imagine those ubiquitous, cheapy “5000 Sudoku Puzzles!” ones you see at the supermarket checkout for a buck ninety-nine, and I think I was expecting something like that here. So imagine my pleasant surprise when out of the shipping envelope dropped a smaller book that looks exactly like a Moleskine notebook. Hard, textured cover. Strong binding. Even an embedded elastic wrapped around, to keep it closed when you’re not using it. Nice. Quality stuff, here.

The book itself is labelled as having “100 puzzles and quizzes.” What sorts of puzzles? A whole variety:

* Word searches (“Find all these words and characters from Antony and Cleopatra”, or “Find all these cliches that Shakespeare first used”) Both the traditional kind as well as “pathfinders” where each word links up to a new one and you have to find them all in a row.

* Quizzes (ranging from easy (“What did Shakespeare bequeath to his wife Anne in his will?”) to tricky (“Which is the largest female role, by line count?” Your mileage may vary.)

* Crosswords, and multiple variations – Kriss Kross, ArrowWords, etc…

* Codecrackers – one of my favorites, where you’ve got a crossword sort of puzzle where each blank has a number between 1 and 26, and you have to figure out which letter goes with which number. Do it right and spell out a Shakespeare quote.

* A variety of smaller puzzles like a jigsaw puzzle with letters on it, or “word wheels”, or word transformation games (for instance you’re given “drat” and “a light breeze”, so you add an F to get draft)

How’s the Shakespeare? As billed, every puzzle has some Shakespeare in it. I have to be honest, some seem to be phoning it in a bit more than others. A word search where every word is a Macbeth character? Cool. A traditional crossword puzzle, with traditional non-Shakespeare clues, with one little “At the end, the letters in the shaded circles will spell out a Shakespeare character” addition on the end? Not so much.

Here’s my metric for dealing with that – does my knowledge of Shakespeare in some way help me solve the puzzle? If so, then I count it as a win. For instance if I’m supposed to be guessing the name of a Shakespeare character by adding letters based on clues, but I spot right away based on the closing F that the character is Falstaff, then win. Likewise even with the word searches – there’s something exciting about spotting the word Leontes among a scramble of letters that you simply don’t feel when you find a generic word like vehicle or library. This is why I love the code cracker puzzles, because the earlier I recognize the quote, the faster I can fill in the unknown letters. I don’t know about you, but I only ever consider a puzzle done when I’ve filled in all the clues, not just when I got the “special” answer at the end.

With that metric in mind, I’m happy to report that pretty much all these puzzles succeed. The crosswords less so, for reasons described – but even there, you never know if you’re going to get a “movie based on a Shakespeare play” or “a famous actor famous for playing Shakespeare”, so there’s some challenge to it, and some level of surprise.

Downsides? Well, this is a small book. As I did several puzzles I found it very hard to keep the cover curled back and out of the way, holding the book in one hand, while still keeping it firm enough to write in. If I put it down on the table, I think the cover would constantly be trying to get in the way. And though I want to share these puzzles with my kids, the form factor really doesn’t lend itself to sharing. In a big puzzle book we could all put our heads together (literally, sometimes, complete with thunk noise :)) and everybody could do a word search. With such a small book I can maybe let me 8yr old take a crack at some puzzles by herself, but the 4yr old’s not getting his little chocolatey hands on it.

There’s also the potential issue of price. I don’t think this is out yet – the marketing copy said April 2011 – but the price printed on it is $7.99 US. I’m sitting here asking myself, if I was browsing the bookstore and spotted this in the wild, would I have scooped it up at that price? If you’re a puzzling Shakespeare fan who is going to do all the puzzles by yourself, then yes absolutely of course you do. [ While we’re on the subject, if you are in the mind to snap this one up, please consider clicking that Amazon link up there, which is an affiliate link, and helps support Shakespeare Geek. Thanks!

In my case, knowing the above family constraints, I wonder. That’s expensive for a book of puzzles that’s really just for me, not something I can share with the kids. Even though this one is 100% pure Shakespeare, they’d get more value out of one of those $1.99 cheapies at the front of the store with 500 pages in it.

Overall I’m very glad that books like this exist, and I am far happier to see this quality product (granted, at the higher price) than if I’d been handed a ninety-nine cent special that looks like a coloring book. My issue with the price could well be my own personal situation and nothing more. Know what I’d love to see, now that I think about it? Once this book is out, I’d love it if their website had online versions – even printable ones – of a bunch of the puzzles. That would cover my “sharing with the kids” issue completely. If that were the case, then all my reservations would be completely gone.

Now! Anybody know a three letter word, ends with O, Much blank About Nothing….? Hmmm…..

UPDATED  Win this book!   (Contest ends Thursday, March 10)

How do you review a movie that you’ve been waiting four years to see? My perception is drastically screwed up, I know that. Do I review it for the Shakespeare? It won’t hold up well, we already know that. Do I ignore the Shakespeare and review it as a generic kids’ movie? We all know I can’t very well do that :).

Let’s start with the Shakespeare, then, shall we? Just how much of the story is kept? For about the first half or so, it’s not bad. There’s the blue Montagues (led by mum Lady Blueberry), and the red Capulets (led by Lord Redbrick). Gnomeo is the hero of the blue team, along with his best pal “Benny” and a dog-like Shroom as their pet. There is no Mercutio character. For the red side we have Redbrick’s daughter Juliet, literally stuck up on a pedestal by her overprotective father, and troublemaker Tybalt, who thankfully is not double cast as the love interest for Juliet (like we see in Sealed With A Kiss).

There’s the inevitable demonstration of how the blues and reds dislike each other – in this case, taking the form of a lawnmower race. There’s a meeting between Gnomeo and Juliet over a rare orchid, where they’ve both disguised themselves and therefore have no idea the others…ahem…true colors. From that point they play a bit more fast and loose with the story – there’s a duel, someone gets hurt, Paris shows up to court Juliet, Gnomeo gets banished (in a way)…blah blah blah no surprise if I tell everybody they tack on a happy ending.

In between they add some characters (Tybalt has a posse? and who is this Featherstone supposed to be?), reduce the animosity between the families to a straight-up revenge story (red attacks blue, blue retaliates and attacks red, red steps it up…) and at one point I thought they were going to take a stab at explaining the history of the feud, but instead they threw in this random other love story that had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s original.

The animation is quite good – perhaps even too good? These are garden gnomes. They are made out of cement, or plaster, or whatever it is you make a gnome out of. As such they are chipped and scratched and dirty. Nice attention to detail, but… the stars of your show are chipped and scratched and dirty. You know? There’s a musical montage that shows both Gnomeo and Juliet going through a lengthy cleaning before one of their meetings, and I thought afterward we’d see them all shiny and new – nope. Best I could tell there was no change in their appearance at all.

Like all Shakespeare-ish stories, they drop in a boatload of random Shakespeare quotes and references. At the beginning I really and truly had hope for a minute when Gnomeo comes out with “Red? I hate the word…” which I recognized as a spin on Tybalt’s like “Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” If they’d sprinkled multiple random Romeo and Juliet quotes like that throughout the play? I would have loved it.

A couple of times they try – the “neutral ground” where Gnomeo and Juliet meet is referred to as “The Old Lawrence Place” for example. But mostly it’s made painfully clear that the writer of this particular film had little more than a high school knowledge of Shakespeare – probably about a C+ knowledge, at that. The only quotes you should expect to find are the generic ones like “To be or not to be”, “Let slip the dogs of war”, and “Out damned spot.” There’s a completely random Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reference, too. There are more quotes from other plays than from Romeo and Juliet.

It’s disappointing that they reduce the story to “revenge”. I wasn’t kidding about that writer’s C+ in English. Tybalt screams it. Lady Blueberry (Romeo’s mum) screams it. Even Benny, you know, Benvolio? The peacemaker? Yeah, picture him screaming “Revenge!!!” as he charges the Capulets. It just don’t work. I don’t mean they talk about revenge, or they act in a vengeful way – I mean that each of those characters at one point or another utters the phrase “Revenge!” We get it. You think Romeo and Juliet is a revenge story. It’s not.

As for the movie itself, if we step aside from the Shakespeare a bit, I suppose it’s…. ok. It’s almost an Elton John vanity project. His songs are sprinkled in (and he even makes a cameo) with no real rhyme or reason. They named a character Benny, for Pete’s Sake, but there’s no “Benny and the Jets.” There’s a crazy amount of celebrity voices. Dolly Parton is carted out for the same old “big boobs” joke that I thought we stopped making when Johnny Carson quit the Tonight Show. Ozzy Osborne plays the part of a deer (one of Tybalt’s posse), but for no discernible reason. He’s not a personality, he’s just a voice. Hulk Hogan does a tv commercial. It’s as if (and I’m not the first reviewer to point this out), Elton called in a bunch of connections and said “Hey, do a voice for my new cartoon.” So they each phoned in a few minutes. But they add nothing to the final product. I mean, come on – there’s LADY GAGA SONG on the soundtrack! Hasn’t anybody heard what happens when that woman releases a new song? The world goes insane. It just happened this past week. But yet here’s this tiny little animated movie where she’s singing an original song, and no buzz about that at all. They could have led with that in the marketing and gotten some traction.

A quick word on the whole “Toy Story” thing. It’s not. It doesn’t even try to be. Short of 2 or 3 silly “People coming, turn back into a statue!” scenes, the real people play no part at all in this story. If the writers could have figured out a way to put together an army of garden gnomes without any humans, I’m sure they could have done it and the movie would not have changed in the least.

The funniest part of the movie, by far, is Patrick Stewart as a statue of William Shakespeare. One of the characters actually gets into a debate with Shakespeare over the relative merits of the “doomed” ending versus the happy ending. I thought Stewart must have had an absolute ball with this one as his Shakespeare joyously taunts that the story can only end tragically:

“I suppose I could have Romeo arrive in time ….nope, nope, I much prefer the both dead version.”

My kids tell me that this was their favorite part as well. Whether it’s actually the funniest part, or if it’s just because we know our Shakespeare, who knows. But it was quite welcome.

Ok, I have to wrap this up eventually. I will give credit and acknowledge that despite their silly puns, this version did not stoop to the dreaded “wherefore” means “where” joke. Phew. HOWEVER, they did commit two cardinal sins – “Shakespeare is boring” and “Our ending is better.” I suppose I just have to grit my teeth over that for the moment, because much of the audience probably agrees. But to me, making references like that clearly says that you do not have any respect (or understanding!) of the source material, and that’s a crying shame. Go ahead and make a movie based on a Shakespeare play, but do it because you love the source material and want to pay homage, not because you actually think that you can improve it. You can’t.

Should you go see it? Sure, why not. It’s got funny bits. My kids laughed, and not just at the Shakespeare. There’s nothing especially wrong with it. I just think there was a great deal of potential that went unused. They could have kept much tighter to the story and still put a happy spin on the ending. Heck, they could have gone all meta with it, like Shakespeare in Love, and played out their own story as a parallel to the superior original, rather than doing this half-and-half job they did do.

I’m brutally torn over the whole “do we want to support projects like this?” question. I want Shakespeare stories for kids. Absolutely. But if I say to support a movie like this am I putting my vote behind cannibalizing the stories as the producers see fit? Is there any chance that the success of this movie would cause somebody to say “Hey, maybe we can make another story with even more Shakespeare in it?” That, is the question.

The reviews are coming in for Gnomeo and Juliet, and it may be better than expected:

In truth the movie almost works as an Elton musical, as hits like ‘Your Song’, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ and ‘Crocodile Rock’ are weaved into the score by composers Chris Bacon and James Newton Howard. John and partner David Furnish are producers and appear to have called in a few favours by getting their celeb chums to do the voice work (Michael Caine, Matt Lucas, Ozzy Osbourne). Director Kelly Asbury adeptly conjures up a sweet romance between the star-crossed pair Gnomeo (James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt). Blunt is particularly feisty as the girl gently rebelling against her well-meaning but overprotective father Lord Redbrick (Caine). And props to whichever of the nine hacks gave her the line “Ooh, my giddy aunt!”

I don’t get the “giddy aunt” reference.
I think this particular reviewer, who ultimately gives the movie 3 out of 5 stars, comes at it from the wrong angle. He compares it to Zeffirelli and Luhrmann, and that it is “not even close to being the definitive movie version.” Umm….YA THINK?
[ Why do I care so much about this movie? ]

(The full title of Wayne Myers’ book is The Book of “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” Musings on Shakespeare’s Most Wonderful Play. I just couldn’t fit that meaningfully in my title.)

I am woefully behind on my book reviews, but isn’t that always the case? Truthfully it’s taken me longer to write this review than it did to read the book!

Mr. Myers book is just the right size and scope for my kind of reading. Weighing in at just under 100 pages and covering one specific play, it’s small enough to be welcoming to the casual reader while still managing to pack a serious amount of discussion material in its dozen or so chapters. Most chapters center around a specific character, so the reader can easily flip around to favorites, or just read straight through.

Twelfth Night is a complex play. On one level it’s a light romantic comedy, some cross-dressing here, a little mistaken identity over there, a reunion of siblings separated by tragedy, a happy ending. It’s practically As You Like It.
Look closer. Look at the treatment of Malvolio, for an obvious starter. What about poor Viola, who not only assumes the identity of her dead brother, but seems to be stuck in the middle of a bizarre love triangle that none of the parties involved fully understand. Who does she love (erotically speaking) more, Olivia or Orsino? It’s clear that Olivia wants her (in her Cesario/Sebastian persona) more than she wants Orsino, and Orsino’s almost certainly got some strange feelings brewing as well. How does this happy ending work out, exactly? Orsino’s spent the play lusting after a boy, only to be told she’s a girl, and he says “Oh, phew, ok cool, I can marry you.” Olivia has been lusting after that same boy, but she’s told, “No, he wasn’t real, but here’s a brother that looks just like him. A brother you’ve never really met, but physical appearance is apparently all that matters.” And so on. Much fan fiction has been written about exactly what happens after Twelfth Night ends. Does anybody end up happy, really?

Myers’ book tells the story for those unfamiliar with it, and then takes it apart character by character, discussing different interpretations throughout the years. How should the shipwreck be staged? Should it open the play, or come after Orsino’s “If music be the food of love…” speech? Is Olivia truly in mourning at the beginning of the play, or just going through some formality? It is no coincidence that Olivia is mourning the death of a brother, as is Viola. So how much should this be played up, and how?

At times this “one chapter per character” breakdown doesn’t hold up. Characters don’t exist in a vacuum. To explain Malvolio, you have to explain how Maria and Toby and the others treat him. So then when you get to the chapter on Maria, what do you talk about? The cast is already small enough, but it does make you think that maybe some characters didn’t need their own chapter, and could instead have shown up strictly in their relationship to the more major characters. More than once while reading I thought, “This often comes out like a series of blog posts, like the author got an idea and then went out to do some research backing up that idea. Then, he moved on to the next idea.” This is ok if you’re a fan of that sort of short-attention-span, read-5-pages-and-then-flip-to-a-different-chapter that sounds interesting approach to tackling a book.

The book is a guide to staging Twelfth Night (giving many, many examples of how others have done it). A great deal of research has clearly gone into this material. Instead of abstract pondering about how a scene could be played, the reader is shown examples throughout the years of how the scene was played. Unfortunately there are no images from these productions, something that I think would have added tremendously to the final product. You can only go so far explaining what Viola looked like emerging from the sea. Show us a picture.

However, if like me you’re more into Shakespeare as literature and have no real interest in staging your own production, there’s still plenty here for discussion. What’s the deal with Orsino, isn’t he basically stalking Olivia? Are we supposed to be sympathetic toward him? What do we do with the whole Malvolio issue? What do we do when he leaves, do we laugh, or do we fear for our safety?

I expect over the coming weeks that I’ll be able to pull a half dozen blog posts out of this book, and that’s a good thing. I can’t even really say that about books like Bloom and Garber because volumes like that tend to spend so many hundred pages tackling a topic that I can never truly get a handle on the author’s argument. Here, Myers has made it simple enough – here’s what happens in Twelfth Night, here’s how the characters treat each other, what do you think? If you’ve seen the play, and/or read the play, you can jump in this discussion.

Overall I’m quite pleased with this book. If I found out that Mr. Myers were planning to do the same thing with another play, maybe Shrew or All’s Well, I think that I’d seek it out. I like the size, I like the format, I like the writing style. Having said that I’m finding it hard to fully grasp the intended audience for a book like this. It seems introductory in many places, but then makes a number of leaps about the book (often referring merely to a scene’s numbering, without explaining what the scene is about), as if the reader is intimately familiar with the play. In other words…..me, I guess. The “more than casual fan”, the kind of reader who does have more than one-time experience with the play, who is interested in deepening their knowledge by finding the key points where there’s discussion to be had.

I’d like to see more books like this, is really the best way I can put it.

Regular contributor Dr. Carl Atkins sent in this guest review of James Shapiro’s “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? “. Mr. Shapiro is also well known for A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.) , his biography of Shakespeare. Dr. Atkins, or “catkins” as he’s spotted in the comments, is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Take it away, Carl:
I was actually pleasantly surprised. It was much more readable than I expected. I had read his “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and found it to be rambling, disjointed, and filled with conjecture, so I was not expecting good things from a book about such a difficult subject. Yet “Contested Will” is, for the most part, tightly written, well structured, straightforward, factual without being too dry, and absorbing. It details the history of the authorship controversy, interestingly laying the blame on one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars, Edmond Malone. He notes that Malone, frustrated at being unable to uncover any documents to help flesh out the biography he hoped to write about Shakespeare, began to look to the plays for biographical references. This opened the door for anti-Stratfordians to launch their only means of attack.
If the book has any fault it is only in spending a bit too much time detailing the course of the Oxfordian cause. I found myself getting a bit bored by the end of that section. But only a bit.

It is a testament to Shapiro’s cool-headedness that he spends two-thirds of the book discussing the (circumstantial) evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship and ends with 27 pages debunking it.
What is most impressive is that Shapiro does not come across as someone with an axe to grind, or as a scornful elitist. He actually sounds like someone who is presenting the evidence for all to see. He makes no pretense about what side he is on, but he makes the evidence very clear.
I did not think I would like a book about the authorship question because I do not think it is an important question. But this book is more about understanding the history of the authorship question than about resolving the controversy. That is a more interesting topic. This is a book I would recommend to all interested in Shakespeare. It is fun to read.