http://blog.shakespearegeek.com/2006/10/romeo-and-juliet-as-disney-cartoon.html A long time ago I stumbled across this animated movie, “Sealed With a Kiss”, which is supposed to be a kids’ version of Romeo and Juliet, only with seals.  Well I tripped over it this week and, true to my word, got it for my kids.  We started watching it last night. It starts out well enough, and even better than I might have imagined.  There’s a voiceover that paraphrases the “Two households” opening, and basically comes down to “Look, the white seals [Capulet] don’t like the brown seals [Montague], that’s just the way it is.”  There is a lengthy battle scene at the beginning where no one gets hurt, and the prince comes in to break it up, just like the story.  I was quite pleased to see that two of the main characters will be Benvolio and Mercutio. And then….the first cardinal sin struck.  Mercutio is…mindless.  His character does nothing but spout random lines from Shakespeare.  Not even from R&J!  His quotes include “To be or not to be”, “Double double toil and trouble”  and a couple of others.  He solidifies his place on my sh*tlist in a scene where he and Benvolio are searching for Romeo and actually saying “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” while he’s looking.  DAMNIT!  Paraphrase all you want but do NOT TEACH MY KIDS INCORRECT SHAKESPEARE.  You wonder why kids get into school and think that Shakespeare is hard?  Stuff like this doesn’t help.  I only have a couple of interpretations of how this could happen, and none are good: * The person who wrote it is an idiot who didn’t know any better.  If that’s the case then you’re not allowed to do a Shakespeare movie. * The person who wrote it thinks my children are idiots who won’t know any better.  They may not understand it, yet, but that’s no reason to feed them an incorrect answer. * The person who wrote it knew better but just didn’t care.  Doesn’t say much for production values. Anyway.  The story continues true to form – they find lovesick Romeo, and convince him to go to the Capulets party in disguise, where he meets and falls in love with Juliet. And then…the second sin strikes.  I’m not sure if this is a bigger one or not, I have to put it in perspective.  Remember The Prince?  Well in this story, The Prince is the bad guy.  He’s sort of a prince, a Tybalt and a Paris all rolled up into one.  Juliet’s dad has decided that she will marry The Prince.  Normally I would say in language as strong as the above, DON’T MAKE STUFF UP!  But I’m torn, because it does manage to prune down the cast of characters in a way that makes it more approachable to young kids.  They get one bad guy to deal with.   Granted it’s still confusing — in their world of princesses, the prince is always the good guy.  They keep telling me that Romeo is the real prince.  I tried to explain to them that in the original story there are two “princes”, Prince Tybalt and Prince Paris, and they said “Three, Daddy – you forgot Prince Romeo.”   As for the rest of the movie – the sound, the graphics – it is all mediocre, at best.  It’s the sort of thing you expect to find for $1.99 in a carboard display case in the supermarket.  Looks like a personal project that somebody did on their PC (which, if I remember the story, it is).  We are only about half done with it, so I have to reserve the rest of my review until the end (which, I checked before ever getting it, is a happy one).  It is for my kids, after all, so my final judgement will be entirely based on whether or not they like it.  The “wherefore” line bothers me, not them.  If they decide at the end that they liked it, if they ask me questions, and most importantly if it stays with them – if they’re talking about the characters weeks from now over dinner – then I’ll call it a success.  That’s all I want, at this age.  I want them to know the stories.  There’s plenty of time later to fill in the details.

http://earmarks.org/archives/2008/01/31/178 But not by me.  This is Germaine Greer’s book about Anne Hathaway, and quite frankly I have no interest in reading it.  But the reviewer seemed to like it, and others among my readers may like it as well, so here you go. It’s not that I particularly dislike Greer, or Hathaway.  It’s just that this looks like a typical biography. Namely, I expect it’ll go something like this: Everything you know about X is wrong.  Here, let me show you with evidence that I found to support my case while ignoring all the evidence against it. If one person can write a book that says “26 was an incredibly old age for a woman to be married” and somebody else can write a book that says “26 was the average age for a woman to be married”, and both claim to have evidence, which should I believe?  The answer, to me, is that they cancel each other out and I don’t pay attention to either.

Right before Christmas a friend asked if I had anything by Bill Bryson in my collection.  I said, “The Walk In The Woods guy?  No.”  I knew that he’d done a Shakespeare book, but not much more than that.  So I wasn’t surprised when it showed up as a Christmas present. I loved this book.  I really really did.  There are four things that put it over the top for me: 1) It’s small.  Just under 200 pages makes it the kind of thing you feel like you can read casually and still actually finish in meaningful time.  Somebody like a Harold Bloom could do 200 pages alone on whether Hamlet said “solid” or “sullied” :). 2) Since it is small, it is brief.  Bryson says in a paragraph or two what others say in a volume or three.  The entire authorship question is wrapped up nicely in a chapter, in which the author even acknowledges that there are well over five thousand books on the topic. 3) It is loaded with facts.   If I’d listed this as #1 it could well have been true for any of the 1000 page tomes the masters have written.  But in this small and entertaining book, Bryson only offers enough fact to make his point, and then he moves on. 4) It is entertaining!  The author manages to thoroughly enjoy his topic, while never tripping over into the fawning “I wish this were true” trap to which so many biographers fall victim.  There are some well known biographies of Shakespeare that take the position, “We don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life for a fact, but let’s pretend it went a little something like this….”  Well, Bryson’s book slaps on a “…but, probably not.”  He is clearly content with how little we know about Shakespeare. Mind you, the very nature of this book makes it pretty introductory stuff.  Much like the recent “44 facts you probably didn’t know” post from someone else’s blog, readers with different levels of exposure to Shakespeare will learn different things.  But I find it hard to believe that there’s someone out there who already knew it all.  He dips into word frequency and invention, but never in a boring way  (“Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, … lonely, leapfrog, zany, well-read, and countless others – including countless!”)  He dissects the existing portraits and signatures of Shakespeare, but again, manages to keep it fascinating.  I knew that there are only six known signatures, but I did not know that he spells his name differently every time and that he never spelled it Shakespeare. It’s actually the case that Bryson backs up his arguments with evidence so frequently that when he doesn’t, it sticks out like a sore thumb.  “The plays were owned by the company, not the playwright,” he writes, “So the fact that Shakespeare makes no mention of them in his will is not unusual.” [That is my paraphrase, not a direct quote.]  But I didn’t see any evidence cited, which made me question this bit and others. I could go through the whole book selecting the nuggets I found most fascinating, but that would take me all day and it would take the fun out of the book for you.  There are, however, two major sections that I thought worth mentioning. The first is about the issue of homosexuality in the sonnets.   It took me a few seconds to digest this sentence, given the emphasis on facts and evidence throughout the book:
The extraordinary fact is that Shakespeare, creator of the tenderest and most moving scenes of heterosexual affection in play after play, became with the sonnets English literary history’s sublimest gay poet. Wh….ummm…..err…..huh?  I think this is the only time in the book Bryson comes out and says “The fact is…” and then attaches that Shakespeare was a gay poet?  Eight pages are devoted to the sonnets and for whom they are written.  The language of those pages is odd, as if every argument against Shakespeare’s homosexuality is couched in language like “Discomfort lasted well into the twentieth century..” and “…that [Shakespeare’s sexuality] may have been pointed in some wayward direction has caused trouble for admirers ever since.”  There are moments when it sounds like Bryson is saying “If you don’t think Shakespeare was gay, you’re fooling yourself.”  I was reminded of my recent reading of Kenneth Burke relative to the question, where he actually used the word “squeamish” (as in, “I don’t get squeamish about it”).  I’m left wondering just how squeamish Bryson is. It took me a little while to convince myself that by “gay poet” he mean that the relationships expressed in the sonnets were homosexual, and not that Shakespeare himself was.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I take issue more at the “extraordinary fact” bit of that sentence, when it is anything but. Lastly comes the authorship question.  Bryson masterfully destroys every argument I’ve ever heard in a way so amusing and patronizing that it merited applause when I was done.  “So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment — actually all of it, every bit — involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact.”  Strong words from someone who throughout the book has been so keen to differentiate what we know via evidence from what we wish were true.  “There’s no evidence that Shakespeare owned any books!” is countered with “Then he must not have owned any pants, because there’s no evidence of that either!”  Good point :). Starting with an amusing story about just how nuts Delia Bacon was, Bryson can’t help but acknowledge the early contributors to anti-Stratford sentiment, namely the noteworthy J. Thomas Looney, Sherwood Silliman and George Battey.  Love it!  He then dissects the contenders one at a time.  Bacon?  There’s no link between Bacon and theatre in any way, shape, or form, other than Bacon’s own attacks on the pasttime as “frivolous and lightweight.”   Oxford? He had his own company of players and yet wrote for the competition?  He was so sneaky that he wrote in puns (“hate from Hate away”) about his pseudonym’s wife?  Oh, and he died 10 years before he could have written The Tempest and Macbeth.  Marlowe, who “had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work”?  This case, Bryson notes, at least had “a kind of loopy charm.” He even acknowledges the Mary Sidney argument, of which I’m familiar after getting a chance to rea d Robin P. Williams’ book, Sweet Swan of Avon.  Bryson acknowledges all the obvious family connections that Sidney had to Shakespeare, but then concludes, “All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.”  I’m not sure that’s quite fair, but maybe that’s just sympathy for Ms. Williams’ coming through. If I go on much longer my review will be longer than the book and I’ll end up spoiling all the good parts.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  It is exactly the sort of thing I enjoy, for everything I said above.  It is not overly imaginative.  It never strays far from the evidence, even when that evidence is potentially dull and boring (like Shakespeare’s habit of never paying his taxes).  The writing keeps it entertaining, and that’s what drives a reader to finish a book.  It shouldn’t be a chore, it should be a treat . This one was.