Tuesday, June 23, 2015

The Great River Shakespeare Festival Opens Friday!

Romeo and Juliet. Much Ado About Nothing. The Great River Shakespeare Festival. 24 June to 2 August 2015.

I've said it before, and I'll doubtless say it again: Go to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. They produce utterly unsurpassable Shakespeare, well worth driving hundreds of miles to see.

Preview performances start tomorrow; opening night is Friday.

Here's a quick link to my reactions to last year's festival.

And here's a trailer for their Much Ado About Nothing—it looks fabulous, and I love the tagline:  "What Love Dares."  Good stuff.


Links: The Great River Shakespeare Festival.

Monday, June 1, 2015

Even More Shakespeare in Pears Before Swine

Pastis, Stephan. “Whuh you Reading?” When Pigs Fly: A Pearls Before Swine Collection. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2010. 11.

Hey,
son.
Whuh
you
reading?

'Romeo and
Juliet' . . .
Its for my
English class.
Thus begins another nifty Shakespeare-related comic by Stephan Pastis.

And the spacing of that dialogue makes it easier for the comic to be inserted below!

Pastis has a fair number of Shakespeare-related comics. In the following, the dad Croc (like most of the Crocs in the comic, a fairly low wattage bulb) finds his son (unlike most of the Crocs in the comic, an over-achiever) reading a book. Observe the hilarity:


Update: Pastis puts together treasuries of his comics, providing "artist's commentary" on some of them. Let's see what he has to say about this one:


I'm not sure that's fair . . . but I'm not sure that comment is to be taken at face value.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest