Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Book Note: Vulgar the Viking and a Midsummer Night's Scream

Redbeard, Odin. Vulgar the Viking and a Midsummer Night's Scream. London: Nosy Crow, 2013.

The punny title Midsummer Night's Scream has proven irresistible to many authors, including R. L. Stein (for which, q.v.) and David Bergantino (for which, q.v.).

Both those books have a connection of one kind or another to Shakespeare.

But, as we know all too well, there are merely parasitical works—those that refer to a quotation from or a title of one of Shakespeare's works but without any substantive engagement with Shakespeare.

This is one of those.

What we have here is the odd, semi-scatalogical adventures of a Viking boy in the town of Blubber during the Midsummer's Eve festival. We get a maypole dance, but we don't get love triangles or love potions or Shakespeare's language.

Here's a quick sample, and then we can all get back to whatever we were doing before.



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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.
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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