*** NATIONAL SHAKESPEARE DAY ***Today (April 23) is National Shakespeare Day–a day for fans of the bard to celebrate his life and work. William Shakespeare is widely considered to be one of the world’s greatest poets and playwrights. He was also responsible for contributing hundreds of words to the English language–many of which we still use today.National Shakespeare Day is a great opportunity to read (or go watch) your favourite Shakespearean play. Or, with dozens of movies based on the bard’s work, you can celebrate the influence the playwright has had on popular culture.More...https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/national-shakespeare-day-where-when-did-william-shakespeare-live-die-b995292.html***English to Shakespeare translatorhttps://lingojam.com/EnglishtoShakespeareanCAUTION: This translator is exaggerated for comic effect and should not be used for serious translations! It's just for fun.***This isn't about the stuff that always does crack up 14-year-olds in English class but is totally innocent: the "bring me my long sword, ho!" sort of thing. But the kids who lose it every time the word "ho" is uttered are closer to the spirit of Shakespeare than the teacher who demands they treat the words like museum pieces. Sure, it would be awkward for teachers to explain the Elizabethan double entendres to their students — but pretending they don't exist makes Shakespeare seem unnecessarily stuffy and difficult. So we're going to start with the most obvious innuendoes, and then move on to some seriously advanced sex punnery that is probably going to blow your mind.In Twelfth Night, the pompous butler Malvolio (think of Zazu from The Lion King and you've got the idea) is given a letter that he thinks is from the lady of the house, declaring her love for him. This is how he convinces himself the letter's in her writing:By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus makes she her great P's. Looking at it on the page, it spells out "CUT." But if you read it aloud — "her C's, her U's, and her T's" (hint: read the "and" as "N")— it gets a lot dirtier. "And thus makes she her great P's." Uh huh.More...https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8479871/shakespeare-dirty-jokes
--You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NYCPlaywrights" group.To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nycplaywrights_group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nycplaywrights_group/dccdce3e-6de0-460b-ba51-e65e973a8021n%40googlegroups.com.***In a sense, all productions of Shakespeare are interpretations: We do not know the performance style of Shakespeare’s actors, so succeeding generations have adapted their performance to the dominant acting style of the day. In the past several decades, there has been a major shift from the beautifully voiced rhetorical approach, best exemplified by John Gielgud, to attempts to create a more conversational tone that still respects the rhyme and meter. We have no idea how Burbage looked, but the heavily operatic makeup as worn by the Laurence Oliviers and Michael Redgraves (de rigueur for the mid-20th century classical plays) has been replaced by little to none. Even though scholars disagree on what Elizabethan actors’ pronunciation sounded like, the assumption that U.S. actors must adopt an upper-class English accent to be “classical” has undergone a significant revision (as has the British actor).Shakespeare’s theater was itself based on a creative process of “interpretation.” The playwright borrowed his stories from Ovid, Plutarch and Holinshed and set them in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Sicily, France, and in the 12th to 16th centuries without an attempt at historicity: basic setting, Elizabethan clothes (Cleopatra in a farthingale, King John in “pumpkin pants”). Imagine the immediacy of audiences coming to the Globe or the Rose, without years of accumulated theatrical traditions or cultural baggage, encountering extraordinary characters, incidents and ideas. Kings, queens and peasants — dressed exactly as themselves, in modern dress, speaking in their accents. How very electric the connection between audience and player must have been!More...https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/shakespeare-meets-the-21st-century/2012/08/03/2562cc6a-d4ed-11e1-829d-8eedd9e3ac96_story.html
***Atwood's most recent novel is Hag-Seed, a retelling of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, which is part of Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare series. She discussed how she and other writers have explored retelling the Bard's work:"The brief was pretty simple. The brief was choose a play of Shakespeare, any play, and revisit it in the form of a modern prose novel, so we have I think eight writers doing this. We've had four of them published already, and four are yet to come. The approaches have been very different from one to another. So the first one, which was Jeannette Winterson, took A Winter's Tale, and she made pretty mirrorings of what's in the play. Howard Jacobson's My Name is Shylock [sic] was a lot looser."In response to a question about how Shakespeare's language affected her own writing, Atwood spoke of the importance of memorizing poetry to her education:"Long ago before you were born, we had to memorize things in school, and write them out from memory. I don't think that was harmful. Then it went away for quite a while, but it's coming back. There's in fact a very good contest that's held across Canada for secondary school, high school students in which they memorize three poems and recite them. You win big prizes, not only for yourself but for your school, and it's become violently popular. These kids are really good. The winners are just exceptional, and that happens here too. I think it's the National Arts that's got a poetry high school contest going on as well. So it is coming back, and I think writing poetry it is true that you have to get the sound right, that the sound actually matters as much or more."More...https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/10/16/podcast-134-margaret-atwood-shakespeare-21st-century-and-youtube
***One of the most cherished and enduring myths about the English language is that its vocabulary was largely populated through the genius of a single man: William Shakespeare. Without seeking to diminish the importance of the man who is viewed by many as one of our greatest writers, we would like to point out that this is just not the case.Where did we get this notion? It appears to have come about through a misreading of the data in the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1928, when this work was first published in full, it was hailed as one of the greatest lexicographic achievements of all time. One of the signature achievements of this dictionary was that the editors provided enormous historical context with millions of dated citations. For each headword, the editors gave what was at that time the earliest known use of that word. And for thousands of entries in the first edition of the OED, the first recorded use of a word was found in the works of William Shakespeare.It should be noted that at no point did the editors of the OED say "We have X entries for which Shakespeare is the earliest known user; therefore he invented X number of words." This assumption was made by readers of that dictionary, who reasoned that if the OED hadn’t found an earlier use that no one else would either. However, most of the citations included in the OED were sent in by volunteers, and these volunteers, unsurprisingly, preferred searching for words in Shakespeare, as opposed to the kinds of documents that might have earlier uses of his "coinages"—such as legal documents, court memoranda, and turgid ecclesiastical screeds.More...https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-shakespeare-didnt-invent/bedazzle
***Dick Cavett Quizzes Patrick Stewart On Shakespearehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beTJNNZcjow***Robin Williams Improvises a Shakespearean Play with Dick Cavetthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPXwhMyPxtk***In Search of ShakespeareLike all stories from history, this is a search for ghosts. A quest for the people who made us what we are. And for one man in particular. William Shakespeare is the most famous writer of all time, and yet his life is still shrouded in mystery. So much so that a vast web of conspiracy theories has grown up over whether he even wrote his own plays or not. This is a historical detective story. Whodunit. Searching for the life of William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon. Set against the turbulent times in which he lived.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuM357xdt7g
