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Having a Shakespeare nerd night, as a consequence of having to read about a hundred and fifty pages on King Lear for class. I finished the essay a while back, and then plunged straight into Susan Cooper's novel King of Shadows, which I found the day before yesterday at Goodwill and which made me gasp and cry and carry on.
God I love that book. It was published the year we did Midsummer Night's Dream at school; I read it two weeks after the show went off. So I had a head full of fairies and blank verse and the Mendelssohn incidental music, and then to get to read a book involving all those things, written by an author I was already at the time passionately in love with - it was fantastic. It's such a purely emotional little book. It skirts very, very close to the id without ever feeling melodramatic or forced. I don't think it's possible to read it and not fall a little bit in love with William Shakespeare.
And now I'm watching Shakespeare in Love - beautiful production, great set design, great score, the kind of writing you can really only expect from Tom Stoppard, and a really pretty appalling cast. Why people keep casting Hollywood people in films about stage actors I will never understand. They're inevitably just kind of wrong: too pretty, too polished, too quiet and elegant and reserved. But Judi Dench makes it all worthwhile.
God I love that book. It was published the year we did Midsummer Night's Dream at school; I read it two weeks after the show went off. So I had a head full of fairies and blank verse and the Mendelssohn incidental music, and then to get to read a book involving all those things, written by an author I was already at the time passionately in love with - it was fantastic. It's such a purely emotional little book. It skirts very, very close to the id without ever feeling melodramatic or forced. I don't think it's possible to read it and not fall a little bit in love with William Shakespeare.
And now I'm watching Shakespeare in Love - beautiful production, great set design, great score, the kind of writing you can really only expect from Tom Stoppard, and a really pretty appalling cast. Why people keep casting Hollywood people in films about stage actors I will never understand. They're inevitably just kind of wrong: too pretty, too polished, too quiet and elegant and reserved. But Judi Dench makes it all worthwhile.