Help me find Hamlet stuff

[Kizarvexius]

@Katisha

And while we’re doing song parodies – though coming on after the Skinhead Hamlet is probably terribly anticlimactic – a bit of G&S-inspired doggerel (I wrote it, so I can call it that ;)).

Brava, Katisha, Brava!

And may I say that your right shoulder blade is just as lovely as your left?

[AnnaLivia]

@Small Clanger

Also an audio version with Derek Jacobi as The Dane* (he’s Claudius in Branagh’s version, how confusing is that? I could splice the two together and have him playing both parts).

I laugh myself sick at the Derek Jacobi/ Patrick Stewart film. Hamlet’s (Jacobi) two years older than Claudius.

The Danish play is far and away the favourite. But I have been known to enjoy the Scottish play…

AL

[BuckleberryFerry]

I read Macbeth four years ago; methinks it shall go on my list next.

[Humble_Servant]

Hi Katisha!

With apologies for the hijack, I can’t resist posting something I just read in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Newman was a Catholic convert in the mid-1800s, and he is writing about whether Protestant English literature is bad for Catholics (answer: no, as long as you keep your sources in mind). Here’s what he says about Shakespeare:

For instance, there surely is a call on us for thankfulness that the most illustrious amongst English writers has so little of a Protestant about him that Catholics have been able, without extravagance, to claim him as their own, and that enemies to our creed have allowed that he is only not a Catholic, because, and as far as, his times forbade it. It is an additional satisfaction to be able to boast that he offends in neither of those two respects, which reflect so seriously upon the reputation of great authors abroad. Whatever passages may be gleaned from his dramas disrespectful to ecclesiastical authority, still these are but passages; on the other hand, there is in Shakespeare neither contempt of religion nor scepticism, and he upholds the broad laws of moral and divine truth with the consistency and severity of an Æschylus, Sophocles, or Pindar. There is no mistaking in his works on which side lies the right; Satan is not made a hero, nor Cain a victim, but pride is pride, and vice is vice, and, whatever indulgence he may allow himself in light thoughts or unseemly words, yet his admiration is reserved for sanctity and truth. From the second chief fault of Literature, as indeed my last words imply, he is not so free; but, often as he may offend against modesty, he is clear of a worse charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can be instanced in all that he has written to seduce the imagination or to excite the passions.

Just shows that the temptation to speculate about Shakespeare’s religious leanings has been irresistable for some time.