Sony, not seeing it. The KJV was written in stilted English, not at all similar to the street vernacular common in Shakespeare’s plays. His work was lively and playful, the bible was stodgy and wooden. Almost like it was put together by a bunch of scholars at university (note its consistent use of the “-eth” conjugation, which was occasional but not exactly pervasive throughout Shakespeare’s writings). So far as we know, he was not college-educated, so he would would not have fit in with the project, find really, the universities already had their fair share of accomplished writers.
Unless you can produce some very compelling evidence, there is no reason whatsoever to suspect that he was involved.
I’m told it’s a big improvement on previous English language Bibles.
That’s a little beyond my purview. Famously, there are doubts Shakespeare wrote his own plays and sonnets, that he existed, that he married his wife, that he wasn’t a Klingon…
And run, don’t walk, away from the 1999 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” film. Stanley Tucci is excellent as Puck, Rupert Everett is competent as Oberon, and everyone else barely makes it to “junior high drama club” level of quality, with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Titania a notable rock-bottom (or rock-Bottom - heh).
Yes, we do, exactly, and there are records of the correspondence between them. They largely drew on the work of Tyndale and Henry VIII’s authorised translation:
PS: Part of Shakespeare’s genius is what risks making him a “bad” playwright - the ability to explore and humanise his characters threatens to upset the balance and direction of the plot, if you’re looking for goodies to cheer and baddies to hiss. The classic case is Shylock, but you could say the same about the way Much Ado turns on a sixpence from romcom to something much darker (with “Kill Claudio!”), or the uneasiness that one gets with the way Malvolio is treated.
I thought Calista Flockhart was pretty good in that version. I remember people dismissing her as a “TV face” at the time, but she was an established theater actress before doing the Ally McBeal TV show.
My favorite film version of MND is the 1968 Peter Hall production, which has an amazing cast (including Judi Dench and Helen Mirren)! The video transfers I’ve seen have been decidedly sub-par, but I hear that Amazon’s HD streaming version is excellent.
I remember being distinctly underwhelmed. Even Kevin Kline, who ought to have been an excellent Bottom, didn’t really sell it to me. Ah well.
(Speaking of KK, it’s a crying shame that it’s impossible to find a good copy of his “Pirates of Penzance” movie with Angela Lansbury, Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith. So good. But many of the advertised copies on the likes of Amazon are actually a stage version without Kline in it.)
Huh. The play within a play in this production is the first, and possibly the only time, I’ve laughed hysterically at a Shakespeare movie.
We’ve got a local theatre troop that does an excellent job mounting Shakespeare productions, really playing up the bawdy side of things and going for borderline slapstick physical comedy that helps to mitigate language issues. I’ve laughed plenty at what they’ve done. But movie Shakespeare has generally left me somewhere from cold to very mildly and intellectually amused. That scene in that production is the exception.
That’s a real stretch right there. Mercutio is talking about tiny fairies. Considering that there was no real atomic theory until the 19th century, and the concept of converting matter into energy did not exist until the 20th century, it’s most likely that the text is referring to Mercutio imagining a chariot pulled by something tiny, but unspecified. Anything else would be completely implausible. Thinking that Shakespeare crafted an atomic theory out of thin air is ludicrous. There are practical reasons why they were discovered when they were.
Democritus (/dɪˈmɒkrɪtəs/; Greek: Δημόκριτος Dēmókritos, meaning “chosen of the people”; c. 460 – c. 370 BC) was an influential Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe.[3]
Greek philosophers had postulated an atom as the smallest individual and indivisable unit of matter. The word was in use at the time to mean “mote of dust”.
Connecting that to modern atomic theory is bass-ackwards. (No, Shakespeare didn’t invent that word.) Modern chemists used the existing word “atom” from Greek theory to describe their proposed smallest physical amount of matter.
People who like literary speculation and games might enjoy Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, and particularly The Eyre Affair, in which ordinary householders are regularly disturbed by door-to-door evangelists - for the Baconian theory as to the authorship of Shakespeare.
