Nerdier by the hour

So a friend of mine who is still in school (suckah!) is taking a Shakespeare class this semester, and this has caused me to think about Shakespeare things. I did a tally, and I have read 22 out of 38 plays, which sounds impressive at first glance (if you're into that sort of thing, anyway), but it's really only a little more than half of them. Now I must read the rest. Clearly.

Secondly, I was thinking about all the ways Shakespeare shows up in modern works. For one, NBC did a TV version of The Tempest some time ago, when Katherine Heigl was turning me gay--she was Miranda. And it took place in the Louisiana bayou during (or just after) the American Civil War, and like, it was terrible. I can't remember if I've seen a recorded staging of The Tempest. Stephen had us watch recorded stagings of some of the plays we read in class, but they were usually so dull that I turned them off after the first act.

For two, in the fourth pants book, Carmen gets a part in some theater company's summer production of The Winter's Tale--she's Perdita, in fact, and she has this strange flirtation with some mildly famous British actor who is also in the cast, but he's, like, older than she is, and he's allegedly playing Mamillius, but, uh, Mamillius dies when he's, like, five, from grief because he thinks his mother is dead, and he has about two lines. I hate that! When the author apparently just looked a list of parts in the play and picked one. In the pants movie, this fellow plays Florizel, who is Perdita's love interest, which, for Christ's sake, makes so much more sense. At least whoever was in charge of the movie was familiar with Shakespeare. Ugh.

Uh, okay, that's it, I guess. Viva Shakespeare! And down with Ann Brashares!