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Tina Packer on the Evolution of Shakespeare's Women

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On the  BBC website ,  Jane O'Brien  interviews  Tina Packer , the author of  Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays : [Packer] says Shakespeare didn't understand women in the beginning of his career.  Olivia Hussey in Franco Zeffirelli's  Romeo and Juliet . "I think something happened, somewhere around Love's Labour's Lost and the early history plays and going into Romeo and Juliet . Either he fell in love or he just grew up, but something happened to him where he suddenly 'got it' about women and there was a profound shift in his writing," she says. 
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Kiss Me, Princess Peach: Actor Based Super Mario's Voice on His Performance as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew

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Image from Game & Graphics. In an interview with the BBC , the actor Charles Martinet says that he created Super Mario's voice by drawing on his performance of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew : [The producer] told me I was an Italian plumber from Brooklyn, . . . so my instinct was to try a gruff and coarse voice - 'hey you, get outta my face!' [But w]hat popped into my brain was a character I'd played in Taming Of The Shrew . I was Petruchio going back to get his wife in Italy . . . . So I thought I'd do something like that.
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Rumors of a New Taming of the Shrew Movie with Anne Hathaway

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We haven't had a big-budget Taming of the Shrew since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton brawled in Franco Zeffirelli's lush 1967 film. Images from MoreThings.com   Now the Wrap reports that "an individual with knowledge of the deal" says Anne Hathaway may play Katharina in a new version .  Let's hope this is true—similar reports have come to naught. (Where is our modern-dress Macbeth with Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton?) 
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Which Shakespeare Plays Do Students Read in High School?

I surveyed the students in my upper-division college Shakespeare course to find out which plays they had read in high school. Most had read Romeo and Juliet (70%) and Hamlet (68%); fewer than half had read Macbeth (39%) or Julius Caesar (36%) . Three plays brought up the rear: Othello (31%), A Midsummer Night's Dream (24%), and—surprisingly— The Taming of the Shrew (21%). The other thirty canonical plays were untouched or had been read by one or two students.
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Accurate List of Hamlet's Soliloquies

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Though Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is his fourth soliloquy, many websites call it his third. They're skipping the twenty-line speech that follows his interview with the Ghost, which in my view is a particularly bad mistake since Hamlet's monomaniacal vow there is at the heart of his tragedy. The internet's cosmic sinkhole of misinformation will never be filled, but it's worth throwing some dirt in when we can, so here's an accurate list of Hamlet's soliloquies, with a short description of where they occur and what they say, along with a few observations.
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Seven Reasons Why Someone Who Doesn't Usually Read Epic Fantasy Might Want to Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy

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I gobbled up a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I went to college. Though I still read SF&F by "literary" writers, for years I didn't read anything that might be found in a bookstore's science-fiction-and-fantasy section. I even sold my collection of SF&F paperbacks, something I regret, much as Ray Bradbury regretted selling his collection of Buck Rogers comics . About fifteen years ago, I began reading science fiction and fantasy again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps what happened to me was what C. S. Lewis told his goddaughter might happen to her—I became "old enough to start reading fairy tales again" (dedication in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ). Or perhaps I was inspired by reading fantasy children's books aloud to my daughters (the greatest reading experience of my life). Or perhaps the change came when, prompted by good reviews, I read Susanna Clar...
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"To Be or Not to Be" in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet

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I once asked readers of this blog to vote for the best of four movie performances of Hamlet's fourth soliloquy (3.1.58-90). (If you'd like to compare them, they're posted here .) I now regret not asking about more than the acting since other elements contribute so much to these interpretations. For instance, each rendition is reinforced with a different setting. Franco Zeffirelli puts Mel Gibson's melancholy musings in a crypt, while Kenneth Branagh, who won the poll, has his Hamlet rage at a one-way mirror behind which Claudius and Polonius are hiding. Michael Almereyda—like many of you, I'm eager to see his Cymbeline —has Ethan Hawke meditate in voiceover while walking past the "ACTION" shelves in a Blockbuster, a contemporary setting in 2000 that now looks as dated as rotary phones and typewriters. Elsinore Laurence Olivier sets the soliloquy on the castle tower that he first shows us at the beginning of his 1948 film. As I described in my p...
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