Thursday, June 5, 2008

Marvelous. Intriguing.

Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare's Wife. New York: Harper, 2007.

The Shakespeare Institute's conference has only just started, but already a host of ideas is swirling around in my head.

Not all of them are from the conference, but I promised myself that this would be a very Shakespeare-intense series of days.

When I'm not walking to some of my favorite old restaurants around the area, I'm reading Germain Greer's Shakespeare's Wife. It's quite lovely--disarming at points, funny quite a lot, sometimes contradictory but extraordinarily scholarly, the book is a very good read.

I fell for it when I first saw the chapter headings. Like Tom Jones (the novel, not the singer--that's why the MLA form for underlining is so important . . . I can easily distinguish between Tom Jones and Tom Jones--the chapter headings are huge and whimsical.

One of my favorites so far is Chapter Five:

Chapter Five of the making of a match, of impediments to marriage and how to overcome them, of bonds and special licenses and pregnancy as a way of forcing the issue, of bastards and bastardy, and the girl who got away
Very nice.

And applicable to my paper--which is to be delivered at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

In short, I'm enjoying the book very much. I just hope I enjoy giving the paper half as much.

Perhaps I should revamp my title to fit Greer's style . . . .


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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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