How is Willie doing these days? It has been over 400 years since the bard roamed Stratford. Much has changed since then- film and television have pushed the theater into the backdrop of today’s culture and much of the language of his day has been stripped of its glamor.
Well, the most money paid at auction for a book in 2006 was for a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1623. It went for $5.2 million at Sotheby’s. It was a healthy $700,000 more than the next highest grossing book at auction.
From Ron Rosenbaum‘s book “The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups” comes this observation:
…right now, at this very moment, one can see more great Shakespeare, one can find more transformative Shakespearean experiences, from what is already on film even in the form of tape or DVD on a television screen than the average person, even the average critic, will see on stage in a life time.
Rosenbaum himself is the perfect example of the modern Shakespeare fan. He is not a Shakespeare scholar but a fan whose journey began after seeing the 1970 Peter Brooks production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
How did Rosenbaum start writing this book? He was coming off an exhaustive 10 year odyssey that culminating in the acclaimed book on Hitler- Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil.
The project left Rosenbaum, as one can imagine, in a very dark zone. One of the remedies for the darkness was listening to audio tapes of Shakespeare while walking around New York.
How is this for a start for what is available for your viewing pleasure:
Richard Burton as Hamlet
Lawrence Olivier or Ian McKellen as Richard III
Peter Brook’s King Lear
Orson Wells’s Othello, Macbeth or Chimes at Midnight
Zefirelli’s or Baz Luhrmann‘s Romeo and Juliet
Zefirelli’s Taming of the Shrew or Hamlet
Kurosawa’s Ran
Now that is one fine film festival!
Thanks to Tyler Cowan of Marginal Revolution for the lead on the Rosenbaum book