Thursday, October 27, 2011

Shakespeare Movie Opens Tomorrow

I love Joely Richardson and Rhys Ifanson.  Also the actor who plays the young Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Jamie Campbell Bower, also played King Arthur in the short lived Camelot on Starz last year.  He was good in that!

Am looking forward to this film.  A dear friend over 15 years ago wrote a novel about this controversy.
 

 But important to note real scholarship, as the New York Times reported this weekend, Brush Up on Your Shakespeare, or Whoever
Professor Shapiro, author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,” called Mr. Emmerich “a charming man and a great filmmaker” but said that his approach was reductively anti-intellectual, and dangerously so. Mr. Emmerich and Sony have produced a documentary and classroom study guide that Professor Shapiro described as full of “half-truths repeated through a 20th-century perspective.” “I have no problem if Roland Emmerich wants to drink the Kool-Aid, but I do have a problem when it’s doled out in small cups to school kids,” he said.
He also said this, which is obviously true:
“That’s so funny,” Professor Shapiro said in response. “If I actually found a document that suggested that the Earl of Oxford wrote ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the age of 9, as the movie would have it, my career would be made.”
But it's just a movie.  I'm glad it will raise awareness., hope it will be entertaining, and regret my friend's novel wasn't the germ for this because it was very good!

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