I wouldn’t ever pretend to be a Shakespearean scholar or a philosopher. I’m a dabbler, a generalist. I think lots of things are interesting, so I follow threads on whims. I don’t need to know everything there is to know about a subject. I don’t want to be an expert on anything. I love to read, but I wouldn’t really belong in Academe.

I’ve read Plato’s Republic, and I wouldn’t fit into his ideal world where people do one thing only, so they can do that one thing exquisitely. It just doesn’t work for me. I think that things I learn in one subject can help me to understand another, and everything crosses over, filling in pieces of a larger puzzle.

I thought Irving Stone’s characterization of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy was pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a man so focused on his craft that his creations were of the highest quality imaginable. He didn’t even want to have a mate, simply because it would distract him from his work.  But even Michelangelo dabbled in painting and architecture, art forms that only helped him to perfect his talent as a sculptor.

Sure I like to be good at what I do. I just think life would be too boring if I only did one thing all the time. And speaking of the Republic, I keep passing by this place that looks like it could be a restaurant but more likely some sort of exclusive club where you have to be invited by someone in the inner circle. The sign says “Republic” and nothing more. 

I had to know, so I searched the Web for “Republic Las Colinas” because it wasn’t even listed on Guidelive, which is supposed to know everything about restaurants in the DFW area, except there’s a bunch of restaurants still listed in Irving and Las Colinas even though they’ve been out of business for two years or more, but I digress.

So their Web site pretty much confirmed it. The way the signs made it look like an exclusive club was intentional, good marketing I guess. The description on the Web site starts off, “Located in trendy Las Colinas…” Ew.

I’ll go anyway.  I don’t care if they stare when they see my disheveled hair. I’m following the thread, following my nose, searching for new flavors and a new adventure.

You know, when Disney does Shakespeare (or anything, for that matter), there’s always a happy ending, regardless of whether it’s based on a comedy or a tragedy.  Hamlet is no exception.  I watched Be Kind Rewind this week, and they made subtle reference to The Lion King’s roots, calling it, “Shakespearean.” I just smiled because I knew how true the statement was.

Evil, power hungry uncles and fratricide aside, the story even includes a part for Hamlet’s college buddies.  Young Hamlet lion cub (Simba) goes off to the school of life and meets Rosencat (Timon the Meerkat) and Guildenboar (Pumbaa the Warthog), who teach him about friendship and survival. It’s beautiful, really.

I went to see The Lion King performed last year, and I was enraptured by the puppetry, all those moving parts coming together to make magic. And when I recognized the story, it just added to the appeal.  I don’t ever think of it as stealing when I see a classic Shakespearean story being retold. I think of it as tribute, and the honoring of a tradition of storytelling that goes back way beyond Shakespeare.

It’s Father’s Day, and we could talk about Katherina’s good father Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, but we won’t.   Instead, we’ll talk about the evil step-father who kills his own brother to attain the throne - Hamlet’s uncle/father Claudius. It’s not that I don’t love my father, because I do. It’s just that I know plenty of people who don’t.  And even bad dads are supposed to be honored this day.

Hamlet is probably the most filmed Shakespeare play of all time. Check out the search list on IMDB to see what I’m talking about. Since young Prince Hamlet pretty much steals the show, you hardly think about Claudius, except in the havoc he wreaks. But he’s one bad dude. Not only does he kill his brother to get his throne and his wife, he also kills poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who weren’t hurting anybody.

Anyway, I have a few things to say about young Hamlet, and we’ll talk about that soon.  But while I’m on the topic of wicked step-fathers, I can’t help but think of the TV show Lost.  Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke on Lost, has been in a hundred different things, but every time I see him, I can’t get The Stepfather out of my head. Jerry Blake was way more blood thirsty than Claudius. Of course, it’s hard to compare a slasher movie with a classic tragedy. But there, we just did.

Happy Father’s Day.

My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.

When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower which wasn’t always called the Bloody Tower. It was originally called the Garden Tower, a name associated with life and greenery instead of death and blood.  The bloody deed that started the tower’s new name was the murder of two young heirs to the throne.

The most popular theory of the murder was that it was commissioned by Richard of Gloucester, King Richard III.  This is the theory portrayed in Shakespeare’s play about this foul, deformed villain.  I really liked Ian McKellen’s 1995 movie version of Richard III with its surreal 1930s setting, but I gained an all new appreciation with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Of course that was the whole purpose of the documentary, to make Shakespeare more accessible to American audiences, to give them a real appreciation for the stories, the language and the art of acting.

Pacino obviously loves his craft, and he has a passion for Shakespeare. We get to learn the background history of what was going on in politics when the play starts. He breaks down every scene to make us love it the way he does.  He even gives us a better understanding of the poetic language used, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.  Love the language, ride the wave.

I’ve been plottng this tour of Shakespeare in the Movies for over a year now, and what better time than following a trip to England?   Our literary tour of England started in October of last year with Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. It took us through a journey into alternate reality London, and actual real-life London. 

The movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays are obvious, mostly because they have the same name as the play — movies like Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and Othello.  But some of my favorites are modern day stories with modern day scripts that take their stories from Shakespeare, with such classic musical examples as Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story.  Some may call it stealing, but I like to think of it as paying tribute.  Then there are movies like L.A. Story and 10 Things I Hate About You that make it point to play up the tribute.

We’re about to explore some of my favorite references to Shakespeare in the movies. What are your favorites?

One of my favorite lines from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was, “So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”  It’s poetry really, because when you’ve overfilled your time, you get all discombobulated like that.

I have no time for books or movies these days, just work and more work, and by gosh it’s springtime, so I have to be outside, buzzing with friends and family, which means cleaning my house so when people can come over I create the illusion of keeping a clean house. Somebody had the great idea of having a crawfish boil, at my house, and as fate would have it, we found someone who’d come by and bring his pot and a bag of bugs and do it all for us, and with my schedule these days, you know I was jumping all over that. Whew!

What I do have time for is half-hour sitcoms on DVD.  They not only keep me laughing, but they keep me on location in London.  I’m not sure that US network television would ever be ready for Coupling, but it’s exactly what I need.

No trip to London is complete without a tour of The Tower.  I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I have a disease where words and concepts trigger songs in my head, and then I can’t avoid blurting that song to all who will hear.  My friends have learned to ignore this ever-so-annoying tic. And it only embarrasses them slightly when I broadcast my disease for all to hear. 

Well, the words, “Tower of London” and “Anne Boleyn,” trigger this song, and though I was sick with a cold, and it was snowing on my head, I kept on singing, and clapping my hands to the rhythms during my entire visit.  (By the way, this was the least annoying of all the versions on YouTube, and you can actually understand the words.)

Embracing the voyage across the sea, I brought my copy of Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about young Will Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, bored with his party buddies in Stratford and moving on to much more exciting things. I was glad I’d read it before, because my vacation was too much of a distraction to actually focus on any of the words I was reading.

Really, it’s a beautiful work, very sexy, poetic and lyrical, but I had to keep rereading paragraphs, pondering the most minute phrases.  Like, what body part was he talking about when he referred to her “black flue”?  I think I know. I’m pretty sure he was talking about giving it to her up the old chimney if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, the first opportunity I had to read was on our flight across the ocean.  But how could I read a poetic novel when a hot young Israeli chick was flirting with me the whole time in her sexy broken English?  Burgess’s words just couldn’t compete with my trying to explain to her what the word “goo” means. 

Do I have something in my eye, she asked, leaning into me. I gently scraped her eye with the tip of my finger.  No hair, just a little goo, I told her.  I don’t know what you’re saying, she smiled and fluttered her eyelashes at me.  You know, like snot or boogers, and I made a gesture like I was picking my nose.  Sexy, right?

When our meals came, my plate held a pile of gelatinous mashed potatoes, and I didn’t think about it until later that this was the perfect way to communicate the meaning of the word “goo.” 

As I tried to sleep, I knew I could make out with her if I wanted to, start my vacation on an exciting note.  But it was enough for me to think, as I take this trip to celebrate my 40th birthday, hey, maybe I’ve still got it.

When I’m in a different country, it’s the little details I notice.  When we first arrived in England, we did three very ordinary things — we used the bathroom at the airport, got cash out of an ATM and exited the parking garage. 

One thing that I would find was pretty common about using public toilets in England was that electric hand dryers prevail.  If given a choice, I will usually dry my hands with paper, but maybe that’s because we have inferior electric hand drying mechanisms in the States.  Not so in England — man, those suckers can blow.

The ATM was not extraordinary, though the queues to get to them were pretty long, but that’s probably because we’d just gotten off an airplane at the international terminal, and everybody else had the same idea.  The parking garage wasn’t extraordinary either, but that’s where my thoughts started to wander… back to literature… and a freaky, London favorite — J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

And what is Crash about?  Why, sex and car crashes, of course.  A guy gets into a car accident and meets up with this whole underground movement of people who get off on being in car crashes, watching car crashes, reenacting famous car crashes, you get the picture.  David Cronenberg made a movie about it back in the 90s with freaky people like James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, and just so you know, it has nothing to do with the 2004 movie about racism in Los Angeles (though as movies go, I liked that one better).

So, we’re driving around the parking garage, and I remember there was a scene in a parking garage in London, it may even have been at the airport.  I’m sure there was something sexy happening because there was something sexy happening in every scene of the book. And there may have been a car accident but it may have just been a discussion about a car accident. I don’t know.  But all I could think was, that could have been right here.

I couldn’t help myself. I kept looking at the parked cars searching for heads or feet or bare bums in the windows, but to no avail.  Just an ordinary parking garage. In London.

When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip to Rome.

Ever since I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, my thoughts of Rome have centered on one thing — Michelangelo’s Pietà — and though we saw so many things, this was the one that mattered to me. A student of philosophy, I’m more into Greece than I am Rome, but this image of a mother holding her dead son whose body has just undergone untold torture, this is something I can feel passionate about. It’s the juxtaposition of humanity and inhumanity, the universal love of a mother for her child.

For similar reasons, my favorite story from ancient Greece is that of Medea, a woman so scorned, so powerless that she takes the lives of her own children.  It’s the one thing she can do to hurt Jason, who has left her for a younger woman, and her need to hurt him surpasses her need to protect her children.  But she is cursed, for she must live with her choice and her own loss, magnified in this act of desperation.

Back in England, we caught a few scenes from Ordinary People on the television, yet another tale of a mother dealing with the death of her son.  We saw only one scene with the mother, and if you didn’t know what the story was about, you’d just think the mother was a bitch and write her off.  But knowing, as she lashes out at her remaining son, you can see her pain and know how deep her loss has cut her.

Ave Maria.