A little over a week ago, the world celebrated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death (and 452nd anniversary of his traditional birthday) on April 23.
This morning I found myself on the train reading this from Bill Bryson's short Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007):
There's no reason we can't continue to celebrate the traditional Julian date of April 23, but according to our current Gregorian calendar today is Shakespeare's real double birth/death anniversary, so what the fuck am I doing at work on what should be a major holiday throughout the English-speaking world?
Mitt Romney recently tried to play this deus ex machina role for the Republican Party's current trumpsterfuck of a primary season, but the GOP is going to need something a little more Zeus than machine to solve their Donald problem.
Maybe Mitt should have channeled his inner Shakespearean Jupiter before dashing back to his beach house with the car elevators:
No more, you petty spirits of region low, Offend our hearing; hush! How dare you ghosts Accuse the thunderer, whose bolt, you know, Sky-planted batters all rebelling coasts?
[The dictionary entry photographed above is from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, 1987.]
I had the pleasure of seeing a new production of Molière's Tartuffe at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C. last Saturday night. While standing in the lobby with my wine during intermission, I was surprised to see a badly-dressed man wearing William Kristol's familiar permanent frown walk past. A couple of days later, something made me search for "Bill Kristol Tartuffe" on Google and I was led to his tweet about the show.
Just fled at intermission from ghastly production of Tartuffe @ShakespeareinDC. Perhaps worst single production of any play I've ever seen.
The Saturday performance was a preview that received a standing ovation from those of us who stayed until the end, but it hadn't been reviewed yet. When the play officially opened on Tuesday, it received unanimous rave reviews in all the places I could find: The Washington Post, DC Theatre Scene, Broadway World, and DC Metro Theater Arts, but, then again, all of these reviewers seem to have watched the end of the play rather than storming out like an offended French noble watching the first version in 1664 (before the royally-mandated happy ending in the 1669 version).
Of course, Bill Kristol has been known to make extremely hasty and seriously erroneous judgments before. Here he is on C-Span in 2003 mansplaining to Daniel Ellsberg how George Bush's decade-long war in Iraq would be nothing at all like Vietnam.
"This is going to be a two-month war, not a year war..." --Bill Kristol, 28 March 2003
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
