Sites your mother should have warned you about.

• Introduction
• Amusing and/or Distracted
• Movies
• YouTube Videos
• "Other" Versions of the Works
• Shakespeaereana
• Trek Related
• Commercial

Introduction

In presenting material to a world-wide audience, my mail indicates that it is impossible not to offend someone. The sites linked on this page have a better than average chance of giving offense. If you think you may not like the material presented at some of these sites, don't view them.

Except for the "Shakespeare in Education" page, where commercial teaching materials are linked, I have avoided linking commercial sites from the pages of "Mr. William Shakespeare and the Interent;" a compunction that I do not observe on this page. I am in no way responsible for what you purchase based on a link from this page.

• A highly speculative chronology of William Shakespeare's Life and Times, from the web site devoted to a new play (to be produced summer, 2007) on Robyn Hood; more imaginative than careful, it contains a neat summary of the accessible facts in outline form with some, er, speculative content.

• Atomic Shakespeare.  "The Atomic Shakespeare experiment consists of three elements: an author's text, the readers' behavior, and the system in which they interact."  That's as much as I know.  You're on your own.  If you figure this one out, let me know.

• "Stratford-on-Avon" from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving.

Thou soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream Of things more than mortal sweet Shakespeare would dream The fairies by moonlight dance round his green bed, For hallow’d the turf is which pillow’d his head. GARRICK .

• Stick figure Hamlet, the name says it all.

• The Shakespeare Book of Lists and Shakespeare 101 companion web site, from Mike LoMonico. 

• The Shakespeaerbot - talk with will, yes, really (well, type not talk), much like a fembot but not nearly so flamboyant.

• Medieval and Renaissance Food Home Page.  The title says it all. Now class, on our web quest today, who can discover how to preserve Eringo roots?  While preparing the feast, do not forget the Medieval and Renaissance Brewing Page.  In fact, hold the Eringo roots, I'll have a beer.

• Book-A-Minute.  Don't have time to read it?  Here is the entire Book-A-Minute for Hamlet::

Whine whine whine...To be or not to be...I'm dead. 

That's it in a nutshell.

• Ahab's Shakespearean Llighthouse Greetings: send one of those get it over the Internet greeting cards containing, of course, a picture of a lighthouse and one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

• The Shakespeare Insult Server from the Elizabethan Oaths, Curses and Insults page, an another insult generator by Chris Seidel.  Try it, thou spleeny clapper-clawed lewdster.

• An anagram from Cory Calhoun on: The Marriage of True Minds by William Shakespeare titled

  Oh Damn! Must I Refrigerate?
  by Leslie Marie Kapshaw
  Part of the anagram server.
   

• Raymond Chandler does Hamlet: "Something was rotten in Denmark..."

• pete the parrot and shakespeare.

• Shakespeare Eclectic Science Fiction Interactive Theatre Interactive Drama Freeform Live Action Role Play & Educational Gaming Resources. There's nothing like a pithy title.

• Shakey's Place - The 3D Globe Internet Experience. A good concept which may develop in time.

• Shakespeare Coined Words Now Common Currency, from the National Geo, a breezy romp through some of the common coin of the realm.

• The Shakespearean Homework Helper, from "a 27-year-old fan of Shakespeare," and accessed through AOL.  Use at your own discretion, I suppose.

• The Rhythm of the Sonnets by Charles Wolff, a collection of 12 original songs based on the Sonnets (with RealAudio clips) and some scholarly information about the Sonnets.

• Shakespeare and Food, "an alphabetical garden of the Bard's esculent poesies".

• Do you know your Shakespeare when you hear him?  Try the Shakespeare Golden Ear Test to find out, from Claremont McKenna College.

• Titles from Shakespeare, "Over the years Shakespeare has proved a remarkably rich source for titles of books and plays. The accompanying lists are by by no means complete; after all, Shakespeare has been providing us with titles for four hundred years. What's more, the lists never will be complete -- not so long as writers keep turning to favorite Shakespearean phrases and images for their titles."

• The TV Viewer's Guide to Shakespeare; The Taming of the Shrew: Macho weds feminist, wins. Fantasy; Much Ado About Nothing: Dumb cop saves maiden's reputation. Routine police work; and so on...

• The Virtual Foole's Troupe (about 200 pages worth of assorted Tom Foolery - although Tom is no longer with them, having now gone on to bigger and better things...).

• Find A Grave.   Here is Shakespeare's.

• Star Wars Shakespeare (Hamlet, Dream, Richard II, Henry IV part 1, and Henry V (and throw in Dr. Faustus for good measure) get the Star Wars treatment.

Movies: Shakespeare and...related?...

• The Man (guess who) who launched a thousand movies.

• Bardoloatry.   The bilingual site devoted to the Swan of Avon and to all the Shakesperian movies.  Bilingual, yes; all the movies, no, but a little on a few of the recent ones.

• The Hamlet Movie Page.  Thanks to Virginia Leong, the last word in Hamlet and the movies.

• A PBS Newshour Segment by Elizabeth Farnsworth on the spate of popularity enjoyed by Shakespeare among film makers in 1997: The Play's the Thing (January 23, 1997).

• Romeo and Juliet the movie (the Bard goes Gen-X).

• Shakespeare in Love, a very thorough page from Steven Marx.

• The best Shakespeare on DVD:

	Zeffirelli's Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton.		The Midsummer Night's Dream featuring Kevin Kline.
	The Olivier King Lear.		The Joseph Papp Much Ado About Nothing featuring a very young Sam Waterston and Kathleen Widdoes.
	The Branagh Henry V.		The Trevor Nunn Othello,with Ian McKellan.
	The Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night.		The Pacino Merchant of Venice.
	The Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet with Olivia Hussey.		The Branagh Love's Labours Lost, featuring Nathan Lane.
	The Hopkins Titus Andronicus.		The Branagh Hamlet.
	The Orson Wells Chimes at Midnight.		Richard III featuring Ian McKellan.

Olivier on DVD:

As you Like It (1936)

Henry V (1944)

Hamlet (1948)

Richard III (1955)

The Merchant of Venice (1974 - VHS Only)

Othello (1965)

King Lear (1983)

Branagh on DVD

Henry V (1989)

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Othello (1995)

Hamlet (1996)

Love's Labour's Lost (2000)

As You Like It (2006)

Othello (1990)

Twelfth Night (1996)

The Merchant of Venice (2001)

• Patrick Stewart's great soliloquy:  B or not a B

• That most famous of all vagabond troupes, the Island Players, offer a pointed production for a producer (the great Phil Silvers as Harold Hecuba) who has treated Ginger badly:  the story of a man who could not make up his mind...

• Foubert and Leibowitz with a Shakespearean Who's On First:

• You sound so dreamy when you talk like Shakespeare:

• The Fab Four perform as Pyramus and Thisbe from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Paul - 'Pyramus' John - 'Thisbe' Ringo - 'Lion' George - 'Moonshine':

• Hamlet.  "Inappropriate Emotion Theatre is honored to present Hamlet: a bunch of goofy creatures of indeterminate genetic origin performing the greatest collection of words ever assembled in the English language."  You will have to wait a good long time for these video files to download, since they are not streamed.  Only Acts 1 and 2 are available, and the MPEG versions of each act are 15MB.  As Edgar says, in another play, "Ripeness is all.  Come on," which is apropos of a site mounted at cheesewars.com.
• A flash animated version of Much Ado About Nothing from the Stratford Festival of Canada.

• Shakespeare Parodies by Richard Nathan.

• Feeling musical?  Have an itch to write the music for an opera?   Here is a libretto for Antony and Cleopatra.  The author is in search of a composer.

•   "In a barn with animals," an mp3 "version" of Hamlet's famous soliloquy: "A humorous (hopefully) interpretation of Hamlet’s Soliloquy by William Shakespeare," from the Internet Archive.

This is the section where all that "other" material is placed.  Material that is not foolish, distracted, disjointed, etc.  which seeks to make a genuine contribution to Shakespeare studies, or at least Shakespeare knowledge, but doesn't fit well into any of the other categories at this web site.  I'm talking about:

• Shakespeare's World, by Harry Rusche of Emory University.  Shakespeare's World is a combination of two sites, "Shakespeare Illustrated, a work in progress, explores ninteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another;" and "Shakespeare and the Players," a survey through postcards of the many now unfamiliar English and American actors who played Shakespeare's characters for late Victorian and Edwardian audiences."  Shakespeare Illustrated has been on the web for over a decade.  It disappeared from these pages for some time, but is back in all its glory.  Both sites are well worth visiting.

• Just-Shakespeare, a cleanly designed site with brief, succinct articles on the life and portraits, along with ancillary articles on music, flowers, precious stones, and so on.  It contains a swicki search tool added to the web site Just-Shakespeare.  The site is overly commercial, and this pseudo-search tool gives it more apparent value than in fact it has.  Each of the articles at the site are brief pieces around which advertisements (mostly tasteful, I will say) are wrapped.

• All the World Still a Stage for Shakespeare's Timeless Imagination, a radio broadcast from Voice of America news aimed at teaching English, with playable m3u and rm audio files and a downloadable mp3 file (7MB).  The subject is the perennial appeal of Shakespeare.  The link also contains a transcript of the broadcast (part 1 aired May 22, 2007).  Part 2, titled What Keeps Works of Shakespeare So Alive and Well After 400 Years? was broadcast May 29, and is available to listen as an mp3, stream as a Real media file, or download as an mp3.
• Jazz singer Cleo Lane sings the titles of all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, plus other works  for good measure.

• The Klingon Language Institute's Shakespeare Restoration Project. Enough said.

• Star Wars is like Star Trek isn't it?  Perhaps no more than Titus Andronicus is like Hamlet.  In any event, you may wish to visit Star Wars MacBeth, "a seventeen minute video production that follows the lives of three brave scots in their quest for the throne of Scotland.  George Lucas meets Williams Shakespeare in an odyssey that spans from the high school cafeteria to the high school gymnasium." The product of a high school English project.

• Shakespeare etc. Folger Museum Shop. A must see for bard buffs.

• Order a video (30 min) of the discovery, planning and rebuilding of the Globe Theater.

©1995-2009 Terry A. Gray
Last modified 09/21/09
Do not copy or reuse these materials without permission.