Word: bardes
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...real Antony and Cleopatra: surreal video footage of 2,000-year-old statues and stelae from a site less than 20 ft. underwater. The ruins appear to correspond to a palace in ancient Alexandria--perhaps the love nest of classical history's most powerful lovers, the pair who, the Bard wrote, "kiss'd away Kingdoms." Proof may still be wanting, but the romance has been reburnished...
...belief that there might be an audience for movies based on the plays of William Shakespeare. Since 1993, when Kenneth Branagh's rompish Much Ado About Nothing earned $23 million at the domestic box office on an $8 million budget, studios have begun to belly up to the Bard. "Much Ado showed Hollywood how successful and enjoyable a Shakespeare movie could be," says Lindsay Law, president of Fox Searchlight Pictures...
Director Todd Olson obviously knows his Shakespeare. Even though the play is taken out of its original Roman context, the Bard speaks for himself--even without togas and Roman columns, the play's fundamental themes remain intact and powerful...
...Homeric audiences had presumably heard of them too. For all its narrative speed, the Odyssey is remarkable in the way it resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses...
...story within the story: Laertes, Odysseus' aged father, has not gone to battle in a long time. There is something infinitely wise and childlike about this moment, a glimpse back into a nonreading age when stories were vehicles of memory as well as entertainment; a lazy or forgetful bard might be reminded by his listeners, "You left out the part about the mildew...