Word: hamlets
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...would have to leave the country to find a place further in spirit from downtown Manhattan than Shanksville, Pa., the rural hamlet where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11. It is a town with no stoplights or sewers or banks. It's home to just 245 residents--244.5 of them white--who attend three lively churches and are embarrassingly nice to strangers. The closest Starbucks is a two-hour drive...
...another, which may be said of words as well. A more companionable relationship with the dead seems to diminish death's worst feature, absence. Dead quiet as a library is supposed to be, its residents are continually chatting up a storm. On any given shelf, at any given hour, Hamlet broods, Hitler rants, Plato dreams, and Grant, gracious in victory, permit Lee's men to keep their horses...
...Superman's 64-year journey from Man of Steel to Buffy Boy is just part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work...
...genetically altered spider DNA in his veins and a compulsion to save the world from the gaudy Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Sure, he can leap tall buildings with several sticky bounds, but he's also nearly grounded by a load of unresolved guilt. Plenty of classic heroes--Oedipus, Hamlet, Luke Skywalker--are obliged to kill a father figure; by the time this movie is over, Peter is responsible for the deaths of two such figures. That makes him one conflicted...
...then something strange happened. A few weeks before retiring, Gollob went to see a performance of Hamlet starring Ralph Fiennes, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for playing an SS officer in Schindler's List. There was something about the production--its pace and precision--that Gollob found "galvanizing." It whetted his appetite for more Shakespeare. He started reading plays and watching PBS videotapes. Before long, his curiosity had grown into a full-blown obsession--and a new way of life, as Gollob explains in his book, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard (Doubleday; $26), to be published...