My computer's go to sleep screen has this quotation skimming across in a sea of teal...

For though the chamomile,
the more it is trodden, the faster it grows,
Yet youth, the more it is wasted,
the sooner it wears.

Worked with a lot of Shakespeare, acting and directing, in my college and grad school theatre days...it is by far the most gratifying of all the other texts I worked with and I also understand why actors revere it so. Gielgud and Peter are right on in terms of those little flashes of brilliance whci are right there in the text waiting hundreds of years for discovery. One night around midnight, some actors and I were doing last minute rehearsals of several scenes for a high school demonstration we were doing the next day. We kept flubbing our lines in the Hamlet and Macbeth scenes...but when we got to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, my partner David and I knew it cold so started to have some fun (like I said it was late and we were punchy). We started doing all these very bawdy interpretations of the lines "Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek"--"I come, anon" you get the idea)and people were rolling on the floor. They said we had to reprise this and work it up for a variety night the department was doing later that month, which we did. The house, as they say, nearly came down. One of our professors, a fun and wonderfully evil chap, actually stood up during the scene and laughingly wagged his finger and said "Now stop that!"

I was privileged to see some amazing productions in the late 1980s by the Royal Shakespeare Company and in London (including Hamlet with Daniel Day Lewis and Judi Dench) and these performances were unforgettable...

saw Kenneth Branagh's new Shakespeare film recently, Love's Labors Lost, and it is wonderful: an over-the-top romantic musical full of songs from the 1930s, great dancing, very clever...I get to interview him June 2 and am very excited! Even though it is a roundtable and I don't get him all to myself...

Sir Gielgud's death marks the end of an era: the classy, humble actor who rose to stardom and egotistical brilliance only to continuously perfect his craft and gradually see his skill as a magical gift which he is honroed to possess...he once said playing Prospero in "Prospero's Books" was his favorite role...personally I loved him in "The Shooting Party" where he plays an eccentric anti-hunting activist in fin de siecle England...

Lawrence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, James Mason, Richard Burton...how can we ever forget their awe-inspiring work?