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I’ve always disliked The West Wing, primarily because it peddles the myth of brave and decent politicians, always doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. In reality I suspect the public prefer not to think about the dirty deals and corrupt and seedy goings on behind closed doors, which makes The Thick of It more my cup of tea – maybe that’s the UK/US divide? Of course I’m not saying most politicians don’t enter the fray with the best of intentions, but they universally seem to disappoint and the longer they hang around, the more they disappoint. Power corrupts. Even the scent of power corrupts.

So full marks to Ides of March for telling the down and dirty, shabby story of how politics always seems to turn out. Last Wednesday I joined George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood on the red carpet for the UK premier. To really appreciate a movie, I try to read as little as I can about it beforehand, so I can watch at face value. Because of that I can admit my ignorance by believing we were likely to have some kind of retelling of the Julius Caesar story (by coincidence the play I studied for my O level Shakespeare), so I entered the Odeon Leicester Square confident of making the necessary connections between the film and the Bard. Not a bit of it.

The bfi (the British Film Institute in official lower-case letters) is a great institution and a former employer of mine, but their organization often leaves a lot to be desired. I ended up being sent to various spots around central London to collect my tickets, meaning I only reached the red carpet about one minute before curtain up. I ran past George Clooney being interviewed without noticing, sat down in my seat and then saw the whole shebang being projected on the cinema screen.

As part of the bfi London Film Festival, my old colleague Sandra Hebron (it’s her last year as Artistic Director of the LFF) called Clooney up on stage where he proceeded to share a few jokes and introduce various cast and crew. Then the curtains parted and we were treated to 101 minutes of an intriguing thriller, even if the expected links to Shakespeare were missing.

This is the fourth film Clooney’s directed. In front of the camera he plays Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and leader in a two-horse race with a Senator from Arkansas. What I loved about the movie was that it’s not The West Wing – it shows just how sordid the realpolitik can be, and all credit to Clooney he’s right at the heart of it. The Ides of March of the title refers to the date of the key Ohio primary, which will fall on 15^th March and help decide the contest.

The US Primary system has al

This Day in World History - In Roman times, Julius Caesar instituted a calendar reform based on a solar year of 365 and one-quarter days. To accommodate the quarter day, the Julian calendar added an extra day to every fourth year, creating leap years. Unfortunately, a solar year is really a few minutes shorter than 365 days and 6 hours. The Julian calendar’s overestimate meant that over the course of a century, more or less, the beginning of each of the four seasons moved back a day. By the late 1500s, the spring equinox fell on March 11, rather than around March 21.

In the video embedded above, YA writer John Green revealed the title for his new book (The Fault in Our Stars) and promised to sign every single one of the 150,000 books in the first print run.

Even though the manuscript is currently unfinished and the cover has yet to be finalized, the title hit #1 on the Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com bestseller list recently. Green said the publication date has been moved up from May 2012 to January 2012. The author will be video-recording himself throughout the entire signing process; the video will be available on the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel he shares with his brother, Hank Green.

Here’s more from Green’s announcement: “I am doing this because 1. I like my readers, and 2. I want to find a way to thank them for choosing to read my books in this media-saturated world, and 3. I can’t tour everywhere, and it seems weird to preference readers who live near big metropolitan areas of the US over other readers, plus 4. I think it will be kind of fun unless my hand falls off.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I'm pretty much positive I'm not the first or only person to notice the similarities between these plays, but I definitely couldn't pass up a chance to talk about something that jumped out at me as I read Julius Caesar. In fact, if you read my summaries of Act II, scenes 1 and 2, Act IV, scene 1, and Act V, scene 5, I've already flagged some of them. It's not just the similarities in the natures of some of the characters - for instance, Brutus is extremely noble, as is Hamlet. There are some factual similarities, too: Both talk to ghosts. Both suffer the loss of their female love interests. Both are seeking to bring down someone who has wrongfully taken power. Both are recognized as extremely worthy, noble men at the close of the plays in remarkably similar terms.

I assure you that this post is based on my personal observations and thoughts - I didn't manage to quickly find an essay on this topic. So you will forgive the lack of actual scholarliness, I hope.

In addition to factual points of comparison, the plays share similar language in places. One of the most memorable lines in all of literature comes from Hamlet: "To be or not to be, that is the question." That line is so memorable because it kicks off Hamlet's second soliloquy, in which he again considers killing himself (as he did in his first soliloquy). In Julius Caesar, we have Brutus pondering a different sort of quandary. He's wondering whether Julius will be a good leader, and he says "How that might change his nature, there's the question." Now, it's possible that the "To be or not to be" line wasn't as iconic in Shakespeare's time as it now is. And it's possible that Julius Caesar came before the final version of Hamlet, although likely that it came after the first version (sometimes referred to as Ur-Hamlet). Julius Caesar is believed to have been written around 1599. The "final" version of Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601 (so, possibly at the same time as JC), though it's widely believed that an earlier version of the play existed as much as a decade earlier.

Which line came first? Shakespeare knows, but he's not saying. Still, the similarity is striking. But when it comes to comparing these plays, it's not just this line from JC, Act II, sc. 1 and the one from Hamlet, Act III, sc. 1, that are similar.

There are other similar lines - as when characters in both plays make references to smiling villains (Hamlet in Hamlet, Act I, sc. 5 and Octavius in Julius Caesar, Act II, sc. 2), both have references to defying augury/ignoring portents (Hamlet in Hamlet, Act V, sc. 2, and Caesar in Act II, sc. 2), and the closings of both plays sound remarkably similar (Hamlet, Act V, sc. 2 and Julius Caesar, Act V, sc. 5).

And there are some similarities between the characters of Hamlet and Brutus. Hamlet spends a lot of time thinking about suicide, as we can tell from his first soliloquy ("O that this too, too solid/sullied flesh would melt"), which dealt with suicide, and his second ("To be or not to be"). Similarly, Brutus mentions the idea of killing himself early on in the play, as a noble way of avoiding improper servitude or submission to an unworthy ruler.

Between their discussions of death and the general set-up, it's pretty clear from early in both plays that Hamlet and Brutus are probably going to end up dead, in part because both of them embrace the notion so fully. Hamlet would prefer death because he is so distraught over his father's death (and then all the subsequent turns of event that make continued survival such a living hell - like knowing that his mother and

From the Kirby Museum blog:

In 1969, Sheldon Feldner contacted Marvel Comics, asking if one of Marvel’s artists would be interested in designing costumes for a production of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar by the University Theatre Company at Santa Cruz at the newly-built Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Enter Jack Kirby, at the height of his powers. See his sketches, including photos of two of the completed designs here.

Via Comics Comics.

Posted by Adam Koford on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: costume design, jack kirby, julius caesar