April 23, 2013, is William Shakespeare's 449th birthday, and apparently Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Go ahead and celebrate by speaking like The Bard — especially if it will confuse your friends, family and co-workers.

Apparently there is a "Hip-Hop Birthday Anthem" by The Q Brothers, which both wishes Shakespeare a happy birthday AND explains how to talk like him. Listen below:


That song is posted on TalkLikeShakespeare.org, where you'll also get tips on how to talk like Shakespeare, such as "When in doubt, add the letters "eth" to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth)." Methinks this will be more difficult than how thou normally speaketh.

And, of course, thou can follow along with how other jackanapes and canker-blossoms are celebrating the day, by checking out the #talklikeshakespeare hashtag on Twitter.:
Tweets about "#talklikeshakespeareday"



-- Cheryl Sadler | CSadler@News-Herald.com | @nhcheryl

The Library of Congress appointed W.S. Merwin the new poet laureate. I voted for Nas.

Say Queensbridge! It’s the melange.

Short biography of Merwin: He won the National Book Award and a pair of Pulitzers for poetry, the most recent of which was in 2009.

Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 but moved to Hawaii in 1976 to study Zen Buddhism. (That will be my excuse to move to a tropical clime, also.) Now, he lives on a former pineapple plantation on Maui.

He gave the best writing advice ever in his poem, “Berryman:”

you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

If you want a longer biography or more poems from Merwin, click the link.

Want to watch a free Shakespeare performance? Of course, you want do. You’re reading a book blog.

The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival is offering free performances of Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor Saturday and Sunday, respectively, at James A. Garfield’s home, Lawnfield, in Mentor. The performances start at 6 p.m.

If you can’t make the performances this weekend, don’t fret. The CSF will be performing throughout the Cleveland area all summer.

Just so you know, Titus Andronicus is the wrong play to bring children to. I’m serious. One character gets raped. Then, the rapists cut off her hands and tongue, so she can’t tell anyone.

Seriously, let the kids watch fireworks, instead.

Speaking of Shakespeare, the blog Everyday Shakespeare hypothesizes how some of the bard’s characters would explain childbirth to their children.

One more thing, Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus.

In 2008. Hitchens released God is Not Great, which criticized many major religions. God has since denied that this was a retaliatory strike.

In all seriousness, we hope Hitchens gets better. Hell may be other people, but it is also esophageal cancer.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Finally, this is not about books, but it’s about basketball and Cleveland. Close enough for me.

Picoult, eh?

I like Jodi Picoult but...

High schoolers should read modern authors but...

You know what? Never mind. No “buts.” If students don’t read Picoult specifically, they should read someone like Picoult.

There are plenty of current authors who deserve study and discussion, and they would interest the students more than Crime and Punishment.

So while I might not include Picoult in my trio of books high schoolers should read before they graduate, I like the logic that lead you to include her.

My list offers no surprises:

1. Catcher in the Rye — I was not in the legion of students who considered Catcher their favorite book. (I think most of them like it because it’s the first book they’ll read with a specific curse in it.) I found Holden’s ranting tiresome instead of insightful, but I’d be foolish to deny the connection this book has with teenagers. I never related to Holden, but Catcher is still a rite of passage.

2. Macbeth — High school students should read Shakespeare before they graduate. The only problem is time has rendered Shakespearean prose ponderous. Fortunately, Macbeth has enough sex and violence to keep the groundlings engaged. It also helps that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest play. It’s not Shakespeare’s best work (that’d probably be Hamlet) or even my favorite (either As You Like It or Taming of the Shrew;) but it is the play high schoolers are most likely to enjoy.

3. Pride and Prejudice — I wanted to include a translated title like One Hundred Years of Solitude or African staple Things Fall Apart. Y’know, something to let the kids know that non-English-speaking countries can write, also. I considered including a Thomas Hardy book just because he’s my favorite writer, but neither of those ideas work. I would have been bored by One Hundred Years of Solitude if I read it in high school, and Hardy’s themes are not universal enough to resonate with everyone. But Pride and Prejudice — it’s essentially the best book about dating ever. I don’t know if all the guys in the classroom would relate, but they should still have to read it.

On an unrelated note, Electric Literature is having a writing contest on its Twitter page. The best tweet with the #stuffmymusesays hashtag will win a Sony eReader. The contest lasts until Friday and will be judged by Colson Whitehead.

Some early entries —

@AndreaSeigel: Take off your pants. The ideas can’t get in.

@Vanessa_LW: It could be strep. It could also be leprosy. The internet makes self-diagnosis easy.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

My wife and I watched the Geauga Lyric Theater Guild’s performance of “Romeo and Juliet” this weekend.

I admire Shakespeare’s knack for characterization. Gore Vidal once said, “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one — and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”

In other words, all authors have a finite amount characters they can write. They might switch the character’s name or gender, add a speech impediment, but they remain the same character.

Plenty of brilliant authors have less than 10 characters in them. Shakespeare had more than anyone. Mercutio is different from Romeo who is different from Juliet who is different from Hamlet, Laertes, Cordelia, Falstaff, Brutus, Iago and so on.

Shakespeare had no qualms about borrowing plots from myth, history and other writers. There are, after all, only so many stories to tell. His genius lay in the language and his characters.

I both enjoy and respect Shakespeare. (I read plenty of authors whom I respect but do not enjoy — Dickens, for example — or enjoy but merit less.) What I do not enjoy is when people call “Romeo and Juliet” a love story.

It’s a great story; but it is not, as News-Herald theater critic Bob Abelman called it, “the world’s greatest love story.”

Instead, “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the best stories about teenage lust and morbidity.

Romeo is capriciously amorous. He’s already smitten by Rosaline before the curtain rises but forgets her with one glance at Juliet. Had Romeo lived, I’m sure he’d regret his quick marriage and pine for the next bella in less than a month.

(Can you imagine Romeo and Juliet five years later, disaffected and arguing over whether to name their son Tybalt or Mercutio.)

Meanwhile, Juliet is obsessed with mortality. She threatens to kill herself four of five times before her happy dagger finds the mark. “Nurse, tell me what happened to Romeo or I’ll kill myself.” “Dad, if you make me marry Paris, I’ll kill myself.” “Cook, if you make macaroni one more time, I’ll kill myself.”

Even when she’s happy, death fascinates her. After she marries Romeo, she notes that when her husband dies, she wants to chop him into tiny pieces and throw him into the sky so he can shine like the stars. This is not just a pretty soliloquy. It’s a glimpse into her morbid mind.

Who — moments after their marriage — starts talking about burial options and dismemberment?

Romeo and Juliet are both teens — prone to hormonal overreaction. One is a fickle lover, the other a necro-obsessive. Their shared tragedy is guaranteed from the opening monologue.

So, no, “Romeo and Juliet” is not about love. It’s about lust, isolationism, prejudice and the deluge of emotions that come with puberty, but not love.

Of course, that doesn’t make it any less brilliant.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com