In Love With Shakespeare? Why, Get Thee to the Net

Forsooth! Now is the season that William Shakespeare arrives in Hollywood.

Making a colossal comeback, the Bard has become the hot new screenwriter because, dude, this guy’s got a way with words. Freshly following America’s love-fest with “Shakespeare in Love,” the Elizabethan wordsmith is turning out sizzling screenplays faster than you can say “Full fathom five.” With Gwyneth Paltrow as Juliet and Calista Flockhart lowering her “Ally McBeal” hemlines for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare is, indeed, being rediscovered in a new, user-friendly format.

But if, perchance, it all sounds like Greek to you, the Web offers a vast warehouse of crib notes, cheat sheets and footnotes to guide you through the unfamiliar sphere of Elizabethan prose.

A magical multimedia forest awaits those who foray toward Fox Searchlight’s official “Midsummer” site (https://www.foxsearchlight.com/midfinal/flash/index.html). The angelic arias of Delibes soothe those who click on a flash-enhanced twinkling star at the virtual gates to the enchanted woods. One can visit the Fairy Garden, Cupid’s chamber (send out cherubic e-cards), Titania’s bower (download a study guide) or the Conservatory, where you can hear aural tidbits from the soundtrack, featuring arias by Cecilia Bartoli.

Hypertext is an excellent tool with which to study Shakespeare, and a hypertext version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” can be found at https://quarles.unbc.ca/midsummer/midsummer1.html. Here you can read the play and click on tidbits of blue type to link to the Elizabethan glossary or the mythology index so you can know your centaurs from your griffins.

While Shakespere.com is currently being “reconceived,” the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (https://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html) is your one-stop shopping site for all your Shakespearean needs. An invaluable resource, this MIT-sponsored site offers the full text of the Bard’s poetry and prose with a most handy search function: Who the heck said, “Lord, what fools these mortals be”? (Why, it was Puck, Act 3, Scene 2, “Midsummer.”)

For those who need to know more about Shakespeare, the man, get thee to Mr. Shakespeare on the Internet (https://daphne.palomar.edu/shakespeare), which houses a Shakespeare Timeline that gives the key events of the writer’s life and work along with related documentary evidence, a genealogy and a chart of coinciding historic events. It reveals, for instance, that the plague ravaged London during the years Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies and the “Problem Plays.”

For those who are more interested in Shakespeare the hunk (a.k.a. Joseph Fiennes), check out the wealth of adulation within the “Shakespeare in Love” Web ring, a robust girdle of sites at https://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/ Studio/5740/SILwebring.htm. One site lets you give Joe a Java kiss at https://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/1464/kissjoe.html.

For those even less interested in Shakespeare scholarship, check out the numerable Shakespeare insult sites, where the ghost in the machine automatically generates scurrilous indignities to your person. At the Shakespeare Insulter (https://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/), you get to learn that when you are told “[Thou hath] not so much brain as ear wax,” the insult is derived from “Troilus and Cressida.”

When you visit the Shakespearean Insult Kit (https://www.crinos.com/users/aforte/ features/shakespear/shakespear.insult.html), you can hand-craft your own original churlish chatter by combining words from three columns that will create such saucy slurs as “Thou loggerheaded onion-eyed maggot-pie!” or, if you prefer, “Thou goatish idle-headed codpiece!”

And while we wait for the inevitable films in which Ethan Hawke does Hamlet, Alicia Silverstone does “Love’s Labours Lost” and “Othello” transpires on a football field, we can pass the time by visiting the Fantastic Typing CyberMonkey (https://www.actionworld.com/staff/dfox/monkey.htm). This steadfast chimp attempts to answer the timeless question: Could a monkey hitting a typewriter eventually pound out the complete works of Shakespeare? The Web site’s monkey trainer tells us that the chances of the amino acids necessary for life arising from a random mix of elementary molecules is said to be the same as a monkey hitting a typewriter and pounding out the complete works of Shakespeare. He asks that you contact him should you catch a soliloquy amid the endless string of key-stroke gibberish.

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Erika Milvy writes about arts and entertainment from her home in San Francisco. She can be reached at erika@well.com.