In case you’ve forgotten in the interim, this is the Shakespearean comedy that Joss Whedon filmed in his backyard with some buddies during a his brief summer vacation from filming The Avengers. In honor of the occasion, Whedon joined twitter.

Sort of.

Disney has reportedly hired Tony-nominated director Alex Timbers to direct a movie musical version of one of William Shakespeare’s plays. Which one, we don’t know. Titus Andronicus? No, probably not. Chopped off body parts aren’t very Disney-ish. And Hamlet‘s been done already (see title image)…

DNA tests have confirmed “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the remains found last year underneath a parking lot in Leicester do in fact belong to Richard III, the notorious hunchback/(possible) nephew-killer and last English king to die in battle. He was also the subject of Shakespeare’s Richard III and, more amusingly (not that Richard III didn’t have its moments), a pair of Kate Beaton history comics.

The Wrap is reporting that Anne Hathaway will be getting her Shakespeare on by starring in an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.

I request that you all take a short break right now to watch (or re-watch) the fan-made short Gotham High, which places a bunch of Batman characters—including Hathaway’s Catwoman—in high school. It uses the #1 Taming of the Shrew adaptation of my heart, 1999′s 10 Things I Hate About You, for much of its footage.

You done? Good. Let’s continue.

After more than four hundred years of preservation and reenactment, it’s no wonder that Shakespeare’s plays have lent themselves to experimentation, adaptation, or modernization of various kinds. But I can understand the Royal Shakespeare Company, being the Royal Shakespeare Company, feels it has some dedication to a traditional staging of the Bard’s work. Shakespeare scholars have been in a bit of a flap lately over a quite modern idea indeed: women playing male parts in RSC productions.

Which is why the picture at the top of this article is Dame Helen Mirren in her role as Prospera in Julie Taymor‘s The Tempest. Not an RSC production in any way, but there you go.

What, do you need some kind of explanation? Ryan North (who you might know from Dinosaur Comics) has just started up a Kickstarter for To Be or Not To Be, a choose-your-own-adventure version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet where you can play as Hamlet, Old Hamlet, or Ophelia. It’s already funded, with all profits from the sale of the published books going to charity.

But we thought you’d like to know about it anyway, so you can get in on those sweet rewards, because of the talent behind the book’s illustrations. You see, the more it gets funded, the more illustrations it will have, and the more art we’ll get to see by ladies like Carly Mondardo, Danielle Corsetto, Emily Partridge, Jess Fink, Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Noelle Stevenson. Also come on, you can play as Ophelia.

(via everywhere.)

Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past our pal Joss Whedon to premiere his Shakespeare film, Much Ado About Nothing, in his own backyard. We knew it wouldn’t come to that of course, but he did film it all at his house while shooting The Avengers, and he’s not a stranger to unusual distribution in tough times. Regardless, Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate have bought the North American rights to the film. All is well. 

Imagine, if you will, a world in which Elizabethan England was as obsessed with adding cats to things as modern Internet culture is, but naturally, having no Photoshop, had to do it by hand.

Wait, you don’t have to, Susan Herbert already took care of that in the illustrations for her book Shakespeare Cats eight years ago, and thanks to Thaeger, they’ve been shared with the internet.

To be more specific, as Sherlock Holmes would expect us to be, he’s now the most portrayed literary human character in film and television according to the Guinness Book of World Records, beating William Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the title. Hmm…I wonder how that happened…

In case you were faced with the high school English class task of memorizing the famous “To be, or not to be” monologue from William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, here is one solution: find a ukelele, learn how to play it, acquire musical talent and a lovely singing voice, and turn it into a song! Or just memorize Courtney Welbon‘s version, the melody of which, she admits, does not exactly match the tone of Hamlet’s soliloquy, in which he ponders whether or not to kill himself in light of all the death and sorrow that has been taking place.

(via Neatorama)