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Dan Thomas
May 9, 2008

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"The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard," by Norrie Epstein (Penguin, 1994)

My qualifications for being Lake Tahoe Action's resident Shakespeare scholar? Pretty much the fact that I still have my Riverside Shakespeare from sophomore year, Epstein's book and the fact that since I have no TV, I still pull them out pretty regularly.

It's easy to forget now, a dozen years after Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet," directors weren't making Shakespeare friendly with the likes of "10 Things I Hate About You" or modern with "O." There were adaptations outside the normal canon of Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, but sometimes you had to look in some pretty weird places. (Turns out "My Own Private Idaho" is Gus Van Sant's weirdo extrapolation of "Henry IV," and the old "Forbidden Planet" was "The Tempest.")

That was a time when we needed a reminder that Shakespeare wasn't just the iambic pentameter monolith behind "Antony and Cleopatra" but the middle-class playwright who told dirty jokes and probably regularly got his actors pelted with oranges and hazelnuts.

As it came out in '94 - two years before "Romeo + Juliet" - "The Friendly Shakespeare" is a little dated. But it makes up for it by taking into account not only Shakespeare on the big screen, but the stage and the text as well.

Not only does Epstein explain all those dirty jokes, but she touches on most of the other aspects of Shakespeare as well, from the sonnets to the authorship question to speculation about Shakespeare's orientation.

And now's a good time to refamiliarize yourself with the proto-acid trip of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" or machiavellian skulduggery of "Richard III" before they hit the stage when the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival begins in July. Or just bone up on your "Hamlet."

- Dan Thomas writes for Lake Tahoe Action.