William Shakespeare. He's the guy to go to for stories, either as old-English recreations or complete reimaginings. We've had a million tales of Romeo and Juliet and other classics like Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We've gotten a stunning look into pulpy Will with Julie Taymor's Titus. We're still not getting a big-screen Coriolanus (argh!), but we are getting more King Lear.

The Telegraph reports that a new $35 million feature adaptation of the famous play has been announced at Cannes. Anthony Hopkins (who happened to play Titus in Taymor's film) will play King Lear, Keira Knightley is set to play his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and Gwyneth Paltrow has been tipped to become Regan, the middle sister. (Goneril, the oldest, hasn't been cast yet.) Talk about a sweet Shakespeare cast! This will pit Hopkins against Ian McKellen's work in a Channel 4 adaptation of the play (one that has Sir Ian in the buff), but I imagine he'll hold his own quite nicely.

If you need a Lear refresher -- this is the tale about King Lear's decision to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters -- the size of each split determined by how wonderfully they praise their father. Cordelia refuses to continue the dishonest flattery, and gets disowned. Not surprisingly, her crappy sisters become cold to their supposedly cherished father, and Lear begins to see the error of his ways. The adaptation is said to feature "epic battle sequences" of the wars that follow.

I'm digging the cast so far, but who should play Goneril? Julianne Moore?

We'll never know if Shakespeare would have appreciated She's the Man, an update of his play Twelfth Night: Or What You Will reset in teen sports comedy land. It is a good bet, at least, he's not rolling in his grave about it, at least no more than Ovid and Chaucer, among others, were rolling in theirs during the Elizabethan era, when the Bard put the poet in poetic license with his own reworking of classics like Pyramus and Thisbe (as Romeo and Juliet) and The Knight's Tale (as The Two Noble Kinsmen). Twelfth Night was itself somewhat a variation of his own The Comedy of Errors, an early title based rather faithfully on Plautus' Menaechmi.

The works of William Shakespeare remain one of the rare arguments in favor of remakes these days, as repeat after rehash after revival is met with great public disdain. There was little plot development he didn't lift from some prior story, but his genius was in how he told, not what he told, and it is the language of his writing that has carried distinction over time. It is therefore ironic that modern versions of his plays, in turn, inherit a sort of credibility by making a legacy out of the action.