Month: September 2007

The other day out of the corner of an ear I caught a commercial on the Encore movie channel.  Something about showing a romantic movie Monday nights at 9.  But the gimmick was famous nines, like “There are nine planets in the solar system…..cats have nine lives…..Beethoven wrote nine symphonies…..Shakespeare wrote nine sonnets…..” WHAT? Fine, “Shakespeare In Love” is one of the movies currently in their rotation, so they were going for the tie-in.  But man, that’s just painful to my ears.  Sure he wrote 9 sonnets…on the way to writing 154 of them. 

I’m a man of my word, and I said here that when my kids learned how to sing at least the first part of Sonnet 18, I’d record and post it.  So, here it is, my five and three year old singing “Shall I compare thee…”.

I did what I could to clean it up, but it gets a little rushed at the end.  They get excited when the microphone is on. Of course, I may not have thought this entirely through.  They sing it now, all the time.  Breakfast lunch and dinner.  I thought that if they’re going to sing the same song over and over again, I’d rather it be Shakespeare than something from Dora or High School Musical.  I’m beginning to question that assumption…

http://www.samsloan.com/shakespe.htm No, not really.  I just thought it was funny, given the whole new “Authorship Coalition” thing.  This “proof” showed up in my feeds today.  I can’t really tell, since the argument is all over the place, but I think his argument is that there can’t even have been such a person as Shakespeare – most of the piece is about how surely there’s nothing but a bag of rocks buried in Shakespeare’s grave.   Ummm….isn’t that one of the points not being questioned?  There certainly was a Shakespeare, we have loads of records to prove it, including his will and signature.  The question is whether that guy wrote the plays. The author of this particular piece believes that “the true author of Shakespeare was a woman. In general, women make better writers than men. This is a proven generic fact.”  I think perhaps that a woman should have written his article for him :).

http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/ Ok, the authorship question is no stranger here.  The link above is the home of “the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare“, and it’s about to get very popular.  You see, Derek Jacobi (and others) have also signed it.  Surely it says something when one of the most well known Shakespearean actors of the day signs such a document? It is important to read what’s actually being said, though.  These are not a bunch of loonies saying “Bacon did it!” or “It was de Vere, you morons!”  Instead, these are people who are simply acknowledging that there is room for doubt.  It’s up to each person individually to decide how much doubt they have.  The site itself, for instance, says clearly that “we doubt that he [the man from Stratford] was the author of the works.”  So that’s the position they’re coming from.  I would take the opposite stance, namely that the lack of evidence does not change my opinion that he did, even if I’m willing to admit that there is room for doubt. I like the way Jacobi put it.  “I subscribe to the group theory,” he said.  “I don’t think anybody could do it on their own.” And later, “I think the leading light was probably deVere as I agree that an author writes about his own experience, his own life and personalities.”  An interesting development indeed!  It’s a public document.  Would you sign it?

http://www.aslshakespeare.com Ok, that’s pretty cool.  Shakespeare in sign language.  Why not?  The site is actually more than that, it’s an educational site with character sheets, scene synopsis(es?) and so on.  The only play that seems covered is Twelfth Night.  But there is most definitely video showing people acting out Shakespeare and signing at the same time.  Impressive!