Month: October 2008

http://www.byhell.com/homework-help/cite-three-allusions-to-greek-and-roman-mythology-used-in-act-1-of-romeo-and-juliet/ I don’t like doing people’s homework for them, mind you, but sometimes it’s fun to look at the questions. Cite three allusions to Greek and Roman mythology used in Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet   The “Phoebus’ lodging” one would be obvious, if not for the fact that it’s not in Act 1.  How many can you think of WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE SCRIPT?

http://celtx.com/ [Found via http://www.collegebound.net/blog/2008/10/16/do-you-have-the-write-stuff-for-college/]   Back in college I wrote some plays.  I remember what it was like to try and format a script.  I never learned the “official” template (much to the annoyance of my directors).  For those that take it seriously, however, there’s word processors dedicated to the task.  Celtx gets a link because the blogger who pointed it out not only speaks of it in Shakespearean terms (“Shakespeare says Celtx rocks”) but actually shows a picture of a dude dressed up like Shakespeare :).

http://manchesteruniversitypressblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/frankfurt-and-new-books.html I link to this one for the second book’s description: The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in performance. This view has recently been challenged by critics arguing that Shakespeare was a literary ‘poet-playwright’, concerned with his readers as well as his audiences. Hurray!  Finally a retort to all those “You do know the works are meant to be performed, not read” people!

As a fulltime computer geek, I get all my news via “RSS” feeds.  They actually show up on my portable device (iTouch), and many’s the time at 6am on a workday my wife will be watching the news on television while I’m scanning 100x as many stories on my own gadget.  Comes in handy when they say “We’ll tell you what Madonna called her husband, right after this commercial break…” and I can tell her because I just read it 5 minutes ago :). As such, I never bothered with the email newsletter thing.  I figure, if people want to know when I’ve updated the blog, they can get the feed.  But not everybody’s a computer geek, now are they? So, that’s my question.  Were I to open up a good old fashioned email newsletter, would you subscribe?  I couldn’t promise regular intervals (certainly not more than once a week), and for the most part it’d be a summary of stuff that had gone on in the blog anyway, but I could definitely put in original content just for the newsletter, as well as expanded details on previously posted stories. Yes, no?  Help me out here people, it’s too quiet for my liking.  You tell me how we can make this the cool place to hang out and talk Shakespeare.

http://shakespiracy.blogspot.com/ The folks making “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead” are working the viral angle.  They’ve got some videos up, if you’re into the whole vampire thing.