Month: May 2013

Clandestine Geekery

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Waiting in line at the bank today, one woman spots somebody else she knows and they have a mini-reunion. I don’t catch the names but it’s not long before I hear #1 say to #2, “Are you still doing any theatre or music?”

My ears perk up.  Theatre?  I suppose they coud mean musical theatre.

#2 replies, among other things, “Right now I’m working with the Burlington Players…”

I pull out my phone and google the 2013-2014 for the Burlington Players to see if there’s any Shakespeare on the bill, giving me a wide open excuse to invite myself into the conversation (and look like a complete stalker).

Alas there is not.  39 Steps. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  Although I do spot (later) that their teen program did something called “Reviving Ophelia.”

<shrug>  That’s the kind of geekery I do for you folks.  I smell even the hint of something Shakespeare to talk about and I’m all over it. 😉

The Shakespeare Geek blog has been around since 2005, making it the oldest continually active Shakespeare blog today. Shakespeare is Universal represents our biggest fund-raising effort to date. For almost eight years and almost three thousand posts I’ve tried my best to make a place where everyone can talk about everything related to the subject of Shakespeare. If you’ve found my sites and products useful and interesting, I would greatly appreciate your support so that I can continue to do even more. Thank you.

All Good Things …

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

I heard a great piece of advice once in an entrepreneurial podcast.  The host said, “If you think you have a good idea, it doesn’t matter if you can find a hundred people that tell you its a good idea.  Go out and find a hundred people who will give you money for your idea, and then you have something.”

The last couple of weeks have been something of an experiment.  I’ve played around over the years with different ways to fund my little Shakespeare addiction here, running ads over in the side bar, doing some affiliate linking, stuff like that.  Always nickel and dimey stuff.  I’ve always had merchandise but it’s always been one-off stuff and I’m lucky to see 2 or 3 sales in a month.
So when I spotted Teespring, billed as “Kickstarter for T-shirts”, I thought “This might be worth a shot.  By getting the volume up we can keep the price down, and everybody wins.” So I took my most popular image (To be or not to be, translated into different languages) and brought the quality up to standard by consulting translators, adding languages, and cleaning up the design.  Thus was born the Shakespeare is Universal campaign.
The big question was, after eight years of posting over two thousand times on the subject of Shakespeare, do I have a “good enough” idea here that I’ve gathered those magical 100 loyal followers who would indeed pay real money for the value they receive?
As I write this, the answer is no.
The game’s not over, not for five more days.  We might still make it.  If I look at the last two weeks as purely a lesson in business and marketing it’s been enlightening.  I’ve reached out well past my comfort level in self-promotion, to be certain.  I’ve hounded celebrities for endorsements.  I’ve tried to rally the troups on Twitter and Facebook and email to feel like they are a part of a cause.  Every day I watch that number go up, I get a little thrill and wonder immediately, “Ok, what did I *just* do that made that happen?”
But I could equally step back and think, “You know, I launched this whole thing on Shakespeare’s Birthday, my biggest traffic day of the year by far.  In the best circumstance we could have crushed that 100 goal on the very first day.”  I think we got about 15.  I don’t even want to begin to do that math, to consider how much those dedicated fans cost me.  It would not be a very balanced equation.
I don’t know how I feel about this.  I know that I put real effort into this and my other sites and projects. They cause me real world stress. They cost me real world time and real world money.  It’s been an amazing experience, and I’ve done and learned a lot of things.  
But is this something that I can keep up forever?  Especially now, with the knowledge that such a large audience out there just really doesn’t care all that much whether I’m putting in the effort or not?  
That, I have to think about.  

The Shakespeare Geek blog has been around since 2005, making it the oldest continually active Shakespeare blog today. Shakespeare is Universal represents our biggest fund-raising effort to date. For almost eight years and almost three thousand posts I’ve tried my best to make a place where everyone can talk about everything related to the subject of Shakespeare. If you’ve found my sites and products useful and interesting, I would greatly appreciate your support so that I can continue to do even more. Thank you.

Most Popular Shakespeare Tattoos

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and finally had the time to do it.  In a highly unscientific manner I punched “Shakespeare tattoo” into the Pinterest search engine, and started tracking what came up.  Although there were a variety of Shakespeare images, in this case I was looking purely at the quotes.

Unfortunately if more than one person finds the same image and pins it, all those instances will show up, and it would be near impossible for me to do anything about that. So instead I factored it into the equation.  The prevalence of a given Shakespeare tattoo doesn’t just mean “More people have this one” it also means “More people *like* this one.”

I learned that pictures of freshly done tattoos are pretty gross.  Many of these showed people all red and swollen which I assume means they took the picture immediately upon completion.  I also learned that people will tattoo pretty much anywhere on their body, and saw a fair share of nearly naked people with just a hand covering the bits that weren’t Shakespeare. (Though it’s not on pinterest and was not part of this study I remember seeing a picture of a woman in the bathtub whose Shakespeare tattoo was so high up her leg that I hope she married her tattoo artist afterward.)

In total I looked at 74 Shakespeare tattoos (or, as noted, re-pins of tattoos). I was surprised at how lopsided the distribution was.  Seventeen of those (almost 1/4th the total) were unique – I found only one tattoo like it. I think my favorite may have been this one:

 

Shakespeare tattoo: My love was my decay
“My love was my decay”

Because I saw a gazillion Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Tempest and Sonnet 116….but who goes to Sonnet 80?  You’ve got to really know and love your material to pull something that almost guarantees no one you ever meet in life will recognize it.  I’ll admit I even passed that one over at first as a not by Shakespeare until I read the note associated with it.

[ All images come from a Pinterest search on “shakespeare tattoo“.  I do not own the rights to any images. ]

Eight tattoos were in the category of “a few people have or like this one”.  Typically I spotted between 2-4 instances of each of these (in no particular order):

  • “What’s past is prologue”
  • “To sleep perchance to dream”
  • “If music be the food of love play on”
  • “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”
  • “Stars, hide your fires”
  • “These violent delights have violent ends.”
  • “All these woes shall serve for sweet discourse in our time to come.”

There were also a few variations on Sonnet 116, including one person with the entire sonnet but most with a portion of “Love is not love that alters…”  Though I like the person who went with “Looks on tempests and is never shaken.”  Two different things to focus on.

But then we get to the big winners.  Two stood out as clearly more popular than the others.  The runner-up, appearing 18 times in my list?

Shakespeare tattoo: To thine own self be true
“To thine own self be true.”

I saw Polonius’ advice on more body parts than I can count (such as the pictured foot).

But the winner (appearing 19 times in the list)?  Want to take a guess?

Shakespeare tattoo: Though she be but little she is fierce
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Everybody loves this quote.  Not only was it the most popular, I saw a number of people who pinned a different tattoo with the comment, “I like this style, only with the quote about she’s little and fierce.”

What do you think quote choice says about the person?  I found it fascinating to consider the different places people have to be in their lives to write of “violent ends” and “all these woes”, compared to those that write of music being the food of love (and bonus points to the creative soul who went with “the earth has music for those who listen” instead).  And how about all these “little but fierce” tattoos? Is that a motivational message to the bearer?  Or a warning to her enemies? Maybe a little of both.

 

Did I Just Find The Source of the Shakespeare / King James Bible Theory?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

When I’m trolling around for blog post ideas I’ll often spot a topic I don’t often see discussed and then google “<that topic> Shakespeare” to see what comes up.  So on Reddit I saw a post about Rudyard Kipling.  Ok.  Google “kipling shakespeare” and one of the interesting things I’ve learned to watch out for is whether Google fills in “shakespeare” before I’m done typing it.  That means that other people are also googling for this.  Sure enough it completes the query.  Even better it completes it with “kipling shakespeare bible.”  Interesting!

And then I found this.  “Proofs of Holy Writ“, by Rudyard Kipling, starring William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

Let’s jump to the end:

“Proofs of Holy Writ” was said to have arisen from a dinner table conversation between Kipling and John Buchan about the process by which the splendidly poetic language of the King James’ Authorised Version of the Bible miraculously emerged from a committee of 47 learned men. Might they, Buchan wondered, have consulted the great creative writers of the day, like Will Shakespeare or Ben Jonson ? ‘That’s an idea’, said Kipling, and he went away to turn it into a tale.

As most of us have no doubt heard there’s long been a theory (nay, conspiracy?) that Shakespeare helped to write the King James Bible.  A theory that goes so far as to suggest that Psalm 46 contains a hidden message — the 46th word in from the front is “shake” and the 46th word from the end is “spear”.   (Bardfilm deals with this topic elsewhere, if you are interested.)

So does that mean that we’re looking at the originator of the whole Shakespeare/Bible theory?

 

Wait, The Puritans Destroyed The Globe?

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

No matter how many times I see an article like “6 Myths You Still Believe About Shakespeare” I always click and skim to see whether there’s something new under the sun.  This one had all the usual — his birthday’s not necessarily on 4/23, he didn’t get all his money from writing, the plays weren’t “published” in his lifetime, and so on.

But this one was new to me:

The building in Southwark known as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a reconstruction that opened in 1997 – almost 400 years after the original was built. The original was ruined by fire after an accident involving the firing of a cannon during a 1613 production of ‘Henry VIII.’ It was rebuilt the following year only to be demolished in the 1640’s under Puritan pressure.

Emphasis mine.  I knew about the burning of course, but I never realized that the Puritans had it burned less than a generation after Shakespeare was gone?  “A bunch of us are sailing to America.  Last one to leave England, don’t forget to burn the Globe.”

Has somebody out there got more timeline on this? What happened to Middleton and Fletcher and Jonson and all the others that were still alive after Shakespeare was gone?  For that matter what exactly was going on at the Globe after Shakespeare, who kept writing for them?

The Shakespeare Geek blog has been around since 2005, making it the oldest continually active Shakespeare blog today. Shakespeare is Universal represents our biggest fund-raising effort to date. For almost eight years and almost three thousand posts I’ve tried my best to make a place where everyone can talk about everything related to the subject of Shakespeare. If you’ve found my sites and products useful and interesting, I would greatly appreciate your support so that I can continue to do even more. Thank you.