Month: July 2018

Here’s a funny story that provides a glimpse into my daily life.

I’m sitting at work in the kitchen and we’re discussing just how good Google has become at predicting what you’ll search next.  We’re playing a game where we click a few links deep into something, then announce what we want to look up next, then start typing a search term one letter at a time and see how many letters you get until Google guesses it (for my examples it seemed to average 3).

Cut to a separate conversation about Star Wars and how Disney basically turned space nazis into merchandise.  I noted this is especially true in episode seven, “the one where that Weasley brother is standing up in front of them all losing his mind.”

None of us can remember which Weasley, though, so I google.  I type D…O….M…. and then laugh and announce to my coworkers, “I guess google knows me too well, do we want to see him in Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Actually I never knew he’d done either, so thank you google, that’s a blog post right there.  Have to come back to that. Let’s see, Dominic Dromgoole, IMDB…”

“Domhnall Gleeson is his name,” a coworker corrects me.

I knew that, once he said it. But at DOM Google had assumed I meant Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director for Shakespeare’s Globe. I didn’t even notice when I clicked through.  Score one for Google.

 

 

[This is old – but WordPress tells me that it “missed schedule” and never got posted.]

You may have seen the surprise announcement by now that Gary Kurtz (who produced several Star Wars movies) is attached to a still-untitled movie project about the life of Christopher Marlowe.

Interesting?  Has potential.  But my first question is, “How much of Marlowe’s life is documented, and how much is it going to be fictionalized?”  I’ll admit I’m kind of exciting to see the “great reckoning in a little room” played out before me.  We don’t get a lot of scenes from Shakespeare’s life where we know exactly where he was and what happened, but we have a pretty good idea of how Marlowe met his end.

My second question is who is this Greg Hall that is attached to direct? I went through his bio to find a credit I could reference, but all I see is one of these dudes who wrote/produced/directed all of his own features.  When I see that my first thought is not, “I bet this dude is the next Orson Welles,” I can tell you that.

Multiple people on Twitter said, “I’d rather have a Ben Jonson movie.”  Tough crowd.  You’d think Marlowe’s story would be scandalous enough to draw a modern movie crowd (not to mention the man was ridiculously good looking).  Just please don’t cast Johnny Depp to play him.

 

 

So I was at the liquor store the older day and the first thing about this particular brand that caught my eye was the how many digits were in the price! There was a whole top row of the special good stuff and take a look at what I found:

“Oh cool!” I thought, “I’ve got to make a Falstaff reference out of that.”

But like I do for most of my references I had to double check and make sure that it was in fact “plump Jack” that appears in the quote and not something else. And then it got even cooler, because I discovered that not only does the PlumpJack winery have a membership program called the Falstaff Society, the membership tiers are:  Hamnet, Hathaway and Muse.

I think I’d like to hang out with these people.  Then I look at the price of the wine and think maybe I’d be out of my league. 🙂

A funny thing happened on the way to the Folger.

Recently I had a chance to visit the Folger Library, where I saw a Fourth Folio they had on display.  Our guide was trying to remember the “other” plays that had been included in this one, and suggested that Two Noble Kinsmen was one of them.  I gave a confused look and said that I thought that one hadn’t been accepted as part of the works until far more recently.  After the visit I went off to do my research.  (I later got clarification that I had misunderstood, and she was using Two Noble Kinsmen as an example of plays not in the First Folio – not that it had been included in the Fourth).

What’s funny is this discovery I made while doing some entirely independent research into the history of this blog.  Check out the very first post I made back in June 2005:

I knew about the existence of Cardenio, which is more “lost” than “questionable”, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which I got into an argument with my neighbor about (I lost, arguing “I have several copies of the complete works and there ain’t no Noble Kinsmen in it!”)

My recollection is fuzzy but I believe I “lost” that one because I’d been arguing that Shakespeare didn’t write it at all. I do have specific memories of when the “number of plays Shakespeare wrote” went from 37 to 38, though.

Fast forward thirteen years and I’m standing in the FOLGER FREAKING LIBRARY questioning them on the subject!  I have no shame.

When I started this site I never tried to claim expertise on the subject.  I know only the faintest hint of what I don’t know.  These days I think I probably know more than I did then, but I still stand in awe of the good folks who do this for a living who will forever know more about it than me.