So I’m tackling Richard III, as I mentioned, and blogging as I go. 

One major question right out of the gate is, “What exactly does this mean? How does one approach a new play?”  It’s not like I’m constrained to wandering down to the local Barnes & Noble and picking up the paperback edition.  It’s safe to say that I’ve got access to a wider variety of resources than that 😉  Not only is there a complete works over on my bookshelf over there, I’ve got the works locally on my laptop and on my phone, not to mention easy googling.

“No Fear” editions that claim to do a <shudder> line by line translation of the play are not an option. If you need to ask why, I point you to 6 years of Shakespeare Geek archives. 🙂

However, it’s also not reasonable to just jump in and read the play.  “Performed, not read!” everybody’s been screaming for years.  Not to mention, in my particular situation it’s just unrealistic so sit down for any amount of time with a Complete Works and all the necessary reference material, and still get a coherent first read of the story.  I see that as more the kind of thing to do after multiple reads, when I can better dig down into specific analysis.

So, performance.  Performance, performance. An argument I’ve always made against “Go see it!” is that this is easier said than done. You can’t just snap your fingers and have a live show of every Shakespeare play, you have to take what you can get.  And right now I don’t know of an R3 in my area.

Well, then, what about movies?  I will get to the movies – the McKellen, most likely, both because it is available for streaming on Netflix and also because his footnoted script is available online and I can follow along.  Once I’ve done that I’ll probably come back around and check out the Olivier version.

Middle ground?  Audio.  I have plenty of time with my iPod (driving, yard work, etc…) which is currently filled with just podcasts and science fiction novels.  Shakespeare Teacher’s recent post on the best of Shakespeare on Audio gave me the idea.  But you don’t have to run out and drop the bucks for Arkangel
, when Librivox is around.  For those that don’t know, Librivox offers free MP3 readings of many public domain works, including of course Shakespeare.

So, there’s my starting point.  It’s currently Saturday afternoon, I’ve got the McKellen R3 in my Netflix queue, and the Librivox recording on my iPod.  I will have to back up my listening with reading, as it’s obvious after just the first few minutes that some “Who is speaking now?” context is needed when doing nothing but listening.  But I can work with that.  My game plan is to listen whenever the opportunity presents, back up with reading when I get a moment, and play catchup with the movie version for a few minutes every night before bed.

So now that the school year is upon us again I’m going to bust out an idea that somebody approached me with last year. A school out in Colorado asked whether I’d be interested in using Skype to do a virtual interview with their Shakespeare class. I thought it sounded neat.

For various technical reasons that never happened (firewalls and client VPNS and other buzzy buzzwords), but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a good idea.

So, consider the offer out there. I want to talk to more people about our favorite subject. If you’re in a position to be in charge of a group of people who might be interested in hearing that (students, I’m assuming), and this sounds like an interesting and feasible idea, then send me a note and we’ll see whether we can make it happen.

Full disclosure : This is in no way going to end with me saying that I expect to be paid for this.  I just want to practice interacting with groups in more dynamic ways than “I post and you people comment.” I also don’t promise that, if I actually get a flood of requests, that I will be able to respond favorably to all of them 🙂  There’s only so many hours in the day after all.
 

Now that the experts have been gathered at 60 Minutes With Shakespeare to answer the very important scholarly issue of Shakespearean authorship, I thought maybe we could queue up some other equally important issues for them to tackle next?

Is it true that Shakespeare hated Mondays?  There’s no evidence to suggest that any of his plays were written on a Monday, so from that we can assume that he preferred to take long weekends.  Burden of proof rests on those who seek to prove that Shakespeare was at his most productive on that particular day, preferably between the hours of 9 and 11.

Shakespeare’s favorite color was green, true or false?  Looking at his complete works we can see that green is mentioned almost 25% more frequently than his second favorite, red.  Orange is clearly his least favorite, mentioned less than 1/10th as frequently as other colors. And, since the color orange figures prominently in the national flag of Ireland, we can therefore conclude that Shakespeare was making a very early political statement about the United Kingdom.

Can you confirm or deny that Shakespeare did, in fact, once argue with his wife?  Since we have no shortage of evidence in the intervening centuries that shows that married men do indeed argue with their wives, it is only logical to assume that everything that some men do, Shakespeare must therefore have done. There is strong indication that this particular fight was about that earring in the Chandos portrait. He liked it, she thought it made him look gay.

Was Shakespeare a cross-dresser?  His plays are loaded with boys dressing up as girls dressing up as boys. Since we know his work to be mostly biographical, this is a logical assumption we can draw.  Additionally, state of the art computer-based textual analysis is currently being performed to determine whether the number of times a king is killed in the plays is a statistically significant indicator that Shakespeare, too, once killed a king.

Has anyone but me noticed that if you take all of the sonnets, dump all of the letters used into a big pile, then withdraw the letters in a certain order it spells out “Hello my name is Edward de Vere and I wrote all this poetry stuff and theatre junk”?  Granted you end up with a bunch of letters leftover, but that’s an error introduced by the typesetter.

Thank you for your time.  The world must know! I have to get back to my email, Roland Emmerich has shown interest in obtaining the movie rights to this post.

September is now upon us and, as promised, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has released 60 Minutes With Shakespeare, which should stand up as the definitive resource for smacking down the Authorship debate once and for all.  60 questions, 60 Shakespearean scholars from around the world.  Amazing amount of work went into this.  Heck, they even got Roland Emmerich himself – the director of the movie Anonymous which seems to be the driving point behind this recent push – to answer a question.  

Having said all that, here’s my thoughts. I appreciate that there are people who question authorship, and thus the Stratford position needs to be defended, especially by the people who are caretakers of history.  It just doesn’t interest me, as a debate.  Of course the Stratford folks get together and answer 60 questions that “prove” Shakespeare wrote his works. But you know what? I completely believe that an Oxfordian group could get together and create this exact same site, and pull out 60 of their own experts (using that term loosely) to answer 60 questions that claim to prove that Oxford did it.  I’m not taking sides – I’m simply pointing out what appears obvious, that if you are clearly on either side, then no amount of proof that you offer can ever be seen as anything but completely biased.

Make up your own mind.  Go listen.  Pick out the questions you’re most interested in, or hunt down the experts you most want to hear from.  I’m going to end up listening to all of them, I’m sure.  But if I’m going into it as secure in the knowledge that Shakespeare wrote his works as I am that the sun is going to rise in the morning, I’m just not quite sure what I’m supposed to get out of it.

Ok, so, pointers from many directions coming that say we should talk more about Richard III.  I’ve admitted in the past that this is perhaps the largest gap in my Shakespeare knowledge – I’ve not seen it, nor read it (at least in any sense other than 20 years ago when I read them all through and have forgotten much).

So begins my quest to add R3 to my list.  I will post here as I work my way through it.  This will no doubt also involve watching the Ian McKellen movie version, which I’m told is outstanding.

So, any tips before I dig in?  I have one big question – how much do the other histories act as prequel to this one?  If I’m about as generally familiar with the histories as I am with this one (and by that I mean, other than a few plot points, not much!) am I going to miss a great deal by just jumping in to R3?  Not that I have the time or patience to go back and read everything, but I am curious.

If you’ve got favorite scenes or other bits, let me know – I’ll mark them for later so I can pay particular attention and generate some discussion topics once I’ve caught up.