I originally asked this question back in 2007 – Is the Shakespeare Association of America for me?
Well it’s been almost 4 years now, and much has changed. If nothing else, I can now say that I’ve spent those last 4 years learning even more about Shakespeare. Plus, my audience has grown and changed, and there are many people here now that weren’t here then.
So I’ll ask it again (mostly because the question’s come up) : Given what you, dear readers, know about me… is the SAA for me?

I’ll just leave this here without comment.

“So, this exists,” says contributor Nathan Pease via our Facebook page.
“This” being a Shakespearean re-interpretation of Terminator 2 : Judgement Day.
Wow. Do not mistake what this is. This is not taking the script and tacking a couple of thees and thines into it. What they’ve done (apparently) is to piece together a T2 script using actual Shakespeare lines?! Pretty daunting task.
This is a Kickstartr project. They need money. If you want to see this produced, help them reach their goal by May 1!

If you’re new here, we like to refer to Shakespeare’s birth/death day (April 23) as “Shakespeare Day” and celebrate it as something of a holiday. I point you, by way of example, to last year where I put out a dozen posts, gave away t-shirts, went to see open mic Shakespeare nights, and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on. That was a good one. 🙂 That post is a link to the entire April 2010 archive, it’s the best I can do, so you have to fish for it a bit. Here, have a link to my summary of the day’s events. And here’s how I spent Shakespeare Day 2009.
Unfortunately this year Shakespeare Day falls on a Saturday, which means I do not have any big online celebrations planned. There’s just no way I can stay chained to my machine all day on a weekend when family obligations take center stage. I’m sure I won’t let it go by unnoticed, but I do feel obliged to let my audience here know that there’ll be no festivities of any significance.
There was some talk about taking the kids down to D.C. this year for April vacation, which would have meant getting to spend Shakespeare Day at the Folger itself. That would have been highly cool. But even though my boy does run around testing his pre-school teachers on their Hamlet knowledge, my wife and I decided that the kids are still a bit young to really get enough value out of a trip like that so we’ve put it off for another year.
What about you all? What are you doing for Shakespeare Day? I’m going to keep calling it that, and encourage you all to do so as well. It’s not just Shakespeare’s birthday. It is a holiday, a day for us to celebrate everything the man means to the world. Don’t be shy.

Ok, here’s a game I thought of while daydreaming about my iPad idea.

Take a scene from Shakespeare, and then seamlessly integrate some modern bit of technology.

Example?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom has been given a donkey’s head, and his frightened coworkers have scattered, leaving him onstage alone.

BOTTOM

Why do they run away? This is knavery of them to make me afeard.

His cellphone beeps the familar triple-tone, signifying a text message. He takes the phone out of his pocket.

BOTTOM

(reading)

“O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee? Snout.” What do you see? You see an asshead of your own, do you?

Another triple-tone, another message.

(reading)

“Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated! Quince.” I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of me …

Get the idea? Instead of running back on stage to deliver one line and then exit, they keep their distance and text him. It is not “Shakespeare via text message” nor is it “rewrite Shakespeare in text-speak”. It’s just a way of saying, “How might this scene play out differently if everybody had had a cell phone?”

Constraints :

1. “Integrate” implies changing some action or dialogue in some way to support the introduction of the technology. You can’t just have Macduff enter checking his voice mail and then put his phone away, unless he delivers a line or otherwise moves the scene along in some way associated with that action.
2. You can alter or reassign text to support your context (such as by giving those lines to Bottom, above).
3. Devices can provide feedback that might be necessary for staging, such as a GPS transmitter speaking its directions instead of requiring the character to read them.
4. You cannot create dialogue of your own. So no examples of King Duncan reading Lady Macbeth’s Facebook page. The idea isn’t to create a new story, the idea is to see how technology can be used to present the story Shakespeare already gave us.

Let’s see how creative you can get.