So I had a very interesting day.  Spent the afternoon watching Othello performed at my local library (more on that in a separate post).  Knowing I’d be surrounded by Shakespeare geeks I of course wore my Mercutio Drew First shirt.  More people recognized and appreciated the reference today than ever before, I’m happy to say. Where it gets even more interesting is after the show when I stopped off at the nearby pizza place, and the guy behind the counter recognized and appreciated the line as well.  He’s the first to actually read it out loud, including the ShakespeareGeek.com part. He said he wanted one, and like always I told him, “Come by my site and buy one.”  So maybe he’ll stop by, and see this.  Hi, pizza guy! Anyway, that started up a conversation when he told me that he and a friend had spoken of producing a show of their own, and daydreaming about doing RENT until they realized just how much it would cost to procure the rights to such a show.   We spoke of public domain stuff, and he asked if I knew of a repository where fledgling producers could learn more about works that are available in the public domain. I thought this an interesting question, because while we often hear about novels and poetry that are public domain via projects like Project Gutenberg, I’m not sure where I’d point somebody who wanted to read public domain plays.  I’m assuming that the rights are the same – if it’s more than X years past the death of the playwright, at least in the US, the work falls into the public domain? And once that happens, anyone who wants to do a show could get the script and just do it? I am assuming all of that, and do not know it for a fact.  Hence, as I told pizza guy I would, I’m asking.  Surely one of my more theatrical followers, someone who has produced a show or two of their own, would know the answer.  How do you find out what shows are available, and what do you need to go through to actually do it?  If this guy did want to pursue attempting RENT, how do you figure out where you’re supposed to go about asking for the rights and cutting the check?

I want to take a moment to say a very public thank you to BardFilm, MadShakespeare and all my other Twitter friends who decided to congratulate me on my new day job by having a “You Know You’re a Shakespeare Geek…” party on Twitter, with all the links pointing back to me.  Some of my favorites:
You’re a Shakespeare Geek if You TEND to VOICE your THOUGHTS in TEN beat LINES. You’re a Shakespeare Geek if you think it’s a Hamlet quote whenever the Twitter login page says "Remember me." You know you’re a Shakespeare Geek if you get a little nauseous when someone mentions the Earl of Oxford. You’re a Shakespeare Geek if you’re listening to Dire Straits’ "Romeo & Juliet" and you think "That’s not how it happened!" Of course as I told bardfilm, this celebration of my new job resulted in me spending all my time on Twitter reading my notes! Thanks again, everybody.  I loved it.

Hi everybody! You may have noticed a sudden resurgence in Twitter tweets and blog posts.  I’m happy to report that not only am I back from vacation, but I’ve got a day job again!  Even better is that it’s got a heavy self-directed, work-from-home aspect to it which means I’m much more free to work on the blog without fear of some grumpy coworker looking over my shoulder and documenting in his little notebook of complaints every time I’m not doing “real work”. Thanks for your patience, and special thanks to everybody that tipped and bought merchandise when I didn’t have a regular paycheck coming in!  You can still do that now, of course.  Don’t let me stop you 😉

(This particular link made the rounds on Twitter already, but it’s definitely worth sharing far and wide.)

I’m not particularly enamored with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s new “Blogging Shakespeare” site which, five-plus years late to the party, seems to be positioning itself as the only Shakespeare blog in town.  Since it’s a new project (just a month or two old) perhaps they’ll put up a Blogroll or some other link section and give a little acknowledgement to the now wide variety of other blogs that have been “embracing Shakespeare conversation in a digital age” for quite some time now. If their desire is truly to provoke conversation and foster community they might do well to start by engaging in some of the conversation already taking place in the already large community.  I’ll be the first to admit that I need to link more blogs myself. I link a bunch, primarily for those authors who are regular contributors to the site, but I’m well aware that there are many I’m missing.

However, having said that I can’t help but be jealous that they’ve got Professor Stanley Wells blogging for them, and he writes gold like this about the new movie Anonymous, and the authorship question in general. We can all sit here behind our blog editors and take our pot shots from a distance, calling the anti-Stratfordians “loony” and getting all patronizing and eye-rolly … but Professor Wells is the guy who sits in the room with them and gets interrogated for hours on end.  Literally. I don’t know that any of us could stand up to that for very long, at least without it breaking down into name calling and chairs flying.

Two specific points come out of this post that make me feel less anxious about the new movie.  First, as Wells points out, this is not being positioned as a documentary, it’s going to be something more like Shakespeare in Love.  I think very few of us had to explain to random movie-goers that Romeo and Juliet didn’t really go down like that.  Second, and this from the comments, is that the actual theory being hyped – the one where Oxford is both Queen Elizabeth’s son and lover (ewww), might well end up looking so crazy that it works against the Oxfordians.  So, that’s never a bad thing either.

Authorship is just one of those nagging conspiracies that I don’t think will ever go away. You’ll still find people who want to engage with you about who shot Kennedy, who was the mastermind behind 9/11, what Obama’s real birth certificate says … We as Shakespeare geeks can choose to ignore it, or we can dive into the conversation and try to give as good as we get in what will soon become a series of very personal attacks.  It’s nice to take a moment, though, and remember that there are real people who do this for a living (although, as Wells says, they didn’t pay him for his interrogation while he sat on his “distinctly uncomfortable bench” 🙂 ).  Their job is harder, and they deserve some credit and respect for leading the charge into battle.

This doesn’t really merit its own blog post but Twitter and Facebook are just a little too small to tell the story properly. I’m currently reading Stanley Wells’ book about love and sex in Shakespeare’s work (I will post a full review when I’m done).  I’m actually reading the Kindle version, and I’m reading it on my iPhone.  So it’s a little painful, but I knowingly did it that way, because I knew I’d carry around my iPhone into more situations than I’d carry a traditional book. Anyway, there’s a spot where the sentence reads like this:  Even so it may be revealing. People masturbate, woo, marry, copulate and give birth. Fine.  But in my first reading of this sentence on my tiny screen, what I got was this: so it may be revealing. People masturbate, woo, My first instinct was to read “woo” exactly as we most typically use it these days, like an interjection of excitement, like Woohoo!  Only without the exclamation point it’s even better, like Professor Wells is sarcastically letting us know early in the book that he’ll be speaking of grown up topics and we should get over it.  People masturbate. Woo. Only after turning the page did I see the marry, copulate and give birth bit, causing me to go back and reparse the entire sentence properly, thus realizing exactly how wrong I was. <shrug> Maybe you had to be there.  But I couldn’t not share that story.