Talk Like Shakespeare Day is back! If you’re too chicken to actually talk like Shakespeare on Talk Like Shakespeare Day, you can always combine two geeky holidays and talk like a Shakespeare Pirate.  Ta be or not ta be, arr, that be the question laddies.  The rest be silence.

Don’t forget that April 23 is also the last day (technically April 22, we’re giving them away on the 23rd) for the Shakespeare in Bits Contest.  We’ve got 10 copies of  their multimedia Romeo and Juliet software [independent review here, courtesy MadShakespeare] to give away!  Details here, but the general scoop is this:  fan our Facebook page, then write something on the wall.  Easy!  What are you waiting for?  It’s Shakespeare, it’s for the computer, it’s free.  There are, like, no words in that sentence that I don’t love.

Where have I been?  I got the book for Christmas, as I mentioned, and only just discovered that there’s to be a movie.  So who knew about the lawsuit, and why didn’t anybody tell me?? It seems that no less than three separate parties, including Club di Giulietta themselves, claimed rights to make such a movie. Apparently everything’s been settled to mutual satistfaction of all involved.  As the article headline says, “Fans of sappy love stories with a dash of Shakespearean melodrama are in luck.”  Yes we are!

This article on How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know? seems to be from 2002, but it’s making the rounds on all the bookmarking sites lately so somebody must have dug it up.  In short, Shakespeare used about 31k words and we predict he “knew but didn’t use” another 35k, for a total of 66,000ish words. What that *means*, I have no idea.  I could not for the life of me give you even an order of magnitude guess at the number of words I know.  What does it mean to know a word?  If I’ve never used the word myself, but saw it written down and could figure out what it meant, do I know it now? Did I know it before then, too?  You can’t exactly just start at the beginning and write down all the words you know.  

Ok, I’m back from vacation and we’re coming up fast on Shakespeare’s birthday.  Got plans?  I hope to put out a plethora of posts over the next couple days (last year I want to say I did 10 posts on April 23 alone), so stick with me!