Once again April 23 has arrived!  Shakespeare Day is what we like to call it around here.  I tell people it’s a very big holiday in my universe, and I’m not lying.  Traditionally I spend the day online. I queue up a marathon of posts throughout the day and generally immerse myself in all things Shakespeare. At least, as deeply as my daily responsibilities otherwise allow.

What makes me sad, though, is when Shakespeare Day falls on a weekend, as it does this year (Sunday).  I generally do not have the freedom to hang out in front of the computer all day on Sundays. Sundays are for family time.  I still queue my posts and monitor Twitter by phone, but it’s not the same.  I never feel quite as joyous. My mind is elsewhere.

How about everybody else?  My Shakespeare universe is generally limited to the online world, there are not many Shakespeare Day parades or celebrations.  I mean, sure, I bet I could find one.  But I think of you all as the community that I’m really interested in hanging out with.  Part of the celebration of the day is not just Shakespeare the man or his works. It’s the people that keep him alive in all the ways that we do.

That last paragraph reminds me of David Garrick and his Shakespeare Jubilee.  Maybe next year I’ll dress up?  Nobody would get it, of course, and I’d have to spend the entire day telling the story.

Which I’m totally cool with.

One more thing?

This came up last year.  One does not celebrate Shakespeare’s death.  You celebrate his birth or his accomplishments. You commemorate his death.  If you catch people calling today the day we celebrate Shakespeare’s death, please go ahead and correct them.  It makes him sound like a super villain.  That’s one of the reasons I use Shakespeare Day to describe April 23. I don’t want it mired down in stuff like that.  It is a day to celebrate Shakespeare’s work, and how it makes life better.

• See a live stage performance of all of Shakespeare’s plays exactly once in your life, and then never again.

or

• Only ever see one Shakespeare play (your choice) for the rest of your life, but you get to see as many versions and interpretations as you want?

In other words, is the ultimate value in Shakespeare’s work represented by the variety across everything he wrote, or the infinite variation to be found in each work?

I think I’d take endless versions of a single play. I’ll learn something new from a Hamlet or a King Lear every time I see it, but I’m fairly confident that I could live my life never seeing Timon of Athens or Pericles.  But could I ever pick one play? I can’t even pick one play to make the example!

I confess this is a bit of a trick question, because the only real way you can decide what play you’d want to see forever is if you’ve seen all the plays at least once in the first place 🙂

I got this idea from a Reddit post that suggested Much Ado About Nothing as a kind of sequel to Romeo and Juliet, by way of the “bride pretends she’s dead” trick, as if it’s Friar Laurence both times, having learned his lesson and getting it right the second time.

That reminded me of all the various Pixar and Disney theories about how all their movies are set in the same universe – such as the princess from Tangled coming to see the princesses from Frozen at the beginning of that movie.

Pick two plays.  Show how some character or circumstance might connect them.  The more off the wall the better!  Go ahead and use whatever was happening in Shakespeare’s real world at the time for ideas as well!

Here’s my entry:

Audiences liked the bit in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where a lion almost eats Thisbe. But they felt robbed that there wasn’t more actual violence. So Shakespeare gave them a character actually pursued and eaten by a bear in The Winter’s Tale. In early productions, Oberon and Puck make a final scene cameo as the ones that bring Hermione back to life.