I had to read this article several times before it sank in.

I saw the headline “Hear Sir Ian McKellen Read The Tempest” and I thought, “Oh cool, my favorite, I’ll bookmark that.”

Then in the picture he’s wearing a t-shirt that says “Heuristic Tempest” and I thought, “That’s odd, I’d like more information about that.”

Then he tweeted, “I hope you’ll enjoy our new Shakespeare app.”

So then I started reading again from the beginning and saw, ” Sir Ian McKellen is launching a series of apps that will allow users to listen to various actors read the Bard’s plays aloud.”

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

TAKE ALL OF IT.

GIVE ME, QUOTH SHAKESPEARE GEEK.  GIVE ME NOW.

I’m intrigued. “Based on the premise that the plays are meant to be seen” is one phrase from one article, but “The app concentrates entirely on the language and is stripped of staging, sets, costumes, make-up, etc.”  Curiouser and curiouser!

Ask anybody to start naming Shakespeare’s “best” villains and you’re going to round up the usual suspects: Iago, Claudius, Richard III, etc…

How long until you think about Goneril and Regan?  They don’t even get a full credit each on this list, they’re made to share.  Which is weird when you think about it, because they spend much of the play fighting and ultimately kill each other.  So it’s not like they’re working together (except in shunning their father).  Does Cornwall, the guy that does the actual eye gouging, even rate?  Nope.  What’s a guy gotta do to get some evil credit around here?

The inclusion of Angelo is interesting.  It’s not like they were trying to round out a list of 10 or something.  It’s always weird to associate comedies with true villains (though I do realize that M4M is a bit of a problem to classify).  I wouldn’t expect to see Don John on this list, so how does Angelo make it over, say, Cassius? Tybalt? Is there an “official” definition of villain that we’re supposed to use, like how the academy separates “lead” and “supporting” actors?

I am a Shakespeare magnet.  It doesn’t take long for friends, coworkers and family to learn that I am the Shakespeare guy, which in turn means that they become more receptive to Shakespeare things, and want to share them with me. I love this. Because I know that my presence in this person’s life means that they are now more aware of Shakespeare, and that their lives are thus more likely to be made better because of it.

I was surprised the other day when my brother in law texted me about a Shakespeare documentary he’d seen.  In the 15 years I’ve been married to his sister the only conversations we’ve ever really had are the Red Sox, Elvis, who is hosting Thanksgiving this year, and who did the other use to refinance the mortgage and were they any good?

It’s always fun to see what others “learn” about Shakespeare on the fly. Often it’s incomplete, or insubstantiated, or just plain wrong.  Since this conversation was over text I have the actual transcript for this one:

B-I-L: I watched a special last night on Shakespeare’s grave. There is a theory that his skull was stolen from his gave. Common in those days. And he died from drinking contaminated water. Quick death within 30 days. Interesting show! Also explained was his grave stone is shorter than others next to him.

Me: Nobody knows how he died, some people say it was syphilis, or a tumor.  It’s all theories.
No idea about the short gravestone thing. I know about the curse.

B-I-L: Hopefully you can watch special. Very interesting!

Me: Did they mention his pal Marlowe? He’s an interesting story — got stabbed in the eye during a bar fight over the tab. It’s generally agreed that he was better than Shakespeare, and if he hadn’t died so young, Shakespeare would never have gotten his big break.

B-I-L: I believe that is who he was drinking with when Shakespeare caught fever.

🙂  Well, no. Probably not him.

[ Now I’m wondering whether my “Marlowe was better than Shakespeare” comment, which I’ve decided to leave in unedited, is going to get me in trouble… 🙂 ]

It’s been an odd sort of year.  Once upon a time I used to post multiple times a day.  My average of several years was near 2posts/day at one point.  Now it’s more like a few times a month.  Life gets in the way.  Social media has made it easier to simply like and retweet various stories quickly, instead of firing up a blog post to wrap them and send them back out into the world with my own “value add”.  Every day I look at my backlogs of material to write about, books to review, stuff to giveaway, and wish that I could do nothing but Shakespeare full time.

Which makes this year especially troublesome for me because, as you may have noticed, it’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  So, as people tend to do because we like numbers with lots of zeroes in them, we’ve all been inundated with Shakespeare stories from every possible source and every possible angle for the last several months.  Every day for months I’ve scanned my daily headlines, seen another project of massive scale and thought, “I wonder what I’ll do?”

Well, here we are, and I’ve taken the Cordelia option.

I thought about making some hipster jokes about how you my faithful Shakespeare geeks have been into Shakespeare since long before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon.  But that’s not fair, because at the end of the day if all this hoop-de-doo makes new fans of some people, then I’m all for it. I’m not denying the latecomers.

Instead I like to think of what the Catholic priest wishes he could say to the standing room only congregation on Easter Sunday each year:  “Welcome!  Where’ve you been?”

Shakespeare makes life better. That was true yesterday, it’s true today, and it will be true tomorrow and another 400 years from now.

Absolutely, celebrate the man and his works on his birthday. Just don’t stop.