Let’s Talk About Globe on Demand

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

Everybody and their Uncle Pandarus is reporting on the Globe bringing their plays online for rental or purchase.  As a fan? I love the idea. As a technology geek I think it’s a good first step, and for a number of reasons I hope they make some changes.

If you haven’t seen the player yet, it’s proprietary. Instead of teaming up with any of the plethora of other services available, the Globe is using their own. You register with them, pay them your money, and watch your videos on their player. This goes against what I see as the most common trends in this industry. As a consumer I want:

1) An “all you can consume” subscription option. You tell me you put 50 plays online and want to charge me $6.50 to rent each one, I can’t help thinking “It’s going to cost me over $300 if I expect to watch all of these.” But tell me that for $99 I can have a year long access to watch the plays whenever I want?  Much better deal, and also far more likely to get more money out of me because I may have high hopes about watching all of them, but let’s be realistic, I’m not doing that. Not only are many not available in my region, many are in foreign languages.  So if I end up watching less than about 15 of them, the $99 deal still puts the Globe ahead.

2) I want to watch on my television, not my computer. This is standard now. Between my Roku box and my Chromecast, anything that’s worth watching is worth watching on the big screen. I’m relatively certain they don’t have a Roku channel, but I’m honestly not sure if it works with Chromecast. It might.

3) If I choose to buy/own a video, do I get a DRM-free, downloadable version? I’m not going to try it to find out, but that’s what I’d want. I want a file that I’ll copy over to my home video system, where I’ll be able to play it on my television (see point #2). I get the funny feeling that buying the video from the Globe means you still get to log back into the Globe site, check out your account, and watch your videos from there.

Has anybody plonked down some money yet and taken this one for a spin? What do you think? What did you rent?

Where You From?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I was looking at my site recently and while I noticed that the lion’s share of my traffic comes from the US, expectedly, but according to Google there’s 117 different locations where my readers have come from.

So I’m curious.  Where you from? What’s the Shakespeare scene like over there?

Collier Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment
On Halloween I asked for research into which edition added a stage direction for Hamlet to put down Yorick’s skull.  Bardfilm tells me it was added in the Collier edition, but then disappeared before I could ask for more info on Collier.  So, I had to go look for myself.

Interesting!  From the Wikipedia page:

Collier used these opportunities to effect a series of literary fabrications. Over the next several years he claimed to find a number of new documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and business. After New Facts, New Particulars and Further Particulars respecting Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), so called from a name written on the title-page. In this book were numerous manuscript emendations of Shakespeare, said by Collier to be from the hand of “an old corrector.” He published these corrections as Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare (1852) and boldly incorporated them in his next edition (1853) of Shakespeare.

More information here.  Did this guy just forge his sources? If there’s such controversy over his edition why would the Moby edition, which is based on the 1864 Globe edition (thanks JM), have this line?

I would have thought the authenticity of this edition would have been seriously called into question just by looking at the first scene of Romeo and Juliet, anyway:

SAMPSON 

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals. 

GREGORY 

No, for then we should be colliers. 

SAMPSON 

That would be awesome. 

GREGORY 

This is what I’m sayin, right? Colliers are the coolest. 

SAMPSON 

I hear you.  Ain’t nothing wrong with being a collier. Colliers rule. 

GREGORY 

You know who doesn’t rule, though? Montagues.

Paterson Joseph, Shakespeare Mastermind

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Personally I don’t know who this gentleman is, I had to go look him up on IMDB. Seems he’s done mostly work on UK rather than US features. Fair enough.  He popped up in my newsfeed this morning for a Shakespeare mention, and here’s what he had to say:

Mastermind specialist subject
Shakespeare. When I watch Pointless and there are any Shakespeare questions I nearly always get them all, and I feel like I’d probably know more about Shakespeare than I do about anything else, as a sort of general knowledge thing. So yeah, it would be Shakespeare, but I’d have to read all 36 plays again.

Anybody else notice something odd right at the end, there?  36? I hear 37 most often, and sometimes 38, but I can’t remember the last time I heard 36. When somebody says that, which play are they not counting? Henry VIII?

Hamlet, Put Down the Skull.

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

So I saw somebody carrying a skull as part of her Halloween costume, and of course I had to come up with some jokes about Yorick, being quite chap-fallen, could not enjoy the Reese’s Pieces he did love so very much.  So of course I had to pull up Hamlet’s speech to get my quotes right.  I go to the MIT (Moby) version, because it’s the easiest to search:

And I thought, “Wait… there’s a stage direction that tells him to put down the skull? That seems oddly specific for a play that rarely states stage directions beyond who enters, exits and dies.”

So I go look it up in the First Folio, as you folks have taught me to do:

Nope! Not there. I’m not surprised, I get that various editions get conflated over the years.  But the thing is, I checked two quartos as well as Second and Third Folio, and I can’t find it in any of those, either.
Anybody know when this got added?  And possibly the more interesting question, why? Was there an edition where somebody went in and really got specific about such things, for some reason? Maybe David Garrick kept forgetting to put down Yorick and would end up carrying him through the rest of the scene until a director got the idea to write it into the script 🙂