Had a Shakespeare dream last night. My whole family had finally made it to Stratford and we were in some sort of bookstore where they had a guy dressed up and acting like Shakespeare. Only problem is that he wasn’t any good, and some of his trivia was wrong, so I started mocking him. Of course this then gets me kicked out! And not just out of the book store but out of Stratford! Needless to say I was a little bent out of shape that it had taken me this long to get there and in a matter of minutes I was kicked out;)
Eight Days A Week
Awhile back I put a question out on Twitter asking which day of the week Shakespeare mentions the most. Bardfilm reminds me that I never posted the answer.
For simple analytical / search questions I head over to Shakespeare.Clusty.com. It is here that I punched in the various days, and here’s the results:
Sunday: 9 occurrences in 5 works
Monday: 7 occurrences in 5 works
Tuesday: 7 occurrences in 7 works
Wednesday: 15 occurrences in 9 works
Thursday: 15 occurrences in 3 works
Friday: 5 occurrences in 5 works
Saturday: 2 occurrences in 2 works
So Saturday is the clear loser, mentioned the least frequently across all the plays.
But the winner … should we call it Wednesday, or Thursday? Notice that Thursday is only mentioned in 3 plays, despite having the most mentions at 15. This is because 12 of those mentions come in Romeo and Juliet while they plan the wedding. Comparatively, only 3 mentions of Wednesday in R+J.
I think we can to declare Wednesday the winner. Mentioned the most often, across the widest number of plays.
Save The Michigan Shakespeare Festival
Straight from longtime Shakespeare Geek contributor David Blixt comes the disappointing (and highly surprising) news that his beloved Michigan Shakespeare Festival has fallen on hard financial times:
The Michigan Shakespeare Festival has issued an urgent plea for aid from its friends and donors as a result of an unexpected shortfall in financial support from several key sources. The call came from Bart Williams, managing director, who described the crisis. “With so much momentum going into this coming season, it is distressing now find several funding sources we had counted on did not come through.” Williams described the budget shortfall as in the “mid five figures,” and that emergency measures were needed to fill this gap within the next few weeks. Without additional funds, the season might be shortened or cancelled altogether.
This is no struggling group trying to keep their head about water. The MSF has been alive and thriving for quite some time, and boasts the likes of Shakespearean gods like Dame Judi Dench and Stacey Keach among those who have endorsed their work.
Please check out the links and help spread the word. Thanks!
Ingenious(?) Shakespeare on Film
There’s certainly no shortage of these lists, but I haven’t linked to one in a while. Flavorwire delivers their list of Top 10 Ingenious Shakespeare Adaptations, but as always I’m never really sure what criteria these sites use for such a list.
All the usual suspects are on this one, and probably nothing that long time readers hadn’t seen mentioned before (Scotland, PA, which I still haven’t seen, being the most unknown). But how do you make a list that includes both McKellen’s Richard III and Luhrman’s Romeo+Juliet with 10 Things I Hate About You, O, and Strange Brew?
I’d love it if somebody made a list with a constraint that we could all agree upon, like “Shakespeare adaptations as musicals” or something. Hint hint, content authors. Get to work.
The Real Housewives of Shakespeare
This hysterical production from the Great River Shakespeare Festival is making the rounds on Twitter. I gave it a pass at first since I never watched the original tv show and figured that I wouldn’t get most of the jokes.
Wrong!
If you’ve not seen it yet, do what I did — try to identify all the wives before they’re introduced. They had me at “what is that knocking WHAT IS THAT KNOCKING!? 🙂 🙂 🙂
P.S. – I’m going to let Juliet’s use of “like” slip by…once. That was like, like, fingernails on a blackboard.