So.  Every article I read about having a successful web presence of any meaningful size always starts with, “Have a newsletter. Collect email addresses.”

I’ve never done that. It is a glaring omission in my strategy. There’s many reasons for that, but most end up in that vicious cycle of “Unless I specifically plan to sell you something, I can’t incur the cost of paying for such a service.”

Well, today after stumbling across a free (we’ll see about that) option, I figure let’s try an experiment.  If you’re interested in what a Shakespeare Geek newsletter might be all about, please come over to the blog and sign up.  I don’t really know what the newsletter will involve, I’ll be honest. It’ll depend on how many people sign up.

Over at the top of the left-hand column you should see a new “Follow Shakespeare Geek by Email” widget, where you can enter your email address (and then confirm by clicking on a welcome email).  If for some reason that widget is not working or you don’t see it, please click here to go directly to the subscribe page.  Thanks!

I’m relying on you folks to let me know the demand for this feature.  If I see a bunch of people sign up right off the bat, I’ll know it’s something you’ve been wanting.  If I have to beg and kick and scream, well, everything will balance out – I won’t go killing myself to deliver content via that channel.  It’s up to you.

Still torn on whether to sit through Anonymous or ignore it?  I think I’ve found the middle ground – check out People Being Stupid About Shakespeare…or Someone Else, the most in depth review/rebuttal of the movie I’ve yet seen.  The author goes through the major points of the movie (the movie, not the Oxfordian theory in general), and then questions some of the more glaringly creative omissions and additions:

…Dekker, Jonson, and a guy with a gut representing, as the IMDB informs
me, Thomas Nashe. And Christopher Marlowe. In 1598. Marlowe makes fun of
Dekker for the failure of Shoemaker’s Holiday and claims
preeminence among historical playwrights. Which is funny, since Marlowe
hadn’t written a history play in five years at that point, largely
because he was murdered in 1593. And Dekker’s play wasn’t written until
1599 (a fact recorded in that famous and fraudulent monument to
government conspiracy otherwise known as Henslowe’s Diary). But
Marlowe’s ghost probably knows that and is just messing with Dekker’s
head. Nashe also kind of hangs around for the rest of the film, even
after his death in 1601…

I know it’s a movie, and I know that the director certainly took many liberties.  I think the important question will be what Oxfordians do with the story.  It’s not like we lovers of Shakespeare saw Shakespeare in Love and ran off to tell all of our friends, “Yes! It was *just* like that! Go see this movie and you’ll know everything about Shakespeare’s life!”

So the million dollar question is whether the Oxfordians will do that. Or will they take each piece that *does* support their case and say, “Yes, that bit is true,” while simultaneously disowning the flat out provably incorrect bits with “Of course he changed some stuff, it’s just a movie.”

(* I also notice that my pal Bardfilm was the first to comment on this post, so he clearly beat me to the punch on this one. )

So, a funny thing happened last week.  Five days ago, on the little used Reddit forum for Shakespeare, I first spotted this post about “Things We Owe Shakespeare”.  It is a picture of someone’s notebook scribblings of a bunch of now-cliches that originally came from Shakespeare.

At the time (you can see my comment on the post), I wrote that it was neat primarily for the artistic value, but I would have liked it if the font was different for each quote, instead of looking obviously like one person wrote it all.

I didn’t give it another thought.  We see these “Stuff Shakespeare said first” lists multiple times a day.

But then the funny thing happened – it “went viral”, as the marketers like to say.  I started seeing links to it a dozen times a day, including from such mega-traffic generators as NPR.  The original poster even said that she (I think?) was getting over 10k hits a day on the thing, and was surprised at it.  She even acknowledges that some of the sayings aren’t original to Shakespeare (dating back to the Bible), and that she spelled some things wrong.

So, then, why did it “go viral”?  That’s the mystery about this stuff.  Here you’ve got the Shakespeare bloggers who do this stuff on a regular basis and hope beyond hope to score such a win.  And then a random writer with no particular connection to Shakespeare (her tumblr appears to be a wide variety of found and created images) happens upon a gold mine.

Here’s my thoughts, and believe me if I knew anything about this stuff I’d be a rich man:

• Artwork.  This post was not a bullet list of things Shakespeare wrote, it was a hand sketch.  It has a certain artistic quality to it (as I noted way back when I first saw it) in the way that they’re all jammed in at odd angles.  People like pictures.
• Originality.  This is not a picture of a poster that somebody saw.  This is the original artist saying, “I made this.”  People appreciate that, and are more likely to share/like it. 
• Needle in a haystack syndrome.  If somebody posts a funny Shakespeare list every day, then the people that frequent that site will implicitly alter their standard of expectation about the content on that site, and no individual list will jump to the top.  Make sense?  I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels right.  Think about it like this (what with the Emmy’s having just been on television last night) : the television show Modern Family is, by current standards, very good.  Every time.  I’ve never had somebody forward me a clip of any individual episode with a note “OMG U have to see this soo funny!!11!”  But in any water cooler conversation somebody can say, “Hey have you seen that show Modern Family?” and most of the people in the conversation will say, “OMG I love that show!”

  In this case we have the opposite. Go look at the original poster’s account, and see how many entries there are that did *not* go viral.

• Audience.  Some audiences, I think, are more attuned to the sharing concept.  I don’t know for certain but I expect that the audience for the site in question is more of a younger, possibly teen audience.  I think that stuff can spread like wildfire through that crowd. It’s not that us older folks (ahem) are less likely to share the good stuff – it’s that we just have fundamentally different networks.  The average teenager’s social network is some substantial multiplier larger than mine.  Plus, the people on that network are more actively online, and therefore more likely to see stuff.  If I post or share something, half of my relatively small social network may not even log in for a couple of days.  Compare that to the younger crowd who are online almost constantly and the minute it gets shared, they see it and forward it along as well.

Like I said, I don’t have any secrets to this, otherwise I’d have a following 100x the size I do :).  I do think that this was an interesting event in the world of viral Shakespeare, and I hope that I’ve been able to learn something from it that I can use in my strategy going forward.

Beware, this is more a philosophical question than a Shakespeare one, but the subjects overlap.

I’ve worked for two educational startups, both that deal with getting kids into college.

One boss had the vision that *every* kid should potentially go to college, and the fact that they don’t is attributable to a failed system (on many fronts – the student’s as well as the system’s).

The other boss, disagrees, and makes the case that for some people, college is simply not the right path, and sometimes even seen as a negative.  It’s been mentioned more than once that up here in Massachusetts, “We don’t ask if you went to college, we ask where you went to college.” But it’s a big world, and there are plenty of places in the US where “went to college” is a bad thing in the “you think you better than me?” sort of way.

I’m not really sure where I fall on that spectrum, and that’s not really what I want to argue.

What I want to do is apply that same spectrum to the question of Shakespeare.  Is Shakespeare for everybody?  If someone doesn’t “get” Shakespeare, is that just the result of a system that failed to properly explain it?  Or should we just accept the fact that some folks are not meant for Shakespeare, and nothing we can do will change that?

Note that I am not talking about those who spend significant effort researching the topic and then come up with a stance on why they don’t *like* it.  That’s like someone who goes to college, finds nothing there, and quits.  I’m talking about the ones that never even get that far – the ones who are unable (unwilling?) to see any value in the subject for themselves, and thus put no effort into pursuing it.

Discuss.