September is now upon us and, as promised, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has released 60 Minutes With Shakespeare, which should stand up as the definitive resource for smacking down the Authorship debate once and for all.  60 questions, 60 Shakespearean scholars from around the world.  Amazing amount of work went into this.  Heck, they even got Roland Emmerich himself – the director of the movie Anonymous which seems to be the driving point behind this recent push – to answer a question.  

Having said all that, here’s my thoughts. I appreciate that there are people who question authorship, and thus the Stratford position needs to be defended, especially by the people who are caretakers of history.  It just doesn’t interest me, as a debate.  Of course the Stratford folks get together and answer 60 questions that “prove” Shakespeare wrote his works. But you know what? I completely believe that an Oxfordian group could get together and create this exact same site, and pull out 60 of their own experts (using that term loosely) to answer 60 questions that claim to prove that Oxford did it.  I’m not taking sides – I’m simply pointing out what appears obvious, that if you are clearly on either side, then no amount of proof that you offer can ever be seen as anything but completely biased.

Make up your own mind.  Go listen.  Pick out the questions you’re most interested in, or hunt down the experts you most want to hear from.  I’m going to end up listening to all of them, I’m sure.  But if I’m going into it as secure in the knowledge that Shakespeare wrote his works as I am that the sun is going to rise in the morning, I’m just not quite sure what I’m supposed to get out of it.

Ok, so, pointers from many directions coming that say we should talk more about Richard III.  I’ve admitted in the past that this is perhaps the largest gap in my Shakespeare knowledge – I’ve not seen it, nor read it (at least in any sense other than 20 years ago when I read them all through and have forgotten much).

So begins my quest to add R3 to my list.  I will post here as I work my way through it.  This will no doubt also involve watching the Ian McKellen movie version, which I’m told is outstanding.

So, any tips before I dig in?  I have one big question – how much do the other histories act as prequel to this one?  If I’m about as generally familiar with the histories as I am with this one (and by that I mean, other than a few plot points, not much!) am I going to miss a great deal by just jumping in to R3?  Not that I have the time or patience to go back and read everything, but I am curious.

If you’ve got favorite scenes or other bits, let me know – I’ll mark them for later so I can pay particular attention and generate some discussion topics once I’ve caught up.

I’ve mentioned before that bedtime for my 5yr old son often involves my being called upon to whip up a story on the fly.  That story must contain either superheroes, or Shakespeare – his choice, not mine.  Superheroes are easy, he picks a couple good guys and a couple bad guys and I inevitably start with whatever my son did that day.  He got a haircut, Wolverine was getting a haircut.

But then he asks for a Shakespeare story, like he did tonight, and I’m often stuck. He doesn’t want an existing story, you see – he wants an adlib.

So here’s the version he got tonight:

“One day, Hamlet was out by the water practicing his swordfighting.”

“Who was he practicing with?”

“Horatio.”

“Oh, ok.”

“So, Hamlet and Horatio were practicing their swordfighting, and Ophelia came up to them.  “I’m going to go pick some flowers down by the river,” she told them.  “Have fun,” said Hamlet, and off she went.

A few minutes later they heard a *crack*, a *splash*, and a “Help!”  Ophelia had fallen in the water!  Hamlet rushed to the edge of the river like he was going to jump in, but Horatio held him back. “You’ll never save her!” Horatio said, “You’ll be swept away too!”

So Hamlet and Horatio called out, “Shakespeare! We need your help!”

“Wait a minute,” my son interrupted, “Didn’t Shakespeare *write* this story?”

“Yes,” I half lied.

“Then how can he *be* in the story?”

“He wrote himself into the story.”

“Oh.  Ok.”

“So Hamlet and Horatio called to Shakespeare, and *poof* William Shakespeare appeared, with a piece of paper in one hand and a quill pen in the other.  “Shakespeare,” Hamlet said, “You didn’t write in any way for us to rescue Ophelia.”

“Oh,” said Shakespeare, “Apparently I didn’t. I can fix that!” and he scribble scribble scribbled something onto his paper.  When he was done, *poof* there was a giant tree at the edge of the river, and dangling from the tree was a tire swing. With that, Shakespeare disappeared.

Hamlet and Horatio knew immediately what to do. Hamlet climbed into the swing, and Horatio pulled him back as far as he could go and released.  Hamlet swung out over the river where he was able to grab onto Ophelia’s arms and pull her back to shore.

Horatio and Hamlet patted each other on the back, congratulating themselves on saving Ophelia.  Ophelia saw the tire swing and said, “Oooo, where’d you get the tire swing?  I call next!”

“Good grief!” said Horatio and Hamlet together.

The end.

This weekend my dad challenged me with a question about Twitter. He asked how old the people are who follow a discussion of Shakespeare, with the implicit assumption that it is an older crowd.

So I did what I’ve been doing lately, to demonstrate the value of Twitter – I asked (on Facebook as well).

89 of you wrote back over the weekend, which is a reasonable number to do some statistics.  [ For the record, I *think* that Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust follows me, but he did not check in with his age.  Knowing his age (it is public record) I know that it would skew my results higher, but I can’t include somebody’s information without their consent, so he’s not included in these findings.  I can’t just pick out one number because I happen to know it, that would skew my random sample. ]

Ready?

With a minimum reported age of 16 and a max of 55, the average age of Shakespeare Geek followers is …. 30 and a half.  *trumpet blare* 

The standard deviation is 10.4.  If I remember my statistics correctly, that means that 68% of the audience falls within plus or minus a standard deviation from the average – so, 2/3rds of you are basically between 20 and 40.

Now let’s have some fun with the Facebook crowd, since I can separate them out.  25 of those 89 results came from Facebook.  Looking specifically at Facebook we have a range of 19 to 48, averaging just shy of 35 (stddev of 9.5, so the range of ages is similar – but a few years older).

So if we take the FB numbers out, that leaves Twitter specifically with a range of 16 – 55 still, but the average age actually drops to 29. 

I find the results interesting, and not just because it suggests that Facebook, once the realm of the college-only crowd, is starting to look a bit old, while Twitter comes up strong from behind.

What this continues to tell us is that Shakespeare remains appealing to a wide array of people.  How often do you get a 16yr old engaged in conversation with a 55yr old?  Not too often!  But obviously something’s got them all coming to this common ground.  I love it.

I know not everybody’s on the east coast of the United States, but I am :).  How’d you spend your hurricane?

Personally I spent it on Twitter tossing out mostly King Lear jokes, with the occasional Tempest thrown in for good measure.  So many Lear comments, in fact, that at one point Sunday afternoon I took a bit of a nap on the couch and had this weird dream where I was some sort of guest speaker for this crowd that had gathered outside, after the hurricane.  I was directed to a podium with a microphone, and had no prepared comments, so I opened with “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!”  Of course even in my dream I can never remember the next line (I always want to say “spitfires and hurricanoes”), so that’s all I’ve got.

For the obligatory “Replace a word in the title with Irene” game on Twitter we had A Midsummer Night’s Irene, Much Ado About Irene, Irene’s Labour’s Lost, and Twelfth Hurricane, or, What Irene Will.

Then came a wide variety of stuff, some of which I think will make good t-shirt material 🙂 …

I Survived Hurricane Irene and all I got was a drunken butler, a jester,
and a fishy smelling mooncalf who tried to steal my laundry.

NC police report multiple complaints of an elderly gentleman claiming to
have caused the hurricane, to seek revenge on his enemies.

 During the storm, keep an eye out for a rambling naked fellow and his fool. He’s had a bad day, give him a cup of tea.

Oh, and lastly, for your entertainment, I found this interesting collection of three separate interpretations of the “storm scene” from Lear. It’s called “Choices”, and whoever made it has overlaid some text on each version – why did this guy swing his hands like that? why did this one choose to emphasize a certain word, or pause in a certain way?  It’s all questions, there’s no real analysis, but it’s still interesting.