Ok, here’s a game I thought of while daydreaming about my iPad idea.

Take a scene from Shakespeare, and then seamlessly integrate some modern bit of technology.

Example?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom has been given a donkey’s head, and his frightened coworkers have scattered, leaving him onstage alone.

BOTTOM

Why do they run away? This is knavery of them to make me afeard.

His cellphone beeps the familar triple-tone, signifying a text message. He takes the phone out of his pocket.

BOTTOM

(reading)

“O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee? Snout.” What do you see? You see an asshead of your own, do you?

Another triple-tone, another message.

(reading)

“Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated! Quince.” I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of me …

Get the idea? Instead of running back on stage to deliver one line and then exit, they keep their distance and text him. It is not “Shakespeare via text message” nor is it “rewrite Shakespeare in text-speak”. It’s just a way of saying, “How might this scene play out differently if everybody had had a cell phone?”

Constraints :

1. “Integrate” implies changing some action or dialogue in some way to support the introduction of the technology. You can’t just have Macduff enter checking his voice mail and then put his phone away, unless he delivers a line or otherwise moves the scene along in some way associated with that action.
2. You can alter or reassign text to support your context (such as by giving those lines to Bottom, above).
3. Devices can provide feedback that might be necessary for staging, such as a GPS transmitter speaking its directions instead of requiring the character to read them.
4. You cannot create dialogue of your own. So no examples of King Duncan reading Lady Macbeth’s Facebook page. The idea isn’t to create a new story, the idea is to see how technology can be used to present the story Shakespeare already gave us.

Let’s see how creative you can get.

I was asked today by my 4yr old son, “Who is the smartest person in Shakespeare?”
I said “Good question, I’ll have to check.”
Here’s me checking. Who’s got an idea? I’m trying to figure out which characters I would think of where smart is a defining characteristic. Does that go hand in hand with scheming, and must the answer be a villain? Or is it potentially a strategic thing, and the answer is political/military/historical?

Roland Emmerich, the Orson Welles of the disaster movie genre (or is he the Michael Bey?), has a new Oxfordian movie coming out, I’m sure we all know that by now. What I did not know how seriously he apparently takes himself. You see, he “expects fury” from us Stratfordians, who are going to turn up in droves to picket his house:

He tells Empire magazine, “I have serious doubts Shakespeare wrote his plays… I’m expecting to have people protesting outside my house. We knew there’d be so many attacks on the film, so we decided to make the film as authentic as possible.”

Blink a few times, rub your eyes, and read that last sentence again. He’s planning to make his movie as authentic as possible.
If that statement wasn’t custom-made to draw the ire of Shakespeareans everywhere, I’ll eat my hat. This press release courtesy of “We Market By Trolling Agency, Inc.”