Shakespeare Reading Challenge 2011 : Sign Up Now!

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

Reader Elena let me know that she’s running her Shakespeare Reading Challenge again for the coming year and asked me to get the word out to Shakespeare Geeks. How many of the plays you think you can read during the year? Challenge Extended!

First off, the Levels:

1. Puck: Read 4 plays over the year, 1 of which may be replaced by a performance

2. Desdemona: Read 6 plays, 2 of which may be replaced by a performance

3. Henry V: Read 12 plays, 3 of which may be replaced by a performance

Now, the Rules:

1. All plays must be read between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011. Anything begun before that cannot be included.

2. Audio versions are also acceptable but all plays must be unabridged.

3. You don’t need to list your plays ahead of time but you may, if you’d like.

4. Review pages for each month will be created but are optional.

On your mark ….. get set…….

Beta Geeks Needed

~ duane ~ 1 Comment
As I may have mentioned, I’ve been in the mood lately to take this site to another level.  I know that many of the regulars here have been very supportive and helped make Shakespeare Geek what it has become. Now I need your help.
I’m looking for a core group of fans of the site who’d be willing to join my contact list ( by email and ideally IM and Skype as well ) and listen to me talk about ideas from time to time. This is not a mass-marketing list and I don’t want hundreds of people on it. This is a personal invitation for the handful or so of dedicated site followers who want to help shape what it becomes.

Here’s what I’m asking:
  • Your email address, obviously. Most of what I send will be hand written and not mass-blasted, so you have very little to worry about in the spam department. I can’t promise never to automate, depending on how successful this project is, but I’d hope by now that you trust me enough to know that selling email addresses wouldn’t be one of my business ideas.
  • Ideally your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) name, if you have one and want to share it. Sometime conversation works better in real time than over email.
  • Speaking of realtime communication, you could also share your Skype contact info if you like to work that way. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to any Shakespeare Geek followers, that’d be fun. Though I never call anybody unsolicited that way, any use of Skype would be strictly after an email or AIM “Hey should we move this to Skype?” dialogue. One excellent advantage to Skype is that you can easily do conference calling, so there’s potential for several geeks to get in on a single conversation. Hard to do that with AIM or Email.
  • I only want a small, manageable list – so I will cap this request off at 10 people. If you want in, act fast.
  • I will contact you for the purposes of conversation. This is not a mailing list where you can lurk – if I write you and you don’t write me back, I’ll stop writing you.

What you get:

  • Early access to any new ideas in development, as they become available. This could include preview copies of books, credentials to web sites…who knows
  • Discussion about the business of putting more Shakespeare out in the universe. Note that this is not a group to discuss Shakespeare – that’s what the blog is for. This is to talk very specifically about the “Shakespeare industry”, for lack of a better term – products and services that could revolutionize how we teach it, how we learn it, and how people appreciate and understand it.

Still interested? Excellent. Send me an email with the information above, as well as a brief bio/intro if you think I’d don’t already know you (i.e. are you a parent, a student? Are you in the Shakespeare profession already? That sort of thing.) You may note that I’m not including a link here, and that is on purpose. Not only do I already have enough spam, but I figure you all know my name – duane – and you know what website you’re on, shakespearegeek.com. You need to be able to exhibit at least a little effort :), so go write me an email.

Caesar and Brutus

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

“Why is the play called Julius Caesar if he dies half way through? Isn’t it really about Brutus?”
That’s a common enough question for a high school English exam. Future students who are going to go googling for an answer to that one will hopefully stumbled across David (“Master of Verona”) Blixt’s post on the subject in which he combines his not inconsiderable Shakespeare experience with his recent research in Roman history to answer this and many more questions. It’s certainly true now that most people have trouble separating what really happened to Caesar, and who he was as a person, from what Shakespeare had to say about him.
In fact, David’s post is an announcement of the play he’s just written, which takes place between Caesar and Brutus the night before the Ides of March. “The great flaw, to me,” writes Blixt, “has always been the lack of interaction betwen Caesar and Brutus. For men with such a tangled personal and political history, the play is remarkably slient regarding their past.”
Sounds like a great idea to me, and I wish him much success with the project!

A Gift for Shakespeare Geek Readers : Words, Words, Words

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

I love it when my kids play Shakespeare puzzles. So much so that, as a programmer, I’m often on the hunt for puzzle generator programs so that I can fill in my own subject matter.

Well, I found a word search generator recently, and while I get it to the point where I need it for my kids, I thought I’d share it with you all. Of course, you get the hard version. Ready?

O V R U K U E A F D C D N O L V D A T T
R R O D E C C L E O P A T R A U E I X L
T O D U N C A N R R R H T C A S S I O V
L G E R T R U D E M E T R I U S D E H K
C R R M T A E C O L T O I Y F T E A M E
O E I V O L I C L E S S P N D O M C A T
C X G L I R U O U A E P I H B L O T C R
V M O A T L E A L O C U E U E R N L D O
L A N A U I R I C R U C B T N L A O U I
E C E L C I N E I L O K A R E U I S F Y
H B R O R D X D D A L D N K D O T A F I
S E I I E T S G R N G L Q I I O S F T I
C T L V M R H A U D A O U L C I A I L C
D H U E A O E R N O A S O J K T B A A Y
A N T O N Y R U Y S I V Y U S A E I B S
N M A I O A M F I S N F Z L U R S V Y U
B B S O R D I L L E A R A I T O F I T A
T R U R E G A N B H T F I E U H R L I T
O S S L B I C A S S I U S T R A A O R L
S E R S O A D D R T T O L I B C D R F U

So, here’s the catch – I’m not telling you the words I’ve hidden in it. What I will tell you is this:

  • It’s all character names.
  • There’s 50 of them. All one word each, I haven’t gotten tricky with stuff like “Richard III” or things like that. Kings and other titled people, if I’ve included any (hint hint), would be represented by their single identifiable name. So for instance “Duke of Cornwall” would show up as Cornwall. If he’s in there. Which he’s not.
  • Not all the plays are represented, and the plays that are represented are not all represented evenly – some have half a dozen or more entries, some have just one or two.
  • Since I made the list off the top of my head, long time readers get a bonus in knowing which plays I’m most familiar with and more likely to go to for content 🙂

This is not a contest, there is no prize. What I will do, however, is announce the name of the winner in a future blog post, if people want to play it like that. So you can proudly declare yourself a geek on a number of levels, and show all your friends. Whoever sends me back the list of 50 names first will be declared the winner. I’m not going to require you send me a scanned copy of the puzzle where you found all the names, I’ll assume that if you get the list right you must have found them all.

Have fun!