I don’t know what side of the US Political system you fall on, or for that matter if you’re in the US at all. Or, if you are, if you care. But I couldn’t let this one pass by.
Apparently Fox News is doing to Obama what Iago did to Othello.

Have fun with that.

Where do you think Shakespeare ranks among the greatest of the storytellers? We all agree that he’s got some skills at the poetry, the drama, the character building, the “getting his point across.” But how was his story? Many of his plots require some serious suspension of disbelief, no? Or ignoring out outright plot holes?

I’ve always been fascinated by the core of what “story” means. If you stripped away Shakespeare’s words and still told the story, would it still speak to the truth of what it means to be human like the original does? How much of the message is in the words, versus the action between the characters? Obviously there’s something there, as people have been “inspired” to run with Shakespeare for centuries, from fan fiction to video games. But if you lose the power the minute you lose the words, why would we keep doing it? Surely there’s something in the story itself that Shakespeare put together. Shakespeare borrowed his stories, and built on them. So did he perfect them? Or is that the pursuit we’re all still engaging in?
With that in mind let me introduce “The Reinvention Summit”, a virtual conference on the future of storytelling.

Reinvention Summit: 2-week Virtual Summit on Future of Storytelling, Nov 11-22, 2010.

We are gathering a new tribe of storytellers: change-makers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and creatives who see storytelling as critical to their work and mission. There’s a star-studded line-up of 25+ speakers with diverse backgrounds to lead teleseminars, interviews, and panel discussions that relate to the future of storytelling as our world goes through reinvention. All sessions are recorded for playback. The online summit includes lots of social networking, collaboration, and crowd-sourcing for those who feel inspired to play. Entry-level pricing starts at just $11.11. To learn more: visit www.reinventionsummit.com.

Disclosure : I was contacted about this directly, but I’m not receiving any particular compensation for it. They do have several “thank you” offers to help get the word out (detailed here) but as far as I can tell, access to those offers is not contingent on posting anything special.

Remember the movie The Producers, which was turned into a stage play, which was then turned into a movie?
Imagine playing that game with Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s legendary film adaptation of Macbeth. Because, you guessed it, somebody’s made a stage play out of it.
Scared? Intrigued? Disgusted?

…the 5th of November. You knew what was coming.
Today is Guy Fawkes’ Day. There’s clearly a connection to Shakespeare, and Macbeth. What’s your opinion? How much did Shakespeare know about the gunpowder plot?

Why doesn’t anybody donate 300yr old previously unknown Shakespeare books to my local library? That’s apparently what happened in Missouri, where the Friends of the Library looked in their donation baskets and found:

• an 8 volume collection of Shakespeare’s work, published by the infamous Lewis Theobald, in 1773
• a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry published by John Bell in 1774

First of all I think a clarification is in order, since keen observers may spot the fact that Theobald died in 1744. So my above paraphrase of the article is a bit awkward – these would have been books that Theobald had edited in his own lifetime, circa the 1720’s, that were then reprinted by someone else. At least, that’s how I understand it.

Theobald, by the way, is “infamous” for the whole Double Falshood / Cardenio issue. We’ve mentioned him many times in the past.
Here’s something that I hope proves as exciting as it sounds to me – *both* sets of books contain pictures of Mr. Shakespeare. And two different pictures at that! Theobald’s contains “a portrait of the artist as a young man” (bonus points to the article’s author for that literary reference), and Bell’s contains a picture of a middle-aged Shakespeare. I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them (they are both included in the linked article).

What do we think? This sounds pretty neat to me.