(This particular link made the rounds on Twitter already, but it’s definitely worth sharing far and wide.)

I’m not particularly enamored with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s new “Blogging Shakespeare” site which, five-plus years late to the party, seems to be positioning itself as the only Shakespeare blog in town.  Since it’s a new project (just a month or two old) perhaps they’ll put up a Blogroll or some other link section and give a little acknowledgement to the now wide variety of other blogs that have been “embracing Shakespeare conversation in a digital age” for quite some time now. If their desire is truly to provoke conversation and foster community they might do well to start by engaging in some of the conversation already taking place in the already large community.  I’ll be the first to admit that I need to link more blogs myself. I link a bunch, primarily for those authors who are regular contributors to the site, but I’m well aware that there are many I’m missing.

However, having said that I can’t help but be jealous that they’ve got Professor Stanley Wells blogging for them, and he writes gold like this about the new movie Anonymous, and the authorship question in general. We can all sit here behind our blog editors and take our pot shots from a distance, calling the anti-Stratfordians “loony” and getting all patronizing and eye-rolly … but Professor Wells is the guy who sits in the room with them and gets interrogated for hours on end.  Literally. I don’t know that any of us could stand up to that for very long, at least without it breaking down into name calling and chairs flying.

Two specific points come out of this post that make me feel less anxious about the new movie.  First, as Wells points out, this is not being positioned as a documentary, it’s going to be something more like Shakespeare in Love.  I think very few of us had to explain to random movie-goers that Romeo and Juliet didn’t really go down like that.  Second, and this from the comments, is that the actual theory being hyped – the one where Oxford is both Queen Elizabeth’s son and lover (ewww), might well end up looking so crazy that it works against the Oxfordians.  So, that’s never a bad thing either.

Authorship is just one of those nagging conspiracies that I don’t think will ever go away. You’ll still find people who want to engage with you about who shot Kennedy, who was the mastermind behind 9/11, what Obama’s real birth certificate says … We as Shakespeare geeks can choose to ignore it, or we can dive into the conversation and try to give as good as we get in what will soon become a series of very personal attacks.  It’s nice to take a moment, though, and remember that there are real people who do this for a living (although, as Wells says, they didn’t pay him for his interrogation while he sat on his “distinctly uncomfortable bench” 🙂 ).  Their job is harder, and they deserve some credit and respect for leading the charge into battle.

This doesn’t really merit its own blog post but Twitter and Facebook are just a little too small to tell the story properly. I’m currently reading Stanley Wells’ book about love and sex in Shakespeare’s work (I will post a full review when I’m done).  I’m actually reading the Kindle version, and I’m reading it on my iPhone.  So it’s a little painful, but I knowingly did it that way, because I knew I’d carry around my iPhone into more situations than I’d carry a traditional book. Anyway, there’s a spot where the sentence reads like this:  Even so it may be revealing. People masturbate, woo, marry, copulate and give birth. Fine.  But in my first reading of this sentence on my tiny screen, what I got was this: so it may be revealing. People masturbate, woo, My first instinct was to read “woo” exactly as we most typically use it these days, like an interjection of excitement, like Woohoo!  Only without the exclamation point it’s even better, like Professor Wells is sarcastically letting us know early in the book that he’ll be speaking of grown up topics and we should get over it.  People masturbate. Woo. Only after turning the page did I see the marry, copulate and give birth bit, causing me to go back and reparse the entire sentence properly, thus realizing exactly how wrong I was. <shrug> Maybe you had to be there.  But I couldn’t not share that story.

Really?  How’d I miss this interview between Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles when it came around back in April? Great stuff, including discussion about the budget and schedule of Welles’ production, his comparisons to Olivier and Polanski films of the time, and what was up with the Scottish accents. Very long article with great insight into how Welles approached Shakespeare, including excerpts from his book on the subject.  Wonderful stuff.

I don’t know whether Calvin and Hobbes (who coined my chosen subject line) were in the brain of Erin McKean when she penned this masterful yet subtle slam on a certain recent Shakespeare-wanna-be in the news about how the English language evolves the right way.  (In truth, the timing may purely be coincidental, as Mrs. Palin is not mentioned at all in the article.  But I like to think it was deliberate…) The subject? Verbing.  That is, the use of nouns as verbs.  English allows for it, whether you like it or not.  I have a blog, I blog things.  I also have a table, and I can table things.  I look around my office and spy a wall, and technically I could say that I was going to wall my calendar, although what that means might be ambiguous – am I going to hang it up? If I walled my buddha statue that might mean I threw it at the wall.  Or I suppose I could lure my enemy down into my wine cellar with the promise of Amontillado and then wall him up down there, too. Grammatically, all valid sentences. Verbing is also at the center of an old grammatical puzzler:  “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”.  I think I got the right number of Buffalo in there.  Because the word happens to work as a noun (the animal), an adjective (the place from which they come), and a verb, you get such a valid sentence. It’s often hated, no doubt.  We all google things and xerox them without too much thought, but sit in a meeting with too many MBA project managers talking about statusing each other or incentivizing their customer base and you may want to beat them with a dictionary. Oh, and one more thing, and I think that this is how and when you correctly drop Shakespeare’s name:

Philip Davis, a professor at the School of English at the University of Liverpool, devised a study in 2006 that tested just what happens when people read sentences with verbed nouns in them–and not just any verbed nouns, nouns verbed by Shakespeare. (Shakespeare was an inveterate noun-verber; he verbed ghost, in ”Julius Caesar, I Who at Phillipi the good Brutus ghosted”; dog, in ”Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels”; and even uncle, in ”Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.”)