http://www.shakespearetavern.com/opp.htm Thanks to regular reader/commenter Ann for the link on “original practice”, where Shakespeare performance is done as close as possible to how Shakespeare himself would have done it. 

In the Elizabethan Playhouse, as I imagine it, the world of the play and the world of performance are one and the same. Thus we do not craft a distinct world of performance for each and every play we do. We use the Elizabethan playhouse. In the Playhouse, we have the Heavens, we have the Hell, we have every thing known to man and we have all of humanity as well. We have all that has come before and all that is yet to come. The playwright has free and easy access to all creation with the stroke of the pen. Thus the playhouse was the central metaphor for life, the universe, and everything. Shakespeare called his playhouse “The Globe”.

This reminds me of my own limited theatre experience back in college, where I wrote for the annual festival of plays (and saw 4 of my works produced).  They did strictly bare stage, where the only props you got were black cubes.  If you sat on one it was a chair, if you stacked them it was a wall.  Anything else, you were bringing it onstage and taking it off yourself. Now, that’s probably a gross over simplification of one small part of what the author’s talking about, so I’ll shut up.  I mention it only because I credit that experience with making me more a playwright and a man of words, than some who cares what color the mountains are.  I’ve always been happy to write “Scene: Outside” and then move on to whatever the characters need to be talking about.

It always seems to sneak up on me, but in just over a week we’ll celebrate Mr. Shakespeare’s 445th birthday.  What are you doing? Alas, I’m almost certainly doing….nothing.  It’s a Thursday, and I’ve got a big boss coming into town for the week so it’s highly unlikely that I could take a vacation day :), and the following weekend (May 2) we are already celebrating both my son’s and my own birthday.  So poor April 23 is going to come and go relatively uncelebrated.  Perhaps I’ll wear a party hat and toot a horn at my desk. Business idea : Shakespeare’s Birthday greeting cards for Shakespeare geeks to send each other.  The rest of the world may not care, but we do.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/7998879.stm Apparently he’s getting his day in court.  Man, the guy looks like an absolute flake.  I’d like to get a closeup of those buttons/stickers on his jacket. Here’s the original story on the theft, and capture.  Seems the eccentric Mr. Scott just walked into the Folger one day and asked them to verify/date “his” Folio.  He apparently did not realize that every Folio in existence has been micro-catalogued for every last smudge and tear on each page, so while they said “You just sit there for *one* sec, ‘k?” it took them no time at all to identify “his” Folio as the one stolen from Durham University. Where’d he get it?  Why, a friend in Cuba, of course. You know, it just dawns on me that Obama just recently eased restrictions on travel to Cuba.  Wouldn’t it be funny to tell the guy “Get your coat, we’re going to meet your friend.”  I’d like to see how the story changes! I know I’ve got some Folger folks that read the blog, I wonder if there’s anybody that was directly connected to the story that can share any good gossip?  I would love to talk to the person who he handed the book to!

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6060430.ece I feel obliged to click on these stories, just in case one of them turns up something I didn’t, in fact, already know. This one has nothing new under the sun – shotgun wedding, Venus and Adonis, 1700 new words coined, etc etc etc. While it mentions the second-best bed, it gives no reason to believe that it was “possibly the couple’s marriage bed.” The article itself is pretty badly written.  For instance:

8. At least two of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio, have disappeared entirely without trace. Love’s Labour’s Won is a follow-up to his early romantic comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Cardenio is thought to have been a version of Don Quixote.

If they disappeared without a trace, we wouldn’t know that they existed.  That’s also the first time I’ve seen somebody make the leap that because Cardenio was a character *in* Don Quixote, that Shakespeare’s play of the same name must therefore be his version of the same story. Or…

He was just 18 when he got Anne Hathaway pregnant with their first child, Susannah (she was 26),

Wait, so who was 26, Susannah?   And…

His only son, Hamnet (the name was relatively common), died at the age of 11, but his sister Judith lived to be 77.

Whose sister, Hamnet’s or Shakespeare’s? Instead of telling us that Hamnet was a common name I think I would have preferred to hear about the neighbors, Hamnet and Judith, for whom the twins were named. Normally I wouldn’t nitpick – my grammar’s hardly stellar – but these are apparently excerpts from a book called the Rough Guide to Shakespeare.  I hope the book is better edited than the article.

There are many “questions” about Shakespeare’s life and work.  There’s of course the big Authorship question, but also a whole bunch about his married life, that other woman, whether he was even heterosexual, who was Mr. W.H.…and then there’s questions within the work itself:  was Hamlet mad?  Did Gertrude know?  Sullied or solid? 🙂 Some questions annoy people, and we take the position that it’s not really a question at all.  Others, though, tend to merit lively discussion. Which are your favorite questions?  You’re at a party and you hear people discussing Shakespeare – which topic do you studiously avoid, and which do you jump in with an “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing…” As is probably obvious to my regular readers, I’m always interested in questions about the work more than the man.  While it’s interesting to me (mostly as a married man) whether Shakespeare was happily married or shotgunned into it, I just don’t think we’ll ever know.  For the record, I realize that “questions about the work” could be considered simply “preference of interpretation” and thus there is no right answer.  What I’m talking about is Shakespeare’s original intent.  If we went back in time 400 years and watched these plays performed (assuming we could understand a bloody word of it!) would we see someone playing Hamlet as mad, or just putting on an antic disposition?