http://www.slate.com/id/2193477 I was wondering if this would happen, for real, in my adult lifetime.  Ron Rosenbaum reports that the Royal Shakespeare Company has made the decision to drop the long poem A Lover’s Complaint from The Complete Works, and to add the relatively recent discovery, To the Queen. Now, granted, it’s not Macbeth or Cardenio.  But still, think about what this means – redefining what’s understood to be “Shakespearean”.  I’m not quite sure what I find more intriguing, pointing to one work formerly thought to be Shakespeare and saying “Nope, not Shakespeare”, or a formerly unknown work and saying “That is.”

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SijkhHsOtha6Ds-KuwtrH2- (Java plug-in required) This is the kind of thing, as a software geek, that I daydream about hacking on in my spare time.  Tag cloud (word frequency) analysis of the Sonnets.  Needs a little work, particularly in the visualization — I picked some words that only occur once (like “wires”) and the graphics blew up.  Fun, though, if you’re gentle with it.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=msbunburyist&p=r I’ve seen many projects where someone says “I’m going to read/perform all of the Sonnets!”  I link specifically to this one because a) she’s doing it in video, which is certainly harder but also offers more expressive opportunities, b) she’s not padding it down with any sort of “Hi everybody here we go” talk, it’s just sonnets, and c) she actually appears to be doing it – she’s through the first 40.  Most of the time someone attempts this they give up long before that.

Update:  I wrote to Madeline asking why she’d stopped at 40, and she said that her computer broke but she was back in business and posting more.

http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/mieko_belle/S1_01a.html A bit of Shakespeare / Harry Potter fan fiction.  Normally I don’t link this stuff, but this one is apparently plotted around Sonnet 17, my favorite.  I have not read the whole thing yet, but it says “Rated PG” at the top so I’m assuming there’s no graphic sex.

http://astrologyofatrainwreck.astrologydetective.com/2008/06/11/birthday-twins-june-11-ben-jonson-the-salieri-to-shakespeares-mozart/ An astrological breakdown of why Ben Jonson never achieved the heights of dear  Mr. Shakespeare. I was amused by the subject as well (which is not mentioned in the article) – Salieri to his Mozart?  As scenes from that Amadeus movie play in my head, I’m not sure that’s a terribly accurate analogy.