Pardon my breaking from the Shakespeare thing for a bit, but I’m looking to talk to some high school students / teachers about my day job.  As I’ve mentioned my company offers a service for helping kids get into college (research, transcript management, resumes and profiles, all that sort of stuff).  US only right now.  Anyway, we developers have been tasked with doing some guerilla marketing to get more kids signed up and I thought “Hey, I have an audience that’s likely to have high school people in it.” So if you’re a high school student, or regularly surrounded by high school students, and you’d like to do me a favor, please drop me a line at dmorin@connectedu.net (my work address, you’ll note).  I’d love to ask you some questions.  Thanks!

http://blogs.enotes.com/shakespeare/2008-03/staging-shakespeare-the-cast/ I always thought it odd in this play that they do the whole Christopher Sly thing at the beginning (convincing a drunk that he’s actually a wealthy nobleman watching a play), but it never goes anywhere.   I refuse to call it “a play within a play” on those grounds. The above post suggests, and maybe somebody here has details, that there’s apparently more to that story?  It would make a great deal more sense if there was some sort of closure to that meta-story.

http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2397 I don’t think that this blog is particularly Shakespeare related, but I like the way the author is experimenting with the sonnet form.  A sonnet that starts out in iambic pentameter and drops off to mono-meter is cool.

http://pixeltheatre.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/shakespeare-in-sl-also-on-youtube/ I knew this was happening, and I wish I’d taken the time to watch it first hand.  Looks pretty neat.

The good folks at Harper Collins were kind enough to send me a few copies of The Book of Air And Shadows, by Michael Gruber (now available in paperback). This literary thriller revolves around “a new play by Shakespeare, in his own handwriting.” Sounds a bit like Interred With Their Bones, but I’m thinking that Gruber’s book actually came first. From what Amazon tells me, Mr. Gruber’s got quite a few books under his belt, this is far from his first work. Anyway, I’ve got 3 copies to giveaway, so here’s what you’ll need to do if you want a shot at one of them:

1. Link to this post someplace.
2. Comment on this post telling me where you put the link.
3. I’ll pick 3 winners on April 1. I’m not joking, that’s just the way it works out.

Once upon a time “link to this post” would have meant to post it in your own blog, but there’s new opportunities out there for links as well – delicious, stumble, digg, Facebook….be creative! Ideally I’d like the link someplace where I can see it to verify that it’s really there, but I’ll have to take your word for it if that can’t happen. (I don’t want to say “will ship inside U.S. only” if I can help it, I know I have regular readers outside my country. Maybe if someone international wins a copy we can work something out on the shipping?)UPDATE: April 1, 2008 – Contest Over. Thanks for playing!