About a year ago I blogged excitedly about a virtual Shakespeare world by Edward Castronova.  Who am I kidding, I immediately wrote to them and begged to be a beta tester.  I couldn’t get in :(. I see an update on the blog, but alas it’s not great news:  they’re out of funding.  So he has no idea when there will be any new milestones to report.  Which means I shouldn’t hold my breath for a public beta?    Oh well.  I would love to see this project reach completion.  Even though he manages expectations by saying to “expect small Dungeons and Dragons world with a Shakespeare layer” rather than “World of Warcraft with Hamlet”, I say, “Who cares, I’ll take it!”  If it’s an academic project and he’s out of funding, I wonder if he has any open source options?  He could put key portions up in Creative Commons license, I’m sure that there’s more than one Shakespeare geek out there that would love to dig in and help generate some content.  

http://www.oomsa.com/node/412 I was going to roll right past this picture of a plain old “Everytime you see a 2B you’re obligated to mention Or Not 2B” joke, until I thought about the paradox.  It’s graffiti.  Deliberately vandalizing the property of someone else.  With a quote from Shakespeare.  I’m curious about the sort of brain that is both capable of holding knowledge about Shakespeare and somehow lacking the bit that says “Don’t do that.”  I suppose the answer is that the whole to be or not to be thing is just so darned generic at this point that you don’t need a brain in your head to recognize it as Shakespeare.  Whoever wrote it probably didn’t even know what he was quoting, just heard it someplace.

At my other site, Diego found an old post of mine entitled, Iambic Pentameter – What Is It?  He asked a good question.  He’s wondering if anybody has a good source on tape that teaches you what iambic pentameter sounds like.  I figure somebody here might know.  Anybody?  I don’t know of specific lessons, per se, but I have to assume that somebody out there has an audio sample of how iambic pentameter is supposed to be spoken.

While doing the grocery shopping today I saw a man with an interesting tattoo.  It was text that scrolled its way around his forearm.  As I passed him I caught “To dream” out of the corner of my eye and thought, “No, wait….” and looked again.  Sure enough, what it said was “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream” and I’m not sure how much more — there was more text but I couldn’t read it all.  “Is that Hamlet tattooed on your arm?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “Nice,” I told him.  “I spotted that right away.” “Good deal,” said he.  Walking away, he seemed pleased that somebody had noticed it. Not too talkative, we guys. 

No, not of Shakespeare himself, but Cleveland University Library has made available some 400+ photographs of Shakespearean performances dating back to 1870.   Make sure to click on the good ones to get the full caption, as well as details on the performance, and information about the collection from which it came.