Stratford Unplugged

As a Shakespeare geek, I find it cool that Shakespeare’s hometown is going wireless in a big way. Not just setting up wifi hotspots around time (so bloggers like yours truly wouldn’t have to wait until we get home to braindump everything in sight!), but you can actually get your hands on a dedicated PDA that will provide an interactive map of the area, pointing out all the good spots.

Highly neat! One of these days I have to get out there.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets…Solved?


Well here’s interesting news for a change. Author Hank Whittemore has issued a press release claiming to have the solution to the sonnets. By solution I assume that means “who they were written about.”

The solution of course comes in his new book, “The Monument : ‘Shake-Speare’s Sonnets’ by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford” which weighs in at 900 pages. What I’m trying to grasp from the press release is how the Earl of Oxford fits into the picture – does the book just start with the premise that Oxford was Shakespeare (as does “Shakespeare by Another Name”, which I just wrote about yesterday)?

More information available at ShakespearesMonument.com.

P.S. Wait til you find out who the Dark Lady is!

Illustrating Shakespeare

Here’s a cool link to how Shakespeare has been illustrated over the centuries (found via del.icio.us). Interesting concept that takes the whole notion of Shakespeare’s works in a very different direction. Does a particular artistic rendition represent a copy of what at one point was a live performance, like you might see in an encyclopedia these days? Or is the artist envisioning the play in his mind and depicting what he sees there?

Listen! Shakespeare By Another Name

If you’re not doing the whole podcasting thing yet (you should!) you may not have heard (ha! pun intended!) of the forthcoming Shakespeare by Another Name, by Mark Anderson. This book argues that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by the Earl of Oxford.

Normally I’d consider it no big deal, as I don’t usually follow any of the “who wrote the works of Shakespeare” theories. What I’m digging about it, though, and major credit to the author for thinking of this, is that he’s doing audio excerpts from the book as a sort of teaser for when it is actually published. So instead of publishing a book that I would never have seen or even given a second thought if I had, he’s gotten me to listen to the first 5 chapters.

How is it? He certainly makes an interesting case. He’s got loads of evidence that Shakespeare’s work pretty much parallels Oxford’s life almost identically, right down to Oxford (or somebody he knew, I forget…) crossing paths with two people from Denmark named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To tell you the truth it gets so obvious the way it’s presented that it makes you roll your eyes and say “Yeah, sure, if it’s so obvious, why has it been a mystery for 400 years?” When I heard the first chapter I immediately thought of that old conspiracy email about “Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln!”

I think that if you’re a collector of such things, this is going to be a good one. The amount of evidence really is staggering. The author’s command of the plays is also outstanding, which makes for the best part of his argument — he always backs it up with sources from the plays, which in turn expands my exposure to select bits of plays like Winter’s Tale that I might not otherwise have ever noticed.