Flashback : May, 2008

Ok, here’s a game for anybody that’s got nothing better to do than hang out on Shakespeare Geek over New Year’s :). I was looking over my year’s posts and saw that I made 67 posts in August of this year. Not bad, averaging over 2/day. But then I looked farther back and saw that in May 2008 for some unknown reason I made an insane *72* posts.
Here they all are, on one browsable page.
Many of you may not have even been around back then, so feel free to jump in Ye Olde Time Machine and see what we were talking about two and a half years ago. I like to think the quality of the post topics has gotten better, the site’s gone from entirely a “Hey look I found a Shakespeare reference on the Internet!” site to deep and serious discussion about some pretty heavy “What is the essence of what Shakespeare means to us?” topics. I haven’t given up on the former, though i have to say that the latter I think is more interesting to me.
Enjoy, and Happy New Year everybody!

Let’s Talk Twelfth Night

Since we’re in that after-Christmas lull, let’s talk about Twelfth Night. I have a book on Twelfth Night queued up for review, I’ll see if I can get that posted tonight.
Until then, the floor is open. Do Twelfth Night productions ever have anything to do with Christmas? If not, do we have any idea where the name comes from?
What are your thoughts on this one compared to, say, the other popular cross-dressing comedy As You Like It? Is this one light and fluffy, or dark and twisty?

Shakespeare as The Bible

My freshmen roommate in college once told me that if you’re having a bad day, or something’s troubling you, you could flip open the Bible to a random page, and you’d find your answer.
Over the last couple days we’ve been hotly debating the underlying message in Shakespeare’s works – did he write himself into the plays, or are we just reading ourselves into it? It’s certainly true that many people over the years have taken comfort in the wisdom and philosophy they find in the words of Shakespeare, regardless of how and why they got onto the page in the first place.
See where I’m going with this?
We may *want* Shakespeare’s works to be some sort of recipe for what it means to be human, his gift to the infinite, a tome where you can, literally, open up to any random page and find the answers to all of your troubles. The Bible, on the other hand, is supposed to be exactly that. It was written, the story goes, by a group of people who *were* being guided by an overseeing force, expressly for the purpose of being just such a book.
So, then, what’s the difference?
Each book tells stories of people in situations similar to our own (albeit dated, usually, and often with language we no longer understand and must have translated). We watch as these people react, and then we get together and discuss why they reacted in that way, and whether we would do the same thing.   
So then how come one book is fiction and we assume that any universal message we get out of it must only be our own projection of ourselves into what we want the message to be, while the other is assumed to be true and any messages we find in it were put there for us to find in the first place?
Imagine if it was the other way around.

Welcome Back!

Ok, I’m back. Hope everybody had a nice weekend, whether that meant spending time in church or with Chinese food.
Got a Kindle, so I look forward to reviewing some Kindle Shakespeare versions (already downloaded one that promised “254 plays poems and sonnets” and wanted to see what that math was all about ;)). Maybe I’ll read more for pleasure now. I’ve always wanted to go back and read that Edgar Sawtelle one.
Got no “Shakespeare things”, which was a little surprising. Can’t remember if I blogged about this but at one point my 6yr old was reading my wife’s computer over her shoulder, said “Hamlet!” and my wife said “Shhhhh!” so I thought maybe there was something in the works. I mentioned this to my wife after the fact, and she claimed to have no idea was talking about. So maybe she was contemplating something and changed her mind, who knows.
No Shakespeare content in this post, just saying Hi (I’ve got a real doozy coming up in the next one!). Feel free to comment at will if you’re in the mood. Anybody get any good Shakespeare loot?

Merry Christmas, Everybody

Hi Everyone,
Don’t expect much traffic over the next couple of days, I’ll be pretty tied up with family stuff at least for the rest of the weekend. Feel free to continue all the discussions, I get emails for all of those are read them all :). I’ve turned off that old “conversations go into moderated mode after N days” thing so you shouldn’t need me to approve comments.
Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours!
Duane