Shakespeare the Man from Stratford

Shakespeare the Man from Stratford
(to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
Shakespeare, the man from Stratford,
Wanted very much to write a play.
So he packed himself off to London,
Where theatre occupied his days.
All of the other playwrights,
used to laugh and call him names (like Upstart!)
They never let poor Shakespeare
Participate in all their fame.
Then one foggy London eve
Ben Jonson came to say,
“Marlowe lost his last knife fight.
Can you pen a play tonight?”
Then all the playwrights loved him,
(Excepting maybe Robert Greene!).
“Shakespeare, the man from Stratford,
You should play before the Queen!”

Another Victim..err, I Mean, Follower

I mentioned recently that I’ve been taking steps to decorate my life with Shakespeare.  By that I mean, not just keeping all my fun stuff piled in a corner at home, but having stuff about me that will allow strangers to strike up a conversation.

I know I posted this on Twitter, but can’t remember if I updated you all with an image of what my computer looks like now:

(Yes, that is my daughter’s Barbie hanging out next to it.) Two people have already asked whether I could have made the Hamlet work so that he was contemplating the Apple, but I think it’s too big to make that effect work. Instead I positioned him to look like he’d just taken a chunk out of the Apple.  The real question is whether my ironic Lion King imagery comes through? 🙂

So this is the computer I carry around with me at the new office.  Today after a meeting, one of my coworkers who I have not really had a conversation with asked me if I was a fan of Shakespeare, which of course struck up the usual conversation.

Did I ever tell you my rule about asking me Shakespeare questions? I always tell new people, once you get me talking about Shakespeare, seriously, don’t feel bad about just walking away. Because I will not stop.

In the span of the next maybe 3 minutes we covered Commonwealth Shakespeare in the Park, Twelfth Night, Lear, how they handled the nude scene (he asked), how they handled the storm, The Tempest, why it is first in the folio but pretty much the last thing he wrote and how depending on which angle you take it tells you entirely different things about the play and the playwright (which, by the way, I might have to make a blog post about because I never really considered that before), Anne Hathaway (both the actress and Shakespeare’s wife), and Penn and Teller.

At this point the poor guy is sitting back down at his desk but I’m walking distance from him so I keep circling back to add something I just thought of.  After doing that two or three times I finally force myself to shut up because he probably doesn’t care about half the stuff I’m telling him at this point.

In other words it was awesome and I would do that a dozen times a day if people approached me :).

I Know What I’m Getting For Christmas, Part 2 [ Another Geeklet Story ]

It’s not that I snoop for my Christmas presents, my family just doesn’t appreciate how generally overly aware I am of my surroundings. If you say something, or you leave something laying around, chances are I’m going to notice it and connect some dots.

I like taking my kids through Newbury Comics. It’s a weird kind of, “Well yeah if I literally had money to burn, there’s a bunch of stuff I’d buy here” shop. I believe the word “kitschy” could apply to much of it.  The kind of stuff you decorate your desk with at work.

One of the popular things you see there now, and really in lots of stores, is those “Pop” figurines? They’re kind of like bobble heads, although I don’t think they bobble. And they’ve clearly been licensed to everyone under the sun. Why oh why doesn’t their marketing department understand public domain? Because every time I see them I look for a Shakespeare, and there simply isn’t one.


So when my girls mentioned needing to go to Newbury Comics to shop for something, I didn’t really connect the dots.  We found ourselves at a different mall that had a different, independent comic shop and one of my girls said, “We have to go in there!” but when I tried to follow she said, “Not you, Daddy! Mommy, come with us.”  Again, I have no idea at this point. I know that there is no Shakespeare stuff in that store, though I’ve told them in the past generic things like, “Oh I like all this kind of stuff” so I’m sure they’re running with that theme.

They leave the store with bags and command me not to look. My middle daughter then begins quizzing me on which Star Wars movie is my favorite, and how I feel about the Clone Wars.  When I tell her exactly how I feel about the prequels and she turns to my wife and says, “Mommy, oh no!” I figure out that I must be getting some sort of Star Wars prequel merchandise from her, and don’t think about it again.

Except for the fact that my wife hides my presents in the same general place that we hide the kids’ presents.  So that evening I stumble across…. a blank Pop figure. I didn’t even know they made such a thing. I have no idea for sure if this is supposed to be for me or not, but I’ve got a hunch. Are they going to try to make me a Shakespeare pop figure from scratch?

Yes, that is exactly what they’re doing. Being kids, not very sneaky kids at that, they left him half finished on the desk downstairs in my office (/ their playroom) which confirmed my suspicions. Right now he looks like something out of the Walking Dead, but whoever is making it really did nail the ruff/collar around his neck so it’s obvious who he is, if you’re looking for it.

 I can’t wait to see how the finished product turns out! I’ll be sure to post pictures.

I Should Have Expected This [ A Geeklet Story ]

Ok I’m totally blowing some family surprises here but I’m pretty sure my son doesn’t read my blog.

Recently my son, who is only 9, participated in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s “Shakescraft” competition where participants were asked to build a presentation of New Place in the videogame Minecraft. Well on any given day I can’t pry my son off of Minecraft, so this seemed like a no brainer. A contest? With educational content? That happens to be Shakespeare? Deal.

So he submits his entry, and we wait. The prize, by the way, is an iPad Air along with some Shakespeare merchandise from the store like a Shakespeare teddy bear. Of course, he spends the month hoping he’s going to win an iPad Air and trying to decide what he’ll do with it since he already has an iPad.

Meanwhile, being a dad I’m working the backup plan.  I contact the gift shop at the SBT and see that I can order one of the bears directly.  Hey, if he wins, great, but if he does not, I’ll ship him a bear and let him think that he at least got a participation prize.

We have to wait forever for the results, but right around Thanksgiving we find out that no, he did not win, so I put my plan into action and order a teddy bear to be sent directly to him.  As Christmas approaches and packages start showing up every day I tell my wife, “Be on the lookout for one addressed to the boy from England.” I explain the story, about how she has to be the one to find it because if I tell him he got something from England he’s going to see right through the story. Also, when he finally opens it she should make sure to grab any sort of receipt in the box that would indicate that his dad paid for it.

Meanwhile, and I did not plan this timing, Christmas shopping season has begun. We encourage our kids to pick out gifts of their own for their siblings, grandparents, and yes mom and dad as well. Traditionally this has been just going down to the local $5 store since they’d insist on spending their own money, but this year as they’ve gotten older we let them exercise more variety in where they got the gifts.  That also made it chaos, because instead of one big shopping run where everybody gets something (albeit something junky :)), this year was multiple trips and multiple times asking, “Ok, now, does everybody have a present for everybody?”

Going into this week, my son informs me that he does not have presents for his grandparents, or me. Well, the grandparents are easy, because every year we make mugs and mouse pads with the kids’ pictures on them. But me?

You see where this is going, right? I wasn’t sure of what was about to happen, but I had a pretty good idea.

I’m driving home from  work yesterday, and we’d planned to take the kids out for a final run to the mall for last minute shopping. I call my wife to update her on when I’ll be home, and she is in the car with the kids on speakerphone. “Daddy I got you a present!” my son calls out.

Yup. It makes sense, really, because he was never about “I hope I win *something*”, he was only about the iPad.  A random Shakespeare bear wasn’t going to put him over the moon. I don’t care, I’m his dad, if there was any chance at all that seeing a “consolation” prize was going to make him feel a little bit better for having made the effort, I was going to take it.  But combining that with him being in the “I don’t know what to get Daddy for Christmas” situation, the results were a foregone conclusion.

So now I have to play dumb.  “Huh?” I ask, pretending not to hear him on the speakerphone.

“I GOT YOUR PRESENT,” he yells again.

“How can you have gotten me a present we didn’t go shopping yet?” I play along.

You know that thing kids do when they have a long story to tell, so they pause every few words and make it a question like they’re constantly checking to see if you’re still with them? He tells me, “This package came? From England? And it said for participation? But I didn’t want it, so I’m giving it to you for Christmas!”

Well that’s just adorable, but my wife and I are both driving cars so I tell him I don’t understand what he’s saying and can it wait until we get home.  I like that my wife came through on the “Oh this must be a participation prize” thing, since clearly it did not say participation anywhere on it. I notice at one point in the conversation he said something about feeling guilty, and I’m honestly not sure whether he means feeling guilty that he does not want to prize, or that he would feel guilty keeping a Shakespeare bear for himself.  I think it’s probably the latter.

I get home, walk through the door where the kids are having dinner, and he explains again, “Ok, Daddy, listen. This package came today, from England, and it was for participation. It had a big PARTICIPATION sign with it.” The embellishment is amusing, because of course it didn’t say that.

“Wait wait wait,” I said, “Participation for what? What are we talking about? Oh wait is this from the Shakespeare Minecraft people? That’s cool that you got something, though, isn’t it? You don’t want to keep it for yourself?”

“I like that I got something, but you like Shakespeare more than me,” he says.

To which he oldest sister pipes up, “Ya think?”

And my middle darling offers, “Daddy *loves* Shakespeare.”

So I know what I’m getting for Christmas 🙂

Are We Really Going To Get Three Romeo and Juliet TV Shows?

Is it too much to hope that just one of them is any good?

I knew about Shonda Rhimes getting into the act with Still Star-Crossed, based on a young adult novel that picks up where Romeo and Juliet left off. The Prince has decided to unite the families by force, and orders Benvolio to marry Rosaline.

ABC is putting a Muslim spin on their version with Indivisible, where a New Yorker develops a friendship with her (his?) Muslim neighbor, and then all proverbial hell breaks loose when their kids fall in love. I wonder if this one is going to have some sort of ancient grudge? If the parents are friends, does that fundamentally change the original story?

Lastly we have Fox’s Latino version, set against a music backdrop in Los Angeles.  The rumors say it’s hoping to jump on the Empire bandwagon, but from the description is sounds an awful lot like the 1996 Romeo+Juliet Luhrman / DiCaprio version.

I have no idea if all or any of these will see the light of day. At least they’re all backed by one of the major networks. I’m pretty sure that the CW tried some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing (a science fiction thing, maybe?) that I never even saw. I have no idea if it ever even came out.

What do you think, do we want a series based on Shakespeare?  I suppose we should give credit to Sons of Anarchy here, which was always understood to be a version of Hamlet. Never watched it, but I hear it was quite good.