Monday, July 16, 2012

Monday July 16 2012

This has been a week of some ado about a few things. The most important is a kind of a birthday. A year ago at this time I was in the process of setting up the blog and a year ago yesterday, the blog's first follower, Hal, signed on. The blog hadn't really been made public yet though so the first birthday celebration will be held in the near future.
The next two Mondays there will be no ado about anything on the blog since Hal and I will be off on an excursion to Macbeth territory (I hope he and Lady M aren't home...). So this will be the last Monday report for July. Here it is:

From Gregory Doran's Shakespeare Almanac:
  • On July 9 and 10, 1575, Queen Elizabeth visited Kenilworth Castle, near Stratford. Shakespeare was eleven years old. Did he witness the festivities?
  • On July 11, 1564, the plague struck Stratford. Baby William was not yet three months old. His parents had lost two daughters to previous plague outbreaks. This one killed 200 hundred Stratfordians out of 1500. The world is so lucky that tiny Shakespeare survived!
Shakespeare sightings:
  • In the novel The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King, Sherlock Holmes's young apprentice Mary Russell learns her Shakespeare at Oxford and refers to him throughout the book.
  • The online film and music company Discshop had a full-page ad in Dagens Nyheter for the newly released DVD of “Anonym”, the film about Shakespeare supposedly not being written by Shakespeare. Having concluded that of course Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, I can report some glee over the fact that the film clearly hasn't been a box office smash having so quickly been released as a DVD, but I'm sad to report that not only Derek Jacobi but two more of my favorites actors David Thewliss and Vanessa Redgrave are in it. Are they too misled?
  • With the London Olympics looming large it's not surprising that Shakespeare is mentioned now and then. Yesterday the Curtain Theater, where Romeo and Juliet was probably first staged, was mentioned in Dagens Nyheter as something to see in East London.
Further, this week:
  • Finished reading with Hal: Much Ado about Nothing
  • Read with Hal: several analyses of same.
  • Started writing: text on same. I actually just finished the rough draft but it won't be polished and posted until next time.





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