Update Feb 18, 2010 – Sorry to the sudden surge of traffic hitting this page, but it looks like the “Meet Bill” link has died. No further information available. Oh, well. Stay, hang out, look around. Questions we can answer?
[Ok, there’s a story that goes along with this that I’ll share shortly…]Meet Bill is a bit different from the typical Shakespeare biography. Example?When Will was eighteen he fell in love with Anne Hathaway. After the requisite amount of headbanging they were married.Oh. I’m not sure whether to debate the bit about how much he really loved his wife (who was, what, ten years his senior?) or to laugh over the “requisite headbanging” that came before the marriage (she was knocked up when he married her, right?).The Bard’s group was bad. They kicked ass so bad his competitors used to send out speed writers, shorthand artists and bribe other actors in his plays to try to make their own bootlegged copies of his plays. The unauthorized “boots” were known as “The Bad Quartos.” (Weird but true.) I like the style. It obviously addresses an audience not usually coming to look for Shakespeare biographies.Ok, you want to hear the story too? This is one of those stories that I like to call “The universe is small” stories. This weekend I was playing around at GoDaddy looking to see just how many variations of Shakespeare domains were out there, how many were being cybersquatted, and so on. One of the first I stumbled across was the fact that romeoandjuliet.com was actually registered 10 years ago, for the Luhrman movie. I’d never known that. Never been to that site. Saw it for the first time this weekend. My browsing led me to the Wikipedia page for the movie (not the play), where I found some errors and corrected them.Now go look and see where this Meet Bill site is hosted? romeoandjuliet.com. But I found it strictly in my morning’s headlines, I did not ever actually browse through that site. Weird.
