Author: duane

Did … Did I Never Post My Othello Costume?

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So I’m not dressing up for Halloween this year, and thought I’d be lazy and do a “Best Of” Halloween post instead.  But then I searched I realized … did I never post my Othello costume?  I know it was on Facebook, but it looks like I never put up here on the blog!

Fall, 2016. I was hired at my new job in December 2015, so this is my first Halloween.  They do a big company-wide party here, with prizes and everything, and I am definitely going through a phase of life where I’m wearing my Shakespeare devotion on my sleeve.

So I decide to go as Othello.

“Oh no,” you think, “You didn’t put on blackface like Anthony Hopkins, did you?”  Well I still work here, that ought to give you a clue.

Nope, what I did was go to as both Othello the play, and Othello the board game.

Step one, I got one of those white painter’s jumpsuits to make a blank canvas of myself.  Then I started transcribing.

You may not be able to make that out, but it’s the entirety of Othello Act I, Scene i.  I may have had delusions of doing more, but that took me forever (and lots more space than I thought) so I stuck with just making the point.

But then I figured maybe people wouldn’t recognize the play. After all, Othello doesn’t show up in I.i.  So I doubled as the board game (sometimes called “Reversi”):

Why am I carrying a stuffed animal? I’ll give you a hint, he’s got green eyes.  He’s a green eyed monster.

Then I figured that there’s still a strong likelihood nobody’s going to get this, so I made it obvious on the back:

If you can get past the glare, that is. 🙂

How’d it go?  I can’t say most people got it.  Couple of the older people at work were all, “Oh, you’re that game!”  Turns out Milton Bradley let the trademark lapse on Othello back in the 1980s and half these people have no idea what that game is. 🙂

Bonus!  While we were in the mood and since I was rifling through my daughter’s stuffed animals, we were presented with this opportunity:

Yes, that’s what you think it is.

I made the beast with two backpacks.

On that note…Happy Halloween everybody!

 

Give Me An S! No, Seriously.

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The funniest thing happens to all my keyboards. Check it out.

This is on a relatively new MacBook. If you can’t see it, my A S and E keys are basically wearing off.  Just those.  Here’s the weird thing, though:

That’s two different keyboards!  Same problem.  Not so much the E on that one, but it’s clear on the S and starting on the A.  I’ve had it happen on about 4 different computers, if you can imagine.  And it’s not purely a MacBook problem, as it’s happening on my USB keyboard as well (I don’t have a picture of that one). I actually even had one keyboard replaced because of it.

Now, you might say “Those are the most common letters in the English language, it makes sense.”  But there’s two reasons why that’s not the problem.

First, the most common letters in English are, depending on where you look, E A T or E A R.  S is much farther down the list.

Second, if this was indeed the problem, then wouldn’t all people experience the same problem?  I’ve yet to see another case of it. In fact everybody that sees my keyboard says, “I’ve never seen that before.”

Here’s my theory.  What word do I type more often (much, much more often) than the average person?  You got it.  And hey, check this out:

S h A k E S p E A r E

All those letters appear two or more times in my favorite word. Coincidence? I think not! I am literally writing about Shakespeare so much that I am wearing out keyboards.

 

 

 

Shakespeare Hated Women Because They Gave Him Syphilis

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Or so Sir Anthony Sher and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate would suggest, according to this article.

The logic seems to go like this:

There’s a really nasty anti-female diatribe in King Lear.

Perhaps it’s autobiographical? Perhaps Shakespeare had something against women?

Hey you know, in the sonnets he mentions mercury baths, and that’s where people went when you had syphilis.

Yeah, yeah!  And another thing, he wasn’t seen around the king very much, and there was a law that if you had syphilis you couldn’t be anywhere near the king!

They then play connect the dots and suggest that if he had syphilis, he got it from a woman, and therefore had some degree of resentment there.

I think my favorite part of the article (and please take that with a heavy, sarcastic eye roll) is where they mention “Oh yeah, and then there’s that thing where Shakespeare might be gay. Which doesn’t mean that he was anti-women, but, you know, I’m just sayin’.”

So confused.  If you give any credit to the theory that he was gay, then doesn’t that completely destroy everything else you’ve said in the article?  “Shakespeare said misogynistic stuff so maybe he hated women because a woman gave him a venereal disease. Or maybe he was gay, which wouldn’t have anything to do with why he hated women.”  THEN IF YOU THINK HE’S GAY WHY DID HE HATE WOMEN? AND IF YOU DON’T THINK HE’S GAY WHY DID YOU BRING IT UP?

Anybody else pulling their hair out on this one?  Careful though, they say that losing your hair was also a sign of syphilis.

 

Shakespeare Uncovered Returns This Friday

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Who’s excited for the return of Shakespeare Uncovered?

WNET’s Shakespeare Uncovered returns to PBS for its third and final season on Friday, October 12!

The series, which covers the fascinating history behind Shakespeare’s greatest plays, will feature six installments hosted by celebrated names such as Helen Hunt, F. Murray Abraham, Romola Garai, Brian Cox, Simon Russell Beale, and Sir Antony Sher.

Each episode will tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare’s famous works and will investigate “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Measure for Measure,” “Julius Caesar,” “The Winter’s Tale,” and “Richard III.” 

The show will air Fridays, October 12-26 on PBS (check local listings) and stream the following day at pbs.org/shakespeareuncovered and on PBS apps.

No, The Other Duke Of Gloucester

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A funny thing happened last week that really put the Geek in Shakespeare Geek.

It all started with a Reddit post.  A user wrote that he had a copy of the 1997 Folio Society edition of King Lear, where the text is taken from the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.

Under “The Persons of the Play”, I see “Earl of Gloucester”. I turn the page, and the very first stage direction says “Enter the Earl of Kent, the Duke of Gloucester…”

He is referred to as the Earl of Gloucester only in the list of characters, from what I can tell. Thereafter, he is always referred to as the Duke of Gloucester.

At first, I misunderstood and thought he was saying that Gloucester is always Duke, so it was listing him as Earl on the title page was the mistake.  My error was pointed out to me – Gloucester is never Duke, always Earl – so I offered to get some first-hand input on the situation.

And by first-hand, I meant just go ahead and ask Sir Stanley Wells. Because why not? Twitter’s amazing sometimes.  We follow each other and have corresponded online on some other occasions.

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