Shakespeare, gender identity, and Caitlyn Jenner

We kick off the third summer of Shakespeare with a few thoughts about gender identity. Shakespeare wrote several plays where women masqueraded as men and of course, back in his time, all the female roles were played by boys, so it must have gotten a little confusing in there somewhere. Caitlyn Jenner is not the first celebrity butterfly to emerge from a chrysalis of gender and she won't be the last. (Chaz Bono--we have not forgotten your gender journey. You're a class act babe.)
My dislike for celebrity culture is pretty deep and the constant bombardment of Kardashian/Jenner trivia (effluvia) just makes me sad. But Caitlyn Jenner's emergence has opened a national dialogue on gender issues that will be far more useful in the long run than all the politically correct reminders about not using certain terms and slurs.

When Ellen DeGeneres came out ("Yup, I'm Gay"), it was huge because she was so warm and funny and so damn likable that people who would swear they didn't so a single gay person (oh, yes you do) could suddenly say, "Wait. I like Ellen. And she's gay. So...maybe it's okay." Not that anyone needs permission to live their lives but in the real world (where my gay little sister lived), living out and proud isn't always that easy.
I think Caitlyn Jenner's legacy is going to be less about the Olympic medals and much, much more about the way her life transformed the way people look at gender issues. I hope so anyway.   And omg, that Vanity Fair  cover photo by the ever-awesome Annie Leibovitz is stunning.

Etsy never disappoints--the Shakespeare Cookie Cutter

I used to have a massive collection of cookie cuttres--zoo animals and sharks and dinosaurs and US states. But I never had this--a Shakespeare cookie cutter. You can get it on Etsy now.

Selling Jaguars with Shakespeare

My favorite ads these days seem to be car commercials. That new one for the Lincoln MKC with Matthew McConaughey and a really big longhorn bull named Cyrus cracks me up. Am I going to buy the car? Alas, no but it's a memorable commercial. I was also a huge fan of Jaguar's "It's Good to Be Bad" commercial that debuted during this year's Super bowl. Now there's a follow-up with everyone's favorite resident of Asgard, Tom Hiddleston, lurking in a garage and waxing Shakespearean as he plans world domination. Hiddleson's performance of Coriolanus (shown earlier this year on one of those filmed plays/prestige movie events things) was ferocious and feral. I was mesmerized. I liked him in The Hollow Crown too, watching him transition from the feckless Prince Hal to Henry V. Yes, this commercial

makes me want to plan world domination while driving through London at speed. Preferably with a villain by my side.

Shakespeare fans--the Etsy Shop of Your Dreams!

I have mentioned before my love for Etsy, and I've run across a shop called IMMORTAL LONGINGS

that produces Shakespeare-themed items that are ... exquisite. I have half a dozen parked in my shopping cart (Just 17 more days until my birthday!) and will definitely return to it for my annual Holiday Gift Guide. check it out!

Whipping Boy and Shakespeare

Both my parents liked words. My father was a lawyer and he early on discovered the delight little kids take in repeating words that sound like nonsense words. I knew how to pronounce posse comitatus before I could spell "cat." And I wasn't that much older when I learned what it meant, which put me way ahead in civics class. My mother favored archaic English phrases like "dogsbody" and "whipping boy" and "dog in the manger." These were phrases my siblings and I learned as kids and I freely used them in conversation until I moved to L.A. and found that people were giving me blank looks, so I stopped. But I still love those words and I chose "Whipping Boy" as the title of my mystery novella because the plot revolves around a murder of a scapegoat. Shakespeare, of course, used all those phrases (and more). Or so I thought until I started searching for the phrase and none of my usual go-to sources could find it. (Plenty of places where one person or another was whipped, and also a reference to "Whipping Boy" in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, but no joy on Shakesperae. Sigh At any rate, I'm offering my novella free for the next five days in case you'd like to read it. There are 10 reviews now (almost all of them by people I don't actually know) and eight of them are five stars! You can snag a copy here.

Monday, Monday

thanks to the bodacious quotatious geeks at Search Quotes, I discovered a whole slew of Monday quotes, some of them by Shakespeare. the Internet, always boggling my mind.

I feel the earth move--Shakespeare and earthquakes

My apartment is near a freeway and also a block from a supermarket supplied by big trucks that travel the street running perpendicular to mine. As a result, the apartment often vibrates, strongly enough that visitors--acutely aware they're visiting earthquake country--mistake for a tremor. "Is that an earthquake?"
"No.""
"Are you sure?"
"Trust me, I'm sure."

Long-time residents and natives deal with earthquakes in one of two ways, sometimes simultaneously. We practice denial. ("What do we say to earthquakes? Not today.") And we prepare. (I have a friend who has an earthquake app on his phone that notifies him of an earthquake anywhere in the world. I'm not sure what this does except fuel his own anxiety, but his is the house I'm headed to in an earthquake apocalypse. He has a GENERATOR.

There's a guy named David Nabham who believes he can predict earthquakes. If he's right, L.A. is due for a major quake this Saturday, between 4 and 8 a.m. or during the same time frame in the evening. The last big quake in LA was 20 years ago, the Northridge quake and it happened in the early morning. I find myself a little unsettled by Nabhan's prediction.  I have bought extra water. i will wear shorts instead of jammie pants to bed on the 11th. 
But since I am thinking Shakespeare this summe, I wondered if there were any mentions of earthquakes in the plays. Turns out there is one, a famous one in Romeo & Juliet. It's Nurse talking about how old Juliet is:

On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;
	That shall she, marry; I remember it well.
	'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
	And she was wean'd,--I never shall forget it,--

Sunday Stratford Shakespeare Festival Promo!

This looks like a good season; which I could be there.

Where did Shakespeare learn about scorpions?

I'm researching scorpions for a client and I suddenly rememembered a quote from Macbeth:  

“O, full of scorpions is my mind!” 

And  I thought--how did Shakespeare know about scorptions? They don't HAVE scorpions in England. Do they? (Yes, I know, he would have known about scorpions from the constellation Scorpio, but work with me here.) Turns out they did have scorpions in England. This from Wikipedia:

Scorpions are found on all major land masses except Antarctica. Scorpions did not occur naturally in Great Britain, New Zealand and some of the islands in Oceania, but have now been accidentally introduced in some of these places by human trade and commerce.

Who knew?

 

 

Did Shakespeare know about penguins?

Live Science

I was reading an article from the Live Science blog about how global warming is threatening the Emperor Penguin. The story is illustrated with a photo of researcher holding an Emperor penguin chick of remarkable cuteness. (As you can see, they're substantial little birds, even as babies, about the size of a human toddler.) But I got to thinking...
Did people of Shakespeare's time know about Antarctica? Did they know about penguins? So I Googled "Shakespeare and penguin" and of course, got four bazillion hits directing me to Penguin Publishing's excellent Shakespeare editions that we all used in high school and college.
As far back as the 2nd century, people spoke of a vast land at the southern pole of the earth known as Terra Australis, but Antarctica was not discovered until the late 18th/early 19th century. (James Cook apparently passed close to it on one of his voyages.)
There is a reference to penguins in a letter dated 1578 (cited in a book on animal folklore in Shakespeare's time), which was some thirty years before the playwright died, so he would have known about them. 
How much do we love the Internet? And Wikipedia in particular?

Mark Twain writes about Would-Be Claimants to the Name Shakespeare

Dr. Buford Jones

I once took an entire. semester-long seminar on Mark Twain. If memory serves, the professor was Dr. Buford Jones, a professor who does not fare particularly well on that student-ranking system ratemyprofessor.com but I loved his classes in American lit and took all of them. (And for some reason, I remember this: he was from the Midwest somewhere and pronounced "Jaguar" like "jag-wire." And he would occasionally poke fun at Reynolds Price, the noted novelist and poet, who also taught a well-regarded class on John Milton. You had to be a junior to take Price's class, so that was a long, three-year wait, but worth it.) But I digress.

In the Twain seminar we went way beyond the usual Twain oeuvre. Of course we read Huckleberry Finn (again) but we also read critic Leslie Fiedler's intriguing essay on the homoerotic subtext of the book, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in Huck Honey!" Fiedler was the author of Love and Death in the American Novel, a book that deeply impressed me at the time. I also loved that he was a proponent of genre fiction, which is pretty much all I read when I wasn't reading for my classes.

Twain left an enormous pile of unpublished manuscripts and diary entries and one of them was a huge section of thoughts calls "Is Shakespeare Dead?" You can read it here. It's very entertaining, particularly if you love the cranky side of Twain.

Shakespeare portrait by Heather Galler

I've been cruising Etsy of late, looking for swag to buy in advance of the October book fair in Sedona where Dark Valentine Press will have a table. And is my wont, I was looking around to see if there was anything new in the Shakespeare section. I found this very cool portrait by Heather Galler and I'm about to go snap it up. Because I deserve a little more art in my life.

Shakespeare on Pinterest

If you're engaged by Pinterest, as I am, you know that there are a lot of topics that seem to engaged Pinners.  They really, really, really like baby elephants. They really like puppies and kitties )who doesn't?) and they like pretty pictures of beautiful places and luscious photos of yummy food. But they also are interesting in Shakespeare's plays. One of my most popular boards is my Shakespeare board, and I'm hooked up to half a dozen others. There are lots of Shakespeare quotes pinned up on various boards. It's all about the words, but on Pinterest, it's about the pictures too.

Ellen Geer as Lear

Photo of Melora Marshall & Ellen Geer by Ian Flanders

The ultimate play about fatherhood-Shakespeare's -King Lear--gets a sex change in this year's production from the Theatricum Botanicum. Ellen Geer, daughter of the theater's founder, Will Geer, plays the monarch wko has decided to divide her realm into thirds and hand them off to her sons. Geer also directs, along with Melora Marshall, who plays Fool, and the reviewer over at Shakespeare in L.A. gave both raves. (Marshall  is also part of the Geer clan, being Theatricum Botanicum artistic director Ellen Geer's younger sister.)   The play runs through September. For more information on it and the theater's other offerings, go to their site. And don't forget, their summer slate includes A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is always a wonderful experience in the outdoor setting.

Shakespeare in 144 characters

Photo courtesy of Bigstock

I think if Shakespeare were alive, he'd have embraced social media. "All the world's a stage," he wrote and isn't it thrilling to contemplate what he would have done with a global stage like the Internet? It's already amazing enough that his work remains potent nearly half a millennium after he was born.  And when we reach the stars, somewhere we will take Shakespeare with us. Because he is alive and well on social media.

There is a Facebook group devoted to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who many believe was the "real Shakespeare." There is a group devoted to Kill Shakespeare, a comic book in which Shakespeare's greatest heroes are pitted against his most menacing villains (more on that later in the summer.) Goodreads has a Shakespeare Fans group that has more than a thousand members. There are study groups and reading clubs and appreciation circles all over the place, including the Michigan-based Oberon's Shakespeare Study Group, which is particularly interested in the authorship question.

Shakespeare is vibrantly alive on Twitter.

I follow a lot of Tweeps who tweet Shakespeare. Here in L.A. there are a number of Shakespeare-centric drama groups and theater companies that I keep up with (like Theatricum Botanicum) and it's a way of making sure I don't miss their special events. There's @ShakespearePost who has more than 32,000 followers and is following nearly 27K.  Not quite George Takei numbers, but if it were really Bill S posting, I bet he would have gotten to 1 million followers at least as fast as Anderson Cooper. Mostly this account tweets quotes from the plays and sonnets but every once in a while, there's something else, like a link to an article about very unfortunate tattoos that was quite entertaining.

If you're on Twitter and want to find more Shakespeare-friendly folk, all you have to do is type the bard's  name in the search bar. There are a lot of us out there.

Ryan Gosling and Shakespeare. You're welcome.

Kattomic Energy Geektastic Holiday Gift Guide--Part Two

 I haven't set foot in a shopping mall--except to go see a movie--in years. I am in walking distance of two excellent bookstores--one an indie, another a Bookstar--and for everything else, there's online. and I do mean EVERYTHING else. Last year I bought almost all my Christmas presents online. This year, the figure is 100 percent. (And don't hate me, but I'm already done.) In addition to picking just the perfect gift for friends, I also usually pick up half a dozen gift cards for stocking stuffers, and last-minute presents. Gift cards have a bad rap, but honestly, I'm always thrilled to get one. (I don't drink coffee, for instance, but a Starbucks gift card will buy a lot of oatmeal cookies and/or hot chocolate.) Amazon gift cards can be redeemed for pretty much anything you can think of. You can even get them in a box if you want to put them under a tree or in a stocking instead of just mailing them.

Practically every supermarket and drug store now has a display of gift cards you can buy for everything from movies to iTunes, but you can also buy gift cards to use on Etsy, eBay,Redbubble, Zazzle, ans SpaFinders. (right bow they're running a deal for two $50 gift cards for $80.) Not feeling the gift cards? Well, here are some other suggestions, arranged by category.

S is for Shakespeare, Science, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Scents

I admit it. When it comes to Shakespeare, I am a fan girl. If you know a like-minded person, there are a lot of terrific presents that celebrate the bard, items that go far beyond the ubiquitous quotation  t-shirts and mugs. (Not that you can't always use another t-shirt or mug.) My favorite Shakespeare-themed gift this season is the Shakespeare flash drive ($25) available on theBroadway Cares site. This fundraising organization now funds  more than 450 groups and has raised $225 million to fight AIDS. So you can give a double gift when you buy anything from their online store.

The Folger Shakespeare Library's "Luminary Shakespeare apps" for Macbeth, Othello and Romeo & Juliet are downloadable from iTunes. From solitary reading to generative thinking, from the classroom to the theater, Folger Luminary Shakespeare apps offer an interactive reading experience to enhance our pleasure and understanding of Shakespeare's extraordinary works. ($11.99)

Shakespeare Trivia

I've just landed a job with a company that sells trivia games to the hospitality sector and one topic that we can't use for questions is Shakespeare because Shakespeare is everyone's go-to topic for trivia and has been overused. No kidding. If you Google "Shakespeare Trivia Game" you get more than 2.5 million responses in 0.29 seconds.
The first site listed on the first page of responses is Fun Trivia, which has a whole assortment of Shakespeare Quizzes and Trivia Games. Games are divided up into individual plays or lines and quotes. Other examples is a game called "Sad but true" (a phrase Shakespeare created) and one that asks you to identify the true source of a quote. The games are all silly, English geeky fun if you find yourself between seasons of Game of Thrones with nothing to do. (Seriously, Ned Stark could have been a Shakespearean character, not unlike Coriolanus in that he just couldn't learn to go along to get along.)

Just Passing Through Shakespeare

Shakespeare, New Mexico is a ghost town. Here's more information about it.

You say "poe-tay-toe." I say "poe-tah-toe"

The first time I ever saw the word "Zounds," I thought it was a fine word. I was little and fond of words that started with Z, or with X because they often sounded like they started with Z (Xerox, Xenophobe). I had learned to read using phonics, so I was all about sounding words out. And so I thought that zounds was pronounced like "sounds" only with a Z.
I thought that for a very long time because the only way you realize you're mispronouncing a word is by hearing it pronounced correctly and "zounds" wasn't exactly a word on everyone's lips in Washington DC in the last part of the 20th century.
Then I encountered the word in a Shakespeare play and discovered that it was not an expression of amazement (sort of like "Outstanding," or "Excellent") but an oath--a swear--that was an abbreviation for "God's wounds" and that it is properly pronounced "Zwounds," which comes out sounding something like "zoonds."  (In other words, it sounded something like one of those old Zima commercials where they substituted Z for all the S words in the ad.)
Turns out that "zounds" isn't the only word whose pronunciation has changed over the years. Father/son actors Ben and David Crystal have put together an entertaining video illustrating the difference in modern and original pronunciation (known as OP). You can find it here.