Shakespeare in 144 characters

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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.

Alias Shakespeare

Most survey courses in Shakespeare don't really get into the question of whether "Shakespeare" was actually someone else, but I had a college professor who was sort of fascinated by the topic, so he added in writings by all the top contenders--Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon. For me, it doesn't really matter. It's like the debate over who "Jack the Ripper" might have been. The plays exist; they're wonderful, and whoever wrote them chose to use the name Shakespeare.
Wikipedia has a great synopsis of the whole authorship question here.
You probably missed it, but last year director Roland Emmerich's movie Anonymous weighed in on the question,  making the claim that Edward De Vere (the Earl of Oxford) was the author. Rhys Ifans played the Earl with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I.