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Showing posts with label Oberon's Shakespeare Study Group. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oberon's Shakespeare Study Group. Show all posts

Monday, June 9, 2014

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.