Buddy, Can You Spare a Quarto

A couple of days back, while doing my usual scan of Shakespeare news stories for the Facebook page, I came across an item of interest in the Hindustan Times (yeah, from India) about The Shakespeare Quartos Archive project.

The effort, a joint project of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, attempts to reproduce and display on the web “at least one copy of every edition of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in quarto before the theatres closed in 1642” (http://quartos.org/info/about.html).  Tied to this is the creation of a brand new interactive interface, which allows users to (among other things): mark and tag text images with user annotations, search full-text, download and print text and images, and compare images side-by-side.

It’s pretty damn cool.
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Audience Showcard

As I ready myself for Saturday’s trip up to Santa Barbara to see the Globe Theatre’s touring production of Love’s Labor’s Lost at the Granada Theater, I’ve been doing a quick inventory of the plays I’ve seen…
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Progress Report

Just for scat and laughs, I did a little data mining tonight… as of today:

  • 130 days
  • 140 entries, with over 100,000 words written (100,619 to be exact)
  • 4 plays read (we’re over ten percent done)
  • 15 podcasts (over three hours of content)
  • 3570 blog visits
  • 2127 podcast downloads
  • 308 subscribers to our podcast RSS feed; another 94 (either through RSS or Atom) to the blog itself
  • 240 Facebook fans
Up until this week, the podcast has been syndicated on fluctu8, podcastblaster, podcastalley, and zencast (… and we will be appearing on iTunes beginning next week!).
Thanks for joining the project… hope you’ve had fun, thus far… and we ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!

Shakespeare Comes to UCLA (my alma mater!)

No, it’s not a production… it’s kinda even better.

The Clark Library of UCLA (my alma mater and the best damn university in the world [OK, so I’m a *LITTLE* biased!]) is about to receive a $2 million collection of 72 books related to Shakespeare.  The Library, which I’m chagrined to say I’ve never heard of, is located off-campus in the West Adams area (for those of you who know LA), and houses a number of rare books.
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Elizabethan Marital/Gender Legality

OK, we’ve only glossed over this so far in this month’s discussion of The Taming of the Shrew… but let’s take a couple of days and discuss matters of Elizabethan marital and gender legality, and the role of women during Shakespeare’s day.
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An Apology: This Podcast Interrupted by…

Every week we have a podcast (on Sunday).

This Sunday we won’t.  It may happen on Monday.  Or it may not happen at all this week.

Why?
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