Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:10 PM

Since I presume my interest was revealed through my blog posts, I will publically blog my thanks.

In yesterday's mail, I received a copy of Marketing the bard: Shakespeare in performance and print, 1660-1740, with a bookmark autographed by the author Don-John Dugas.

Wow.

What a marvelous and exciting surprise. Totally unexpected, and perfect timing, given the holiday.

Thank you VERY much.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:51 PM

Not only has XM Radio devoted a channel solely to Chanukah music, but they're offering a FREE trial for the holiday!

• Go to listen.xmradio.com
• Select Free Trial
• The Promo Code is TheChosen
• Once you're registration is approved, launch the online player and tune it to channel 108.

This is a first for XM Radio, so let's make it a ratings success to encourage them to continue the practice.
[XM Radio has multiple Christian channels; let's show them they've got an audience for Jewish music.]

More details including a program schedule @ XMRadio.com/Hanukkah!

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:00 AM

The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum is a fascinating book.

Most of our modern notions of what Christmas is about seem like a massive work of social engineering -- a convergence of constructed folk "traditions" that reshaped notions of how the holiday was celebrated.

Rather disturbing at times, as Nissenbaum exposes the ideology behind some of the creators.

I strongly recommend it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:00 PM

Mario Van Peebles as Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahim,
Peter Coyote as Chief Bloomenbergensteinenthaland, and
Adam Goldberg as Mordechai Jefferson Carver, aka The Hebrew Hammer

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:58 PM

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has an exciting announcement:

Geomagnetic storm incoming

If your local forecast is for clear skies tonight, and your distance from the equator is the same or greater than ours, get outside and look up. You may get to see an aurora. Trust me, it's worth going to some trouble to see.

Read the comment thread for links to help you determine what might be visible in your night sky and when. [Alas, it appears too cloudy by us...]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:55 PM

So, it's that time of year again, when conservative Christianists (and FOX News) make hay over an alleged "War on Christmas" in this country.

I'm currently reading Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas, about the... evolution... of Christmas celebrations in early America. [You know how "First Night" celebrations have tried to tame New Year's Eve from boozefests to more family-friendly public entertainment? The Christmas story is something similar.]

The book begins in Puritan New England.

Not only were the Puritans opposed to Christmas celebrations, they were opposed to any recognition of December 25th as a special day. Why?

The Puritans themselves had a plain reason for what they tried to do, and it happens to be a perfectly good one: There is no biblical or historical reason to place the birth of Jesus on December 25. True, the Gospel of Luke tells the familiar story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth -- how the shepherds were living with their flocks in the fields of Judea, and how, one night, an angel appeared to them and said, "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord." But nowhere in this account is there any indication of the exact date, or even the general season, on which "this day" fell. Puritans were fond of saying that if God had intended for the anniversary of the Nativity to be observed, He would surely have given some indication as to when that anniversary occurred. (They also argued that the weather in Judea during late December was simply too cold for shepherds to be living outdoors with their flocks.)

It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity. The Puritans were correct when they pointed out -- and they pointed it out often -- that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so "thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones]."

Nearly a century later (December 25, 1776), Reverend Ezra Stiles (who later became president of Yale) expressed similar sentiments:

This day the nativity of our blessed Savior is celebrated through three quarters of Christendom . . .; but the true day is unknown. On any day I can readily join with my fellow Christians in giving thanks to God for his unspeakable gift, and rejoice with them in the birth of a Savior. Tho' [i.e., if] it had been the will of Christ that the anniversary of his birth should have been celebrated, he would at least let us have known the day. . . .

Our nations' forefathers were very clear about this.
So why are modern Christianists so clueless about their own religion?

For the record, winter holidays are traditional because they really were a time of feasting and leisure in poorer and agrarian societies. As Nissenbaum explains, not only was the work of gathering the harvest done, but:

December was the season -- the only season -- for fresh meat. Animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to ensure that the meat would not go bad; and any meat saved for the rest of the year would have to be preserved (and rendered less palatable) by salting. December was also the month when the year's supply of beer or wine was ready to drink.

And if Bill O'Reilly or John Gibson really want an old-fashioned Christmas, maybe we should bring back the tradition of wassailing, described in Wikipedia thus:

[I]n early New England wassailing was associated with rowdy bands of young men who would enter the homes of wealthy neighbors and demand free food and drink in a trick-or-treat fashion. If the householder refused, he was usually cursed, and occasionally his house was vandalized.

So, can we just invite ourselves over to their mansions for the holidays and demand their best spread?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:05 PM

Over lunch, I saw on Think Progress that:

Journalist Critical Of Climate Skeptic Michael Crichton Written Into Crichton Novel As Child Rapist

I don't know about your reaction, but my first thought was of Tony Twist vs. Todd McFarlane

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, here's an old summary by Peter David:

The case was litigated for many years, with multiple appeals and a retrial... they even tried to get the Supreme Court involved.

The end result was a $15 million verdict for Twist, with McFarlane forced into bankruptcy.

After all that, why would another professional writer make the same mistake?

Of course, it's somewhat unsurprising given the source. Crichton's got a history of ignoring evidence.

Think Crowley's got a case?

For the record, here's Crichton describing a fictional rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy.

The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist ... a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune

Icing on the cake? Crichton felt a need to explicitly state that "Crowley's penis was small."

Michael Crowley's reaction:

I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

Crowley goes on to say:

I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level ... I'm looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.
Crichton must know that turning a critic into a poorly endowed child rapist won't exactly aid his cause. Ultimately, then, I find myself strangely flattered. ... If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:08 AM

Very quickly, today's Giveaway of the Day is novaPDF: a Windows printer driver that will allow you to create PDFs from any application.

I've been needing something like this since I lost my Acrobat installation when my old laptop went blooie.

Must install and register it today only!

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:56 PM

This little tune has been running through my brain this evening:

Lemmings... entertain you.
Lemmings make you smile...

Well, don't they?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:08 PM

So, a friend complained that YACCS won't allow him to post comments on my blog. His IP address is not among those spammers I banned, so I'm not sure what's going on. [I do read the comments on my LJ feed if anyone else is experiencing these problems.]

So in response, I've started whacking away at some code for self-hosted comments, migrating away from YACCS altogether...

[Bit of an overreaction? Maybe. As a positive, it would give me more control over my data. As a negative, I lose YACCS' spam filters and RSS feeds for comments. And I need to make sure the server can handle the load before I dump nearly 2000 pre-existing comment threads upon it.]

I started off with an old ASP script which I've already tinkered with for some other places on my site.

Keep in mind, I've never worked with ASP nor XSL outside this application, nor can I program with JavaScript beyond trying to read and adapt existing code. [w3schools.com is a real boon!]

I've already hacked around with it to enable comment counts on my blog (or the emergency backup blog I'm testing this against) and made a number of other formatting changes to get everything looking nice.

I still need to make at least two major additions before I even consider rolling this out:

1. Enabling cookies to retain username and url (like my current system has; why make return commenters keep re-entering the same data), and
2. Creating some kind of online way of editing the comment files, to remove spam or fix bad HTML. A datagrid would be ideal, but isn't necessary.

I've started tinkering (googling and adapting) on both, but my early efforts have only yielded script errors.

Any thoughts?

I haven't switched over yet, and don't even know if I'm going to.

PS: code assistance from more experienced web developers would be appreciated. I may want somebody to thump on my new code before it goes public to make sure I'm not leaving myself open to security risks or making stupid sloppy errors.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:40 PM

Sunday night, 10pm, WGBH radio will be airing:

Hanukkah: A Time for Superheroes examines the connection between ancient heroes and modern-day superheroes.

Host Arye Gross begins with the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees, the Hebrew band of brothers who fought against the religious repression of the Syrian Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. This heroic tale has long inspired comic book writers. Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and DC Comics' Wil Eisner describe their humble origins and the backdrop of their Jewish experience that informed Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman. The program also features conversations with filmmakers Sam Raimi (Spiderman) and Brian Singer (X-Men) and visits the studios of graphic novelists Art Spiegelman and the Hanouka brothers.

The on-air promo said the show was produced by PRI, so folks in other locations may want to check your local NPR listings. Alternately, WGBH does stream live if you want to hear it here.

I don't know whether the radio show will mention this, but a new book out this season is Up, Up, And Oy Vey! : How Jewish history, culture, and values shaped the comic book superhero.

On a related note, in the 1992/1993 Marvel Holiday Special, Peter David wrote a story called "Revisionist history" in which Doc Samson attempted to tell the Hannukah story. When his audience of kids find the story too dull, he spices it up by inserting contemporary references and super-powered characters. I've only heard of it, but should really seek it out in the quarter bins...

It appears there was a similar story in The Tick Yule Log Special #1 titled "Jews Are Mighty!" Ian, do we have that one?

For more on Jewish comics (the newsprint-kind, not Jackie Mason) see this "select bibliography", the sidebar on this page of famous Jews, or this list of comic characters' religious affiliations. And I blogged months ago about Wikipedia's lists.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:48 PM

Okay, fine, I'll stop considering the Fung Wah bus as a reasonable option for getting to NYC.

Universal Hub has the latest

Plus older Universal Hub posts about Fung Wah foibles.

PS: For two other entries from Universal Hub that amused me yesterday, read about the experiences of Emily and Beth.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:15 AM

I just saw this USA Today article about a ranking of the Most Literate Cities in America.

The rankings, now in their fourth year, aim to rate the 70 largest U.S. cities not on whether their residents can read, but whether they do.

It considers several measures in six categories: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Sounds cool, but...

Boston fell from seventh to 11th place.

We're not even in the top ten?!!

And yet, skimming over the list, I see Minneapolis is #2 and St. Paul is #5.

Why don't they merge those two into Minneapolis-St. Paul (like so many other listings), which would bump Boston back up into the top ten...

Examining the detailed listings, Boston is:

• 2nd regarding Internet resources,
• 3rd for periodical publishers,
• tied for 16th for library support,
• 27th in terms of educational attainment,
• 48th in terms of bookstores per 10,000 population,
• and isn't even on the list for newspaper readership!

Waitaminute, there's something fishy going on here...

Boston has two major newspapers plus several major independent weeklies. And we have no numbers for newspaper circulation, not even in the sidebar on online reading???

In the 2004 rankings, we came in twelfth in that category; we can't have dropped that precipitously?

Was that omission an error? If so, that might've spiked our overall rating and unfairly omitted us from the top ten.

I may contact the study authors (in my copious spare time) to find out.

If someone else wants to pick up the ball on this, be my guest.

Update — late addition: Newspaper circulation rankings for Boston:

• 2004: twelfth place
• 2005: tied for 3rd place
• 2006: Not listed anywhere in the top 70 (top 10, 11-30, 31-50, 51-69) nor in the sidebar on online reading.

The methodology page claims that circulation figures "were obtained from the Audit Bureau of Circulation website" (with further massaging based on population).

But, from ABC, I see that the Globe is 13th and Herald 59th -- higher circulation numbers than some of the top ten cities.

Something's definitely off about this. I've e-mailed the study author.

Second edition addition:

I received a reply from someone at Central Connecticut State University (which conducted the study).

They made a mistake when posting the newspaper table to the web and have since updated the page with the correct figures.

Boston is actually ranked #3 in newspapers.

Much better.

Unfortunately, was only a display error. The correct number was taken into account when averages were calculated, so it won't affect Boston's overall ranking.

Oh well, I would've loved to have been the person who singlehandedly put Boston back into the top ten of most literate cities.
Hey: 89 books year-to-date, with 19 days to go...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:54 AM

Time Out New York turned the tables on New York critics, assigning a panel of distinguished experts to review the professional reviewers.

Critics were rated on a five point scale in several categories: knowledge, style, taste, accessibility and influence.

And here's what they said about New York theater critics.

I wonder what they'd think of my reviews. Influence nearly nil, but beyond that... I don't think I can evaluate myself fairly.

Since I'm interested in learning more about theater criticism, they also recommend further reading. Separately, I got a strong recommendation for Kenneth Tynan.

[Seen on Slashfood, which concentrated on the food critics.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 AM

Well, this personality test does call itself “Brutally Honest”

Loser- INTP
20% Extraversion, 53% Intuition, 60% Thinking, 40% Judging

Talked to another human being lately? I'm serious. You value knowledge above ALL else. You love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. The fact that nobody else cares still hasn't become apparent to you...

Nerd's a great word to describe you, and I seriously couldn't care less about the different definitions of the word and why you're actually more of a geek than a nerd. Don't pretend you weren't thinking that. You want every single miniscule fact and theory to be presented correctly.

Critical? Sarcastic? Cynical? Pessimistic? Just a few words to describe you when you're at your very best...*cough* Sorry, I mean worst. Picking up the dudes or dudettes isn't something you find easy, but don't worry too much about it. You can blame it on your personality type now.

On top of all this, you're shy. Nice one, wench. No wonder you're on OKCupid!
Now, quickly go and delete everything about "theoretical questions" from your profile page. As long as nobody tries to start a conversation with you, just MAYBE you'll now have a chance of picking up a date. But don't get your hopes up.

I am interested though. If a tree fell over in a forest, would it really make a sound?

Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster

For the record, here's how this quiz defines the other personality types:

ISFP	(Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving)	==	Loner		ESFP	(Extraverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving)	==	Clown
ISFJ	(Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging)	==	Pushover		ESFJ	(Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging)	==	Sap
ISTP	(Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving)	==	Criminal		ESTP	(Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving)	==	Commander
ISTJ	(Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging)	==	Borefest		ESTJ	(Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging)	==	Do Gooder
INFP	(Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving)	==	Almost Perfect		ENFP	(Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving)	==	Scumbag
INFJ	(Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging)	==	Freak		ENFJ	(Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging)	==	Busybody
INTP	(Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving)		Loser		ENTP	(Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving)	==	Prick
INTJ	(Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging)	==	Crackpot		ENTJ	(Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging)	==	Dictator

I first took a Myers-Briggs test... gosh... over a decade ago. After trying several tests, I was regularly an INFX -- with the Judgment/Perception split so close to the borderline it wasn't worth differentiating.

I guess there's a fine line between Almost Perfect and Freak, which I used to straddle...

Any other brave souls care to volunteer their own results?

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 PM

While I'm on the subject, a friend of mine recently sent me the list of events for this spring's Shakespeare in Washington festival.

Whimper...

The events I'm most interested in seeing are:

• Washington Shakespeare Company: Edward III (Mar. 29 - Apr. 29), and
• Royal Shakespeare Company: Coriolanus (Apr. 14 - May. 6),
• Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy presides over the trial of Hamlet (Mar. 15).

  Shakespeare and the Supreme Court!!! That's two of my geekeries in one place! Of course, I assume something like this will sell out quickly (and besides, those grapes are probably sour anyway)

Aside from that, I'm most driven towards the plays I haven't seen yet.*
As it happens, if I can afford it, the runs coincide over the weekend of Shakespeare's birthday (observed).
Of course, that feels like it should be the most popular weekend for the festival. Then again, I still haven't gotten around to tickets to Merchant and Malta by TFANA in NYC, which I also want to see...

On the whole, it sounds like a cool set of events which makes me wish I lived closer to DC.

As the brochure puts it:

“Hamlet will be performed in Hebrew^*, in silence^*, by inch-high plastic ninjas^*, on film^*, as an experimental multimedia work^*, and put on trial by a Supreme Court Justice^*.”

Overheard around our house when the brochure arrived:

Me: “Hey, they've got Macbeth with an all-Alaska Native cast!”

Ian: “I don't know if I could get inuit.”

Me: “‘Is this a dagger I see before me, or just an optical aleutian?’”

Thank you. Thank you. We'll be here all week (and hopefully to DC for some of these shows).

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:12 PM

Work mentioned in The Shakespeare Wars that I wish to find (not necessarily own, but at least read from the library to see whether it works for me):

• Stephen Booth's "analytic commentary" on Shakespeare's sonnets

Is it wrong that I should be so excited by a book with over 400 pages of notes and analysis for 154 sonnets?

Since I don't (yet) own a copy of Shakespeare Wars, but merely borrowed it from a library, here's a quick list of Rosenbaum's four favorite Shakespeare on film performances to try to catch on video: the Olivier Richard III, the Burton Hamlet, the Brook Lear and the Welles Henry IV.

Also, seen in the bookstore which I want to read:

• The Ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within by Stephen Fry

It got a great review in The New York Times.

Mind you, I'm about to return nearly a dozen books to the library unread (by me; Ian's finished most of the fiction), including:

• A Perilous power
• When the beast ravens
• The Lies of Locke Lamora
• The Thief
• The Queen of Attolia
• The Commonwealth of thieves: the improbable birth of Australia
• Making comics: storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels
• Pox: genius, madness, and the mysteries of syphilis
• The Rituals of dinner: the origins, evolution, eccentricities, and meaning of table manners

But that seems to be the way I am.

Hopefully, I can get back to these some other time...

[Again, this is why I'll probably never pursue a PhD. Too many competing interests. Besides, it's the holiday season, so there are several communities posting multiple quality fanfics per day. With so much reading material from groups like Harry holidays, H/D holidays, HP holiday-gen, Merry Smutmas Smutty Claus, and others... who has time for books this month?]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 PM

I just wish to address a few points in The Shakespeare Wars that caught my eye.

This is the third entry I've written on the book since reading it. If you want a more traditional review, jump down two posts on the page.

Consider this (a) an open letter to the author, (b) a jog to my own memory, and (c) for the benefit of anyone else who's read the book.

Folks unfamiliar with the book may wish to skip this post for the timebeing.

Having recently read Unediting the Renaissance by Leah S. Marcus, I found myself thinking she deserved mention in the chapter on multiple Hamlets.

The chapter on the Wigmakers' lawsuit was fascinating, but nowhere does the book reveal the eventual verdict. A very frustrating (non)end to an otherwise interesting story.

Jumping ahead to Chapter Seven (on "the pause"), I read that as I was picking up Hannukah gifts for my nephew, including a picture book. And that seems to be the obvious analogy.

Try reading these sentences from Grandma's Cat twice, first pausing at each new line, and then using more natural speech patterns (pausing only at the punctuation):

I bring a treat he likes to eat... That night in bed I scratch his head.

vs.

I bring a treat he likes to eat... That night in bed I scratch his head.

Positing similar pauses in Shakespeare's work shouldn't be that farfetched a leap for anyone who has read Doctor Seuss.

Regarding Chapter Eight (on original spelling) and the remarks about Shakespeare's "unanchored language" (p.266) reminded me of something which stuck me not too long ago.

Shakespeare had no access to the kinds of dictionaries or thesauri that modern writers may rely upon. If he ever found himself struggling for a word, he could either ask the people around him, or just make something up. He didn't have many other alternatives.

So, yes, it's a very different relationship to language than that of later writers.

I consider myself a Marlowe fan (I'd call myself a Marlovian, except that term seems to have been taken over by the authorship kooks), and he was much on my mind during Chapter Nine (on Shylock).

Given all I'd heard of the "Jew of Malta evasion" -- efforts to minimize Shakespeare's antisemitism in Merchant by saying Shylock's so much better than Marlowe's Jew -- I dreaded reading the play. But I also felt I should, to achieve a more balanced image of the man.

Much to my surprise, I loved it! Barabas is so over-the-top, he's a hell of a lot of fun!

Heck, even Harold Bloom speaks highly of the character, suggesting a portrayal I wish I could see:

I cannot envision the late Groucho Marx playing Shylock, but I sometimes read through The Jew of Malta, mentally casting Groucho as Barabas.

It's still an incredibly touchy play. I find myself disbelieving that TFANA will actually be staging it, and I'm approaching it with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

Finally, I just love this quote by Stephen Booth, which is so wonderfully evocative:

"[T]he essential pleasure we get from drama is generally that one is always looking at two things: what one is being shown and what one is seeing.

Among other things, this passage reminded me of the opening to ASP's Hamlet, where a darkened and empty theater became the ramparts of Elsinore castle on a bitterly cold night, such that we could feel the chill.

It's magic, and one of the aspects of theater that doesn't always translate to the greater realism expected from film.

And, I guess that's all I have to write on the book for the moment.

Aren't you glad. ;}

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:00 PM

A recurring theme in The Shakespeare Wars involves Ron Rosenbaum asking various Shakespeare experts (academic and theatrical) about early transformative experiences with Shakespeare that turned them into the Bardophiles they are today.

For what it's worth, here's mine:

In the spring of 2000, Ian started running a fantasy roleplaying game set in Elizabethan England. My character was going to be a boy actor from London.

So I started reading up on Elizabethan life, both nonfiction works and fiction set in the period. [I started tracking reading lists about midyear 2000, if you want to see some of the titles.]

July 2002, Publick Theatre was staging As You Like It. I was curious to see it, in part because that's the year I'd begun reading up on Marlowe, and AYLI has some frequently-mentioned Marlovian references. I'd tried reading the play, but it never quite grabbed me. And Ian wasn't interested, so I went alone.

Oh. My. Gd.

Having read works like King James & the history of homosexuality, I got most of the jokes about ganymedes and cuckoldry. So much so that I was frankly shocked at how many small children were in attendance.

Needless to say, I loved it.

I found the whole play to be raunchy, hysterical fun.

So much so, that I ordered Ian to see the play the following night so I could talk about it with him.

And that's really what got the ball rolling for me.

Mind you, I already had a certain grounding in Shakespeare. [See this old blog post, for more details]

And I still consider As You Like It one of my favorite plays.

How about you? Did you have some kind of initiating experience that made you fall in love with Shakespeare?

Share it, by commenting here or in your own blog if you've got one...

Postscript: An open message to Ron Rosenbaum regarding As You Like It.

I saw your comments that you don't care much for the play, particularly your criticism in the final chapter of Oliver's redemption in Act IV.

If you haven't read it already, may I recommend John C. Meagher's Shakespeare's Shakespeare -- specifically the chapter on "the dramaturgy and dramatics of role-doubling." I doubt it will drastically improve your opinion of the play, but I found the discussion of that scene to be an interesting insight into why it's all tell and not shown.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 PM

This weekend, I finally finished The Shakespeare Wars: clashing scholars, public fiascoes, palace coups by Ron Rosenbaum, which I've been reading in dribs and drabs since Thanksgiving.

It's a thought-provoking book, and not one I could rush through too quickly.

The New York Times review was quite negative, describing it as:

pages and pages of arcane discussions about textual scholarship and "iambic fundamentalism," windy and inconclusive debates about what is truly Shakespearean and blow-by-blow accounts of feuds between rival scholars that cannot possibly be of any interest (at least as rendered by Mr. Rosenbaum) to the lay reader.

and carps:

Certainly arguments about two "Lears" and three "Hamlets" are intriguing, but in light of the fact that few readers are probably aware that different versions of these iconic plays even exist, Mr. Rosenbaum's discussion of them feels strangely pedantic and overly focused on intramural academic debates.

In other words, she seems to believe the only people interested in this kind of material are the pedants participating in the disputes, who wouldn't need Rosenbaum's book as an ingress.

But that doesn't match my own experience.

Though I'm neither in academia nor the theater, I'm certainly aware that multiple versions of those plays exist. I recognized many of the professors Rosenbaum mentions -- I've even read some of their mainstream books. I got and grinned at the little digs against Harold Bloom, such as this quip:

...Greenblatt, perhaps the most eminent of Shakespearean scholars in America, if you don't count Harold Bloom (and many serious scholars just don't).

Until this book, I only had a rudimentary knowledge about many of the debates he describes -- enough to whet my appetite for Rosenbaum's explorations.

In other words, I'm the intended audience for this book.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. For example, I get the feeling that Duane of Such Shakespeare Stuff is a kindred spirit, and he's blogged about being similarly excited by the book. Likewise, I think Elizabeth Bear might enjoy some parts (particularly the chapter on the Wigmaker's Lawsuit).

And this goes back to what I've written before about Shak