It’s a very busy week in Folger Education! We’re excited to have so much to offer for Shakespeare’s Birthday, this year, and are excited to be a part of PBS LearningMedia’s celebrations as well!
This month,PBS LearningMedia is celebrating “Much Ado About Shakespeare” with online events and resources for educators. Tonight (April 16) from 8-9pm EDT we’re joining forces for a Twitter Party discussing our favorite resources and tools for bringing Shakespeare to life in the classroom! Join us live and share your stories with us!
PBS LearningMedia is also re-releasing episodes and resources for Shakespeare Uncovered, and will be hosting a free webinar with the executive producers of the series on April 22 from 4-5pm EDT. They’ll review video from each episode and the educational resources created to accompany the series with Folger educators.
As you know, we’re coming up on our Electronic Field Trip next Tuesday and our local Shakespeare’s Birthday celebration at our historic building on Sunday. How will you celebrate?
Oh no! The makers of that subversive film Anonymous have gotten us summoned to Professor Umbridge’s office to write lines AGAIN! “I will not tell lies. I will not tell lies. I will not tell lies.”
We’re talking about Shakespeare – the epitome of the Enlightenment – liberation from dogma, freedom to question, to repudiate your illogical and unjustifiable status quo, freedom from intellectual tyranny.
Let’s skip Professor Umbridge’s detention. Cast aside preordained conclusions. Read forbidden books. Gather and piece together solid facts. Discover for yourself why deVere’s life is the underpinning of Shakespeare’s works. Draw reasoned conclusions on your own.
Begin your exploration with AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question: Black & White by Peter A. Sturrock. He’s the kind of teacher we want – NO LINE WRITING OR ROTE MEMORIZATION!
He methodically, scientifically investigates the authorship issue. Once you’ve finished his book, you’ll want more! Find other brilliant, inquisitive minds by googling Edward deVere, Oxfordian, or Oxfreudian.
[…] night, PBS and the Folger Shakespeare Library hosted Twitter party, a real-time online conversation about teaching Shakespeare with experts from the Folger and […]
It is revealing that those experts apparently don’t want to discuss Shakespeare’s Sonnets. They are wise to avoid them. As the Sonnet writer says, “lest the wise world look into your moan/and mock you with me after I am gone.”
I will corrupt youth with notions about how the traditional Shakespeare biography was written as scripture, and like anything sacred, looks primitive, and at the time, lacked science. – When I was young I was crestfallen at not finding Shakespeare as swashbuckler and general pain in the arse to the crown. Today, however (since the 1960’s, really), that all changed.
Knowledge changes things.
Sometimes, when the force of the myth is so overwhelming, the learning curve is measured in decades, not days.
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me, after I am gone….
Something to think about, huh?
I’ll celebrate by tipping a glass to the real author of the plays, born at Hedingham April 12, 1550, old-style — i.e. April 23 by our modern accounting.
As he wrote:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sudden bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that write it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
O, lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O, lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.