American Shakespeare Center Co-founder and Director of Mission, and Mary Baldwin College Professor Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen delivers a pre-show lecture on William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost before a live audience at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA, on April 24th, 2013.
Dr. Ralph Presents: Love’s Labour’s Lost
File Size: 36.2 MB; Run Time: 37:41
Hit the jump cut for the text which Ralph used during this lecture:
At the American Shakespeare Center, we are fortunate to have a name that attracts people with talent. Of course, anyone who sees our shows recognizes the talent onstage, and that of the costumers, perhaps even the props person. Some will credit the directors, a few will think about the other artistic staff members: our amazing Associate Artistic Director, the Stage and Tour managers. What I appreciate more and more, though, as every summer arrives, are the talented interns who come to spend their summers with us.
2013 Intern Elizabeth Floyd (right) at the OCS offices with College Prep Director Kim Newton (left)
Applications for positions in marketing, development, management, education, and artistic start rolling in as early as September, and our various department heads begin battling for the students most suited to their needs. We have students from Pennsylvania and from the University of Nebraska, and we’ve welcomed Utahans and Ohioans and folks from as close as JMU. Conversations in staff meetings turn from “I don’t really have time to take care of that immediately,” to “My intern arrives this week, we can has him/her to take on that project.” We begin developing long lists of wishes — research, formatting, filing, blogging, tracking — and divvying up tasks amongst departments. And then, blessedly, they arrive.
In education, we strive to give each intern an over-arching project that is their start-to-finish focus and that meets their career goals. Then, we add the fateful clause at the tail end of their contract, “And other duties as required.” Oh, that clause. That clause can encompass the interns attending workshops to give us feedback, going to rehearsals to develop ideas for new programming, stuffing envelopes, writing instructions, checking digital text against folio text, and so much more. That clause, that one clause, is what makes us look forward to the interns’ arrival. Certainly, we are excited about their projects, about getting to know these smart and talented people who will be leaders in Shakespeare, theatre, arts management, business and elsewhere, but the relief that settles on our staff when we realize that we can actually check some dreams off the list is, as Mastercard says, priceless.
Given that this year is a Blackfriars Conference year, that clause is even more meaningful to me personally. When we implemented a “blind” reading committee as part of our selection process in 2011, I knew there would be some work involved. I could not have imagined just how much formatting, futzing, and focusing it would take to actually make this initiative run. But that year, I had Brenna. She swooped in and took 24 hours worth of headaches off my hands. This year, Sarah — a wonderful recommendation from our dear friend Carole Levin at UNebraska — is making it possible for me to focus on new initiatives like our Consortium, and on overdue edits for our Playhouse Insider and camp plays, with the knowledge that I will still be able to get the abstracts to my committee on schedule. Ah, breathing. What a thing it is!
Intern Jane Jongeward (rightmost) at the 2011 Blackfriars Conference
We’ve had some wonderful interns over the past several years, and I want to acknowledge each of their contributions and thank them for their work. I take a great deal of pride in seeing them go on to become professors, run their own theatre companies, direct plays, and, even, intern for other theatres (though that last one is harder). So, thanks to Kyle, Megan, Liz, Nuri, Carla, Sarah, Sara, Natalie, Amy, Rachel, Elizabeth, Mara, Grace, Maria, Kimberly, Abigail, Kendra, Jessica, Madeleine, Elena, Alex, Emily, Molly, Jane, Lia, Amy, Melissa and anyone I may have missed. You have transformed our department with your work and we at the OCS are forever grateful to you for picking up those other duties, or, as Shakespeare puts in in Cymbeline, “You were inspired to do those duties…” And you inspired us in so doing.
Some of their comments:
–Sarah
As promised, thanks to the generosity of Viking Press, OCS Education is pleased to host a giveaway contest for The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett. In case you missed my review, I will reiterate that this was a wonderful, creative, and scholastically responsible historical mystery novel, and I highly recommend it for Shakespeare enthusiasts — particularly of the breed that I know frequents the Blackfriars Playhouse. So, this is your chance to get a copy for free, straight from the publisher — just in time for the summer holidays!
All you have to do to enter is tell us: What show in our 25th Anniversary year, opening June 21st, are you most looking forward to, and why?
We will randomly select a winner from the submissions and make our announcement on Friday afternoon. Please note that due to the publisher’s restrictions, the winner must have a U.S. mailing address.
The Bookman’s Tale is the story of Peter, an antiquarian bookseller who, in the midst of grieving for his recently-departed wife, finds what appears to be a Victorian-era watercolor of her, pressed inside an old copy of Edmond Malone’s An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers (the book exposing William Henry Ireland’s forgeries of Shakespearean manuscripts). Though he knows the painting can’t possibly be of his wife, he feels compelled to find out the identity of both painter and subject. Hunting down this information leads him to stumble across an early edition of Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the source material for The Winter’s Tale. While this would be an extraordinary find on its own, what makes this particular book even more astonishing is the marginalia: a series of notes apparently written by Shakespeare as he composed his play. Peter thinks that he may have realized his life-long dream to find evidence proving once and for all that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him, but he knows enough of the history of forgeries to be wary of deception, and so he sets out on a quest to determine the book’s authenticity. He’s not the only one on the trail, however, and people with a lot to lose if Pandosto proves authentic are willing to kill to preserve its secrets.
The book moves along three separate but interrelated storylines: the first set in 1995, when Peter finds the copy of Pandosto and goes on his quest; the second set in the 1980s, when Peter begins his career in rare books at college, and which also charts his relationship with Amanda from their first meeting to its tragic end; and the third spanning from 1592 through the 1870s, tracking the transmission of one copy of Pandosto through time and through the exchange of many hands. The historical plotline delves into the world of playmaking and printing in the 16th and 17th centuries, showing what a cutthroat business it really could be, driven by rivalries, egos, and personal vendettas. Of the three storylines, the least relevant to the driving plot is the 1980s thread — but that is the storyline which gives this book its heart. It’s what makes you care about Peter, and it’s what makes you feel that his quest matters not only scholastically, but personally as well. It also provides a lot of the connective tissue which ultimately ties the loose ends of the story together, because the reader gets to see Peter learn his trade as well as learn to come out of his shell and engage with Amanda’s family and friends.
I received this book from the publisher, in exchange for a review, and I will freely admit that I had a lot of reservations — and I will just as freely admit that they were all, thankfully, rendered irrelevant. I worried this would be yet another Da Vinci Code knockoff, and while I have nothing against that genre of book in general, the quality can be alarmingly varied. I worried it would have an anti-Stratfordian bent, because I have learned to be leery when I see phrases like “prove the truth about Shakespeare’s identity” on book jackets. I worried that the dead-wife angle would make it too maudlin, too Gothic for my personal tastes. I’m very happy to say that, as it turns out, I had nothing to fear on all three counts.
The biggest problem, I think, is that the summary really doesn’t do the book justice. For one thing, it makes it sound like the book is a lot more about the painting and the Victorian angle, when the far greater focus is on textual transmission and the development of the Shakespeare brand through the centuries. It’s also not nearly as mournful in tone as the jacket makes it out to be. Peter is a strong protagonist without needing to be an action hero, and I appreciate him for that. He is, definitely, a scholar and a bookseller, and at no point during the story does he morph into a super-spy or an Indiana Jones. He remains what he is, using his intelligence, his inquisitive nature, and his training in the field of early modern publishing to hunt down the mystery. I also appreciated that Lovett could give us an introverted protagonist with social anxiety problems and still have him be a strong character. Peter struggles a lot, both early in the 1980s storyline and in the 1995 storyline, with social interaction, but the reader gets to see him learn how to deal with that. He finds his safe spaces and safe people. Unfortunately, since Amanda was the one who drew him out to begin with, after her death, he retreats from the world and isolates himself entirely — so a lot of the story isn’t just his quest to find the truth behind Pandosto, it’s about him finding closure with her death and learning to be that more-adjusted version of himself again, even without her. It’s a deeper and more emotionally satisfying angle than I was expecting the book to have, and it strengthens the narrative.
Some of the twists and turns are a little predictable, but that doesn’t bother me much. After all, as Shakespeare so often reminds us, knowing the plot isn’t the same as knowing the story. The Bookman’s Tale is less a fast-paced thriller and more a historical-psychological exploration with a dash of mystery, and I appreciate that Lovett didn’t seem to feel much need to hammer it into another form. The threat of danger towards the end is the only place it gets a little Da Vinci Code-y, but even there, The Bookman’s Tale strains plausibility far less than other books in this genre. There were only a few details throughout which I found far-fetched, such as a professor of Shakespeare at an esteemed university never having heard of Q1 Hamlet (but perhaps, in the 1980s, that could have been true?). The secondary romantic interest felt a little tacked-on and unnecessary. The book definitely would have worked just as well without that aspect, but Lovett also isn’t too heavy-handed about it, so it’s easy to ignore.
I can cheerfully recommend The Bookman’s Tale as a great summer read for any Shakespeare enthusiast, but particularly, I think, for the kind that we get at the Blackfriars Playhouse. There’s more substance here than to your typical novel of this sort, and a lot more “Easter eggs” slipped in for the benefit of readers-in-the-know. I think our scholarly friends will appreciate the attention to detail which Lovett gives the history of textual transmission. The sections set during Shakespeare’s lifetime are full of wonderful details, intriguing cameos, and cheeky off-hand references. Lovett clearly knows his stuff when it comes to the playhouses and the print culture of early modern England. The Bookman’s Tale would actually be a great companion book to Shapiro’s Contested Will, in some ways, because it takes a fictionalized look at the true history of how Shakespeare mania grew over the centuries into a force which spawned forgeries and erroneous theories. It just released this week, so pick it up at your local bricks-and-mortar or on Amazon.
Thanks to the generosity of Viking Press, the OCS will be hosting a giveaway contest, wherein one of our lucky followers will get a free copy of The Bookman’s Tale. We will have details on that giveaway for you in a separate post early next week.
In this edition of the Blackfriars Backstage Pass, OCS actors Patrick Earl, Andrew Goldwasser, Rick Blunt and Liz Lodato discuss their work on William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost with OCS Co-founder and Director of Mission Ralph Alan Cohen. This podcast was recorded on May 3rd, 2013.
Blackfriars Backstage Pass: Love’s Labour’s Lost
File Size: 48.1 MB; Run Time: 50:04
In this edition of the Blackfriars Backstage Pass, OCS actors Stephanie Holladay Earl, Patrick Midgley, Bridget Rue, Patrick Earl, and Rick Blunt discuss their work on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi with OCS Co-founder and Director of Mission Ralph Alan Cohen. This podcast was recorded on May 3rd, 2013.
Blackfriars Backstage Pass: The Duchess of Malfi
File Size: 57.3 MB; Run Time: 47:46
American Shakespeare Center Co-founder and Director of Mission, and Mary Baldwin College Professor Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen, tag-teaming with Playhouse Manager Katie Crandol, delivers a pre-show lecture on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi before a live audience at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA, on April 17th, 2013.
Dr. Ralph Presents: The Duchess of Malfi
File Size: 42.1 MB; Run Time: 35:04
It’s April 23rd again, and that must mean it’s time for the Shakespeare Birthday Project. I’m pleased to once again be taking part in this celebration of Shakespeare’s life and the great joy he’s brought to so many people for so many years.
The thing of it is — I wasn’t quite sure what to write about this year. I’ve already devoted a post to how Shakespeare shaped my life path, and last year I discussed his inspirational power to teachers. Fortunately, circumstances aligned to provide me an avenue for discussion, because this year, Shakespeare’s birthday falls swift on the heels of an incredible eight-day stretch of OCS Education seminars. We began on Friday the 12th with our Spring Teacher Seminar, and that barreled straight into this year’s second annual week-long International Paper Leadership Seminar. Having these two events back up against each other allowed me to see the full spectrum of engagement with Shakespeare, from our super-excited educators, eagerly throwing themselves into immersion, to a group of business professionals, lawyers, and mill foremen, most of whom had little lifetime exposure to Shakespeare, and some of whom primarily spoke languages other than English.
There are ways in which our Teacher Seminars are like shooting fish in a barrel, because those educators (particularly those attendees who come multiple times a year) are always hungry to indulge their love of Shakespeare. That can be a double-edged sword, however, because it means I feel a lot of pressure to give them new, exciting material. So, for this event, I was pleased to be able to give them over to our Tempt Me Further tour actors for two workshops. I think they always get different insights from such active practitioners, even if they’re covering the same material that Sarah and I would. They also got to listen to a Master Minds lecture from an MBC graduate student and had the opportunity to discuss common misconceptions about early modern female performance with her. Best of all, though, they threw themselves willingly into every activity, listening attentively, offering their own viewpoints, and feverishly scribbling notes to take back to their own classrooms. Thanks to their enthusiasm and cheerful participation, I finished the weekend feeling, as I typically do after Teacher Seminars, more energized, rather than drained.
Our Leadership Seminars are a different animal, since the people we see for those typically come from well outside the world of Shakespeare or even of education. On the first day of this program, the International Paper coordinator asked the participants to rate their impression of Shakespeare on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning “would rather eat glass” to 10 meaning “have a secret crush on him.” We heard a few encouraging responses of 8+, but we also heard (not unexpectedly), a few in the 1-3 range — so we had our work cut out for us. We know that going in, though, and we’re always up for the challenge.
The Leadership Seminar involves three major focus points: exploring Shakespeare’s examples of leadership through demos led by our actors and discussed by Dr. Ralph; writing and performing personal statements about a work-related challenge; and building short scenes in small groups through the use of cue scripts. Many of the challenge statements, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused precisely on the obstacle of communication — some of those quite literal, from those facing language barriers, others more abstract, as new leaders learn to negotiate team motivation or the transmission of information between departments. Others don’t feel like their team’s needs are always heard and recognized by those higher up in the organization. Our goal in a Leadership Seminar is to give participants the tools, using Shakespeare as inspiration and the vocal and physical techniques of the actors as a form to build around, to address these issues effectively once they return home. We examine both the technical construction of their statements as well as their presentation skills, adjusting each day. The difference from the start of the week to the end is always dramatic — and the great joy of it is getting to watch people get better at something through the coaching and exploration. We see the participants start to use their voices and their bodies to greater effect; we see them train themselves to plant their feet, stand up straight, and make eye contact; we hear them reconfigure their thoughts to be more evocative and persuasive.
What impressed me the most about our group from International Paper, though, was how game everyone was to try things out, even if they were uncomfortable, even if we were asking them to dig into something that was not their native language. It wasn’t easy work much of the time, but the participants were willing to engage and to make the attempt — and that makes all the difference. What they discovered was that Shakespeare is funny, moving, expertly constructed, and, the greatest surprise of all, often relevant to their own lives. The cue script activities taught them lessons about communication, leading by listening, and working as a team. The work they did showed the group that Shakespeare’s company faced many of the same basic problems they do in their positions. The demos, and the scenes themselves, often illustrated how those issues of communication, credentialing, and empathy speak across boundaries of time and language. Several participants ended up working Shakespeare’s lines, in direct quotation or in more oblique reference, into their challenge statements. Are all of these people likely to refer to Shakespeare often in their everyday lives? It’s unlikely. But they may think a little more positively about him — I think we converted some of those 1-3s into at least 5-7s by the end of the week, and we got at least a few lines into their mouths and into their brains.
So, happy birthday, Mr. Shakespeare! Thank you for continuing not only to provide me with a career, but with the opportunity to share positive experiences with so many, so different people. May we continue to celebrate your natality for centuries to come.
It’s been 2057 years since Brutus, Cassius, and between six and sixty other conspirators stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar to death in the Senate’s makeshift meeting-place, a theatre built by Caesar’s friend, ally, and eventual nemesis, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Over two millennia later, the words “Beware the Ides of March” are all over the Internet today. Would it please Caesar to know that his death is still remembered? If he could look back, might he be glad that he was struck down at the height and thus immortalized in story, rather than living on to a natural death, which might have relegated him to a lesser place in history?
|
|
Flowers left at Caesar’s grave, 2011; credit An American in Rome. |
I’ve talked before about how the Ides of March retains a strange place in our cultural awareness. As Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen pointed out in a recent lecture, the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated by his friend Brutus on the Ides of March may be the one historical fact that nearly everyone in the Western world knows. Somehow it permeates, reinforced by all sorts of media — books, TV, movies, song, and theatre. As an example of just how strongly this awareness still resonates, I discovered not too long ago that people still leave flowers at the (supposed) site of Caesar’s grave (or, rather, at the site of his cremation, since most Romans did not inter the bones of the dead as Shakespeare implies). The picture at right shows one example, and Googling “flowers left at Caesar’s grave” yields many more. They change over time — someone takes the old away, making room for the new, and in all of those pictures, the flowers always look fresh and colorful. I would love to take a closer look at some of those notes that get left for him, to know where these people come from, what they have to say to this famous corpse, what drives them to remember his death so many years later.
Considering the longevity of the tale of Caesar’s epic life and death, Shakespeare puts premonitory words in Cassius’s and Brutus’s mouths, just moments after the conspirators perform their savage butchery/noble sacrifice.
CASSIUS
Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown?
BRUTUS
How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey’s basis lies along
No worthier than the dust?
CASSIUS
So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be call’d
The men that gave their country liberty.
For Shakespeare, this was obviously a tongue-in-cheek joke, since his company was acting it over in England, which from Brutus’s perspective wouldn’t be a unified country for nearly a thousand years, in the English language, which, though heavily influenced by Latin, was still centuries and several Germanic, Dutch, Scandinavian, and French invasions away from developing into something Shakespeare would even begin to recognize. For the OCS this season, in yet another nation that didn’t exist either in Shakespeare’s time or in Caesar’s, in a variety of American accents (with one Australian in the mix), the lines have an extra layer of sly knowing painted on them. We’re contributing to the tradition, and at this rate, it seems unlikely that human civilization will ever forget Julius Caesar — or how he died.
If you want commemorate Caesar’s death by learning more about his life, you could do worse than starting with Shakespeare’s version of the story. Despite dramatic license and some imaginative emotional scenes, he adheres pretty closely to his sources, primarily Plutarch’s Life of Caesar and Life of Brutus. You could also look to Velleius Paterculus, Nicolaus of DamOCSus, or Appian. If you’re more a secondary source sort of researcher, I can also recommend the podcast series The History of Rome. Episodes 39-44 chronicle Caesar’s life, but if you’re any sort of classicist, the entire series is well worth a listen. If you prefer the sensationalist take, HBO’s Romeis fantastic entertainment and extraordinarily well-acted. HBO compresses time, conflates characters, takes its own liberties, and gives you a different angle on events than Shakespeare does, but on the whole, it’s actually not that far off from reality, either. The showrunners said they strove for authenticity rather than accuracy, and the result is an exciting political drama that just happens to be set more than two thousand years ago. If you’re looking for a good long read, Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series covers the collapse of the Roman Republic beginning with Gaius Marius, whose martial reforms and political machinations in many ways set the stage for Caesar to be able to achieve what he did a few decades later, and ending with Antony and Cleopatra. Western culture has never been short on either nonfiction or fiction about Caesar and the Roman world — and if you have any good recommendations for me, I’d love to hear them.
This story started innocently enough. One of my current projects is to complete a full metrical and rhetorical analysis of Romeo and Juliet (as I did for Julius Caesar last year), but in order to begin that, I first have to complete a full check against the Folio. At OCS Education, we like to return to the 1623 First Folio to recover stage directions, emotionally inflected punctuation, and other textual variants which editors have sometimes obfuscated over the years. This practice can lead to a lot of intriguing discoveries; little did I know that one such curiosity yesterday would end up devouring a significant portion of my morning.
While checking 1.4, where Mercutio and Benvolio attempted to cheer Romeo up as they head for the Capulets’ ball, I ran across the fOCSinating error at right: Hora. as a prefix, presumably for Horatio. There is no character in Romeo and Juliet named Horatio, though the stage direction for this scene does specify the presence of “five or six other Maskers, Torch-bearers.” ‘How odd,’ I thought. ‘I wonder if that error is in the Q2.’ The 1599 second quarto of Romeo and Juliet is the other reliable text for this play; most modern editions conflate elements from the Q2 and the Folio to arrive at their preferred version of the text (though many slip in elements from Q1 as well). As you can see below, yes, the 1599 Q2 does contain this error — even more explicitly as Horatio. The Folio, then, simply retains what Q2 shows.
So I wondered, ‘Huh. How strange. Does this error exist in Q1, then?‘ A quick check revealed that: no, it doesn’t. These lines are not in Q1, which jumps straight from Romeo’s “So stakes me to the ground I cannot stirre” to Mercutio’s “Give me a case to put my visage in,” skipping the pictured section of dialogue entirely. So how did the wandering speech-prefix come about? (And ought I to call it a prefix-errant?).
The simplest explanation is basic printer error: speech prefixes and names were often struck as sets, rather than assembled from individual letters. This practice is why the prefixes and names within the verse generally appear in an italicized font rather than the plain text. It’s easy to imagine, then, that a Horatio, struck for some other play, somehow got mixed in with the Mercutios intended for this scene, and that the type-setter’s quick fingers grabbed it and placed it without the type-setter consciously noticing the incongruity. It’s possible, though I suspect far less likely, that the printer did strike the speech prefix Horatio for this single instance. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote Horatio once where he meant Mercutio (in simple Italianate error, or perhaps thinking of another role the same actor played) and that error stayed in the fair copy or prompt book Creede received to set the type off of. Other similar errors exist, as in the editions of Much Ado about Nothing which have Kemp instead of Dogberry — but each of those gets used more than once. It seems less likely that Creede would create and strike a new full-length nameplate to use only once, so, for the intellectual exercise, I decided to pursue my first theory.
I was at first only tickled by this appearance, amused to picture Hamlet’s best friend getting ready to go to a party in Verona. Did he take a weekend trip away from Wittenburg? Did he decide to move south after the tragedy at Elsinore? Fanfiction-like possibilities abound. But then I remembered — the Romeo and Juliet Q2 was printed in 1599. The first quarto of Hamlet wouldn’t be printed for another four years, so it’s unlikely that the speech prefix was struck for Hamlet‘s Horatio. The light amusement began to grow into a prickling curiosity. What character could it have existed for, then?
The only other Horatio who jumped to my mind is the gentleman in Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy — which, as it turns out, had a quarto printed in the same year as the Q2 of Romeo and Juliet in which this error originates. Ah-ha! This seemed to fit my theory perfectly. How easy to make the error if both plays were being printed at the same time, or at least within a reasonably close amount of time — especially since both are full of Spanish/Italianate names.
So, I went to Early English Books Online (EEBO) to find out, first, who printed the Q2 Romeo and Juliet, and if that was the same printhouse that put out the 1599 Q3 of The Spanish Tragedy. Answer: No. Thomas Creede printed the Romeo and Juliet Q2, while William White had the 1599 Spanish Tragedy. The next-earliest Spanish Tragedys were in 1592 and 1594, printed by Edward Allde, so there’s no strong connection there, either.
Who, then, is Horatio? How did this speech prefix sneak in? I felt compelled to push my theory farther. If we accept our Occam’s-Razor-Compatible explanation of a wandering prefix from something else originating at the same printhouse, then what other plays and books were that printer putting out around the same time, and was there a Horatio in any of them? Between 1597 and 1599, Creede printed six other plays, including the 1598 Richard III, John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, and the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, as well as a lot of prose histories. I skimmed through a couple of the plays — no Horatios (though, as a side note, skimming just the stage directions in an unfamiliar play can give you an interesting perspective on it. The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus apparently includes a brazen head, Venus and the Muses, Medea and Iphigenia having a conversation, and at least one murder). I, sadly, do not have the time to look through all of the narrative histories and discourses to see if Horatio appears in the text of any of them. As such, I have no notion where this error originates, who that first Horatio was that ended up reveling with Mercutio and Benvolio, and I may never have that curiosity satisfied. Such is often the travail of academia.
Why does any of this matter? I recognize that, while I found this to be a wonderful scavenger hunt and an entertaining game, not everyone is thoroughly geeky enough to share those effusive emotions about a relatively minor textual variant. So what’s the practical application? Well, that has to do with the choices editors have made in repairing the error over the years. Every modern edition of Romeo and Juliet that we have here in the OCS Education office assigns those lines to Mercutio. It makes sense. He and Romeo are enjoying a back-and-forth. But… they don’t have to be Mercutio’s lines. Would anything change by giving them instead to Benvolio? It would certainly make him more involved in Mercutio and Romeo’s conversation, part of their lively sparring, not separate from it. What sort of a different Benvolio might that yield for the entire production? I don’t know, but I’d like to give that option back to production companies and classroom discussions so that we can find out.