Dear Oberon,
Just a reminder that we will take up where we left off at our February meeting this Thursday at the Farmington Library on 12 Mile Rd. between Orchard Lake Rd. and Farmington Rd. Doors to our meeting room A open at 6:45.
Our special guest will again be Robert Duha, managing director of the Michigan Shakespeare Festival. We will also welcome festival artistic director John Neville-Andrews, who will be directing The Tempest for the festival this summer. At our last meeting, Robert revealed some fascinating plans and dreams for the MSF, which could well involve our Oberon group. More on that in a separate e-mail report and at our meeting Thursday.
Also, be on hand to plan our Shakespeare Unbirthday Party for our April meeting, one of the best unbirthdays you will ever celebrate. The idea, of course, is that the world has been commemorating the wrong date for Shakespeare’s birth for 400 years now. Why have they done that? Because it is the wrong Shakespeare! Help us correct that little error this year.
We will then move on to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets later this year. No problem there. The Sonnets were indeed published in 1609, exactly 400 years ago.
But wait! The publisher’s note referred to “our ever-living poet,” as if he had already died because indeed he had. Not the Stratford Shakespeare who lived out his shady days to 1616, as is well known, but the “ever” poet, E. Ver, i.e. Edward Vere, who had died in 1604. If there ever was an “ever-living poet” in 1609, it would certainly have been Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
So, yes, time is out of joint, and it is our lot to set it right. In April we will celebrate how out of joint it has come to be, and we will set it right in October.
A full plate indeed. What a wonderful 2009 it will be!
Yours, devoted
Tom Hunter
Chair
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