Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Horton Bay General Store where Hemmingway hung out as a youngster. Day two of Oberon Up North had a lovely resonance for me. This year's Michigan Reads highlight was Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Tom Hunter took us to the site of those stories at Horton Bay on Lake Charlevoix (Pine Lake to Ernest) where we visited  Hemingway's youthful haunts, the birthplace of the great man's genius. Richard, Tom and Rosey sit on porch with Hemingway in photo on site. We stopped at the Horton Bay General Store, owned by Chip and Claudia Lorenger, where we enjoyed their great hospitality for lunch that included my first Smithwick's (say smithicks ) Irish Ale, Ireland's oldest ale now brewed by Guinness -- very good. Richard kept pointing out all the places that Hemmingway had sat or touched, but we were undaunted by his cynical references to another birthplace we all know -- at least Ernest Hemingway actually wrote the stories attributed to him. Red Fox Inn and general stor...

Torch Lake, Michigan This year Oberon Up North was about exuberance and awe. Our visit to Interlochen Center for the Arts ' Interlochen Shakespeare Festival provided a  Taming of the Shrew  unlike any Shakespeare performance I've ever seen. Dustin Tucker and Laura Ames Mittelstaedt portrayed Petruchio and Kate as a lion tamer and knife thrower in William Church's exuberant circus of a production. From the first act when Kate whirled knives at her terrified sister played by Ana Luderowski -- tied hand and foot to a giant wheel -- joyous imagery burnished this frolic a play.  Laura Ames Mittelstaedt as Kate in Interlochen's Taming of the Shrew Marshall Maynard Fredericks ' "Two Bears" sculpture fit into the circus theme outside the Harvey Theater on the Interlochen campus. Sue Width, Tom Hunter and Richard Joyrich admire Fredericks' bears. Oberoner and Interlochen Market Research Manger Gordon Berg  escorted our group around the huge Interlochen campu...

Wellesley College English teacher William E. Cain blasted Jonathan Bate's new book, Soul of the Age: a Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare in the June 21, 2009 edition of the Boston Globe in his review "Will we hardly knew ye -- and still don't" . Cain complains that Shakespeare bios in general are unhelpful and irritating when biographers ". . . lacking plentiful facts, fills pages with assertion, guesswork, and speculation about how his or her overview pertains to Shakespeare’s life." Cain complains specifically of Bate: Reading “Soul of the Age’’ requires much patience, in order to endure Bate’s penchant for guessing, speculating, and surmising. In one of his early chapters, in the span of just two pages you will encounter phases such as: seems to have been, it is highly probable, this was usually, it is highly probable, it is a fair inference, would probably therefore. It all amounts to a fragile fabric stretching across a void.  This is a c...

This brilliant article by James Harkin of the Financial Times  spreads light and heat on the post-paper world and could be a primer on how to launch the authorship issue into Jovian orbit:  The author as performer by James Harkin, Published June 19, 2009 Financial Times (ft.com) Harkin said:  When almost everything is available in a digital world of zeroes and ones, the thing that is impossible to duplicate is the intensely involving experience of live performance. The flamboyant talks (TED) described above are rarely interactive in the conventional sense; they don’t encourage any kind of formal participation from the audience. Instead, they speak to a desire for an intellectual experience involving enough to soak up all our attention. James Harkin, FT, 06/19/09

Dear Oberon, Now that was a good old-fashioned Oberon meeting Thursday night.    Great conversation.    Great cookies from the Safety Director. A great video. We welcomed prospective member Earl Mandell to the fold with returning new member Bruna Lilly. We saw the 30 minute DVD “The Implausible Mr. Shakespeare,” a raucous, pointed attack on the tradition that William of Stratford is the author of the works with plenty of examples of why that tradition just doesn’t make sense.    It contains one of the best analyses of the goofy Droeshout engraving at the front of the First Folio which people have thought to represent Shakespeare’s appearance now for 400 years. The video provoked a lively discussion afterword. We will probably be ordering printed copies of our Oberon Blog which just might become a kind of yearbook for us.    Linda Theil has looked into it, and although we haven’t made a final decision yet, when we do, it appears that copies might ...

On June 14, 2009 the New York Times published an article in their sports section titled  "Author, Author - Did A.W. Tillinghast Really Design Bethpage Black"  by Charles McGrath . The story compared the question of who designed this year's U.S. Open (golf) course to the authorship issue. The Shakespeare authorship issue has not only "seeped into the culture", as SOS President Matthew Cossolotto has said, it has become recognized enough for a sports reporter to use it as a metaphor for the question of whole really designed the U.S. Open golf course. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal . Today the New York Times . Tomorrow the world. ( Le Monde ?) In any event, the article cried out for a response, so here is the one I sent: To the Editor: Congratulations to the New York Times for putting Shakespeare where he belongs--on the sports page ("Author, Author," June 15). Golf, no less. Infact, there is evidence that Shakespeare was quite an athlete hims...

The Ohio Shakespeare Festival will present As You Like It at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays July 9-25 and Romeo & Juliet at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays July 30 through August 16 at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in Akron, Ohio. Buy tickets online or call 330-673-8761 for more information.

Water Works Theater Company, Inc . will present Shakespeare's Scottish play in July at Starr Jaycee Park in Royal Oak, MI. The schedule is:  July 23-26, July 30-August 2 and August 6-9, 2009, beginning at 8:00 pm on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and at 7:00 pm on Sundays. Bring your own seating to the event. Buy tickets online at: http://www.waterworkstheatre.com/tickets.html  for $15 each plus a $2 online processing fee. The website says: You may also purchase tickets (cash or check only) at the Starr Jaycee Park box office one hour before each performance. Starr Jaycee Park is on 13 Mile Road between Main and Crooks, two miles east of Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak, MI .

The Flint area Shakespeare in the Park production of Midsummer Nights' Dream -- produced by Flint parks project director, Kay Kelly -- is free to the public provided by a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation. Burton's James Cech will play Puck and Flint's Brian Haggard will play Bottom. The event began last week in Flint's riverfront Kearsley Park; the remainder of the schedule includes: Thursday, June 18, 7 p.m. - For-Mar Nature Preserve, Burton Friday, June 19, 7 p.m. - Clover Beach, Linden Saturday, June 20, 7 p.m. - Flushing County Park, Flushing Twp Sunday, June 21, 7 p.m. - Crossroads Village, Genesee Twp Information according to an article by Chad Swiatecki blogged June 10, 2009 on M-Live. Thanks to Doug T. for bringing this event to our attention. LT

Dear Oberon, Just a brief reminder that our regular meeting for June is this Thursday, June 18, at our regular meeting place, the Farmington Public Library on 12 Mile Rd. between Orchard Lake Rd. and Farmington Road. Doors of Conference Room A open at 6:45. We will be making plans for the Michigan Shakespeare Festival on Saturday, August 1, including a presentation table which the Festival has promised to make available to us. Also on the calendar is the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (at which the MSF is taking aim!), the University Musical Society's Globe Theater presentation of Love's Labor's Lost in October, and the SF/SOS national conference in Houston in November. Plus we will plan on taking a closer look at the MSF's two Shakespeare offerings for this year, The Tempest and As You Like It in July. Remember that starting in July we will be meeting on Wednesday evenings in an attempt to better accommodate schedules of our members. Let me know if th...

Dear Oberon, Looking ahead, our next Oberon meeting will be Thursday, June 18, at the Farmington Library; room opens 6:45 p.m. We are most pleased to announce that, courtesy of the Adult Learning Institute, Oberon will be making a donation to the Michigan Shakespeare Festival this year.    I will be presenting “The Real Shakespeare” to ALI at their meeting on October 1, featuring Ron Destro’s “Who Really Wrote as Shake-speare,” which we ran at the UNbirthday party in April to good reviews. Looking back, we covered a lot of territory at our May meeting.    It was good to welcome from the ALI new Oberon member Del M. Final plans have been made for this year’s Oberon Up North, which will take place at or around Torch Lake at the end of June and will include an afternoon at Interlochen, a performance of  The Taming of the Shrew  at Interlochen’s Shakespeare Festival, and a surprise junket into Michigan’s literary history. This year’s participants wi...