I can't quite tell you why I have a fascination with Shakespeare, but I do. By the way, I totally feel a lesson coming on here, so be prepared. I took a course on Shakespeare from my mentor Carolyn, who is revered as the Shakespeare scholar throughout Colorado colleges. I learned so much and then had the opportunity to sit in the class again and lead study groups as her teaching assistant the year after I graduated. I loved it. The theories...the symbolism...the puns. It's great. And yet, if Shakespeare lived today he'd be thought of as a hack since back in the 16th/17th centuries it was no big deal for someone to plagiarize another person's works. The only thing was, Shakespeare tweaked it enough for it to live for centuries. Ever hear of Christopher Marlowe? Didn't think so. (BTW, Marlowe may have written the original Romeo and Juliet.)
Anyway, April 23 is listed as Bill's death day. No one really knows what happened. Some think that it may have been his birthday (he was baptized as an infant on April 26) and he partied too hard and died. Don't know. But I thought I'd pay tribute to the man that I've often considered gaining a Master's Degree in. I still may someday. According to Carolyn, even better than studying Shakespeare in school is to be a dramaturg for a Shakespeare Company. A dramaturg is the researcher to make sure a play is historically-correctly portrayed. I did that for a George Bernard Shaw play I was in and loooved it. I have my dad's interest in history and trivia and my mom's intensity to study. I was born to dramaturg.
Going on...my New Year's resolution for 2007 was to begin our family genealogy. As everything I begin, I worked my tail off. Matt was having heart surgery in the middle of March and I had found a lot of names to enter on Josh's side of the family. I entered over 5000 names before Matt's surgery. It was a lot of work, but I happily did it. (Less than two months later my laptop crashed and I lost all of my work and hadn't backed it up. Can we say, "Oh crap!"?) Someone else in Josh's family had already done a lot of work and I just discovered it and entered it. I found out that Josh's family had a lot of royalty in their line: Charlemagne and other various kings and queens. Even Old King Cole. Did you know he was real? I had printed all this information out and flipped through it at one point and discovered that there was a King Malcolm from Scotland. This one stumped me. I knew I'd heard of him before, but couldn't figure out from where. I asked Josh if he was the king in Braveheart, but Josh said that king was English. I continued what I was doing and eventually forgot all about it. Finally, I got to inputting the information on those pages I had flipped through. I entered King Malcolm and then turned the page to his father, King Duncan. At this point I was reeling. Who the heck were these people? I knew them, I knew that I knew them. And then I found the dude's death date. It was a specific day and year (sometime in the 13th or 14th century). At this point, all the dates were listed as just years, so I knew this was something of interest. Then I saw the note next to the death date and place: "Killed by Macbeth." Josh's extremely great-grandfather was the king killed by Macbeth, whose son was accused of it so he left the land and eventually came home to reclaim his crown when he was found innocent. Granted, Shakespeare altered historic events to create great drama, but Josh's family is FAMOUS!!! I thought this was soo cool! We have a famous family.
Now, don't judge me for claiming Josh's family line as my own. I brought some royalty to the mix as well. Such as the Spencers, as in Diana Princess of Wales. Oh, yeah.
And we've got Lady Godiva. I was going to post a picture of her, but she's famous for protesting against her husband's taxation on the people by riding her horse naked through the town. (Anyone else think of Abby on that one?)
So, Josh brings to our family a man killed by "Something wicked this way comes" and my contribution is a nudist. Are we the coolest people, or what?
Happy 445th birthday, Shakespeare!
4 comments:
My hubby has a lot of "royalty" in his family too, it comes though from un-wed mothers, that had at least a one night fling with royality... the things we learn!
That is so totally cool.
What a fun post.
I like reading your blog.
I've got an unverified claim to Jesse James and a relation who was married into Daniel Boone's family.
Other than that, my roots are all unconnected masses.
Oh, and horse thieves.
You are soooo funny some times! :) Hey, the lost family history stuff... by chance did you give me a copy of the file before it crashed? I remember getting the file from you one time while we were visiting... I guess I will have to send you what I have and you can see if it is what you were working on. I finally finished my home server with redundancy so I should not ever loose important things again!
I forgot all about Princess Di. I think you told me that about Josh's family, but cool things like that are always great to relearn!
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