Primrose Road

It's Will Shakespeare's birthday (maybe; it's a guess based on his baptismal date and the fact that it would be kind of cool if he was born and died on the same date). If you're in Washington DC by any chance this weekend, be sure to catch the Shakespeare's Birthday Open House at the Folger Shakespeare Library this Sunday. There will be Shakespeare-related fortune telling. And a "Happy Birthday"-singing Queen Elizabeth. I'm excited. ;)

I've been looking at Shakespeare-inspired card and board games during my time at the Folger (there's *really* not that much for a new media person to do in the archives, though, contrary to popular belief, I do read and make use of Early Modern documents); the games will allow me to at least contextualize some of my work on how very un-new and unexciting "interactivity" is.

Saturday morning (yep, I spend Saturday mornings in the li-berry this term), I looked at a card game from 1900 and a checkers game from 1865. Since I'm most likely not going to write about the card game (and therefore don't have to worry about self-plagiarism), I wanted to share some of the rather hilarious (and sometimes justalittle blatantly racist, sexist, and/or essentialist) questions posed to game players. If you answer all of them correctly, you win either $5000 in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice, a batch of mascarpone brownies, a "Fight Sexism" Purim gragger, or absolutely nothing, depending on my mood.

Questions are all taken from "The Study of Shakespeare: An Instructive Game" (Camden, Maine: Shakespeare Club, c. 1900).

1. What is the name of a savage and deformed slave?
2. What is the sweetest and happiest of all Shakespeare's comedies?
3. Who was a genius without moral fiber?
4. Who was one of the most fascinating women in the world?
5. Who fell in a brook accidentally and was drowned? (Easy one, but I thought it was funny that they totally ignored the whole discussion about whether or not she deserved a Christian burial.)
6. What play may America claim as suggesting and shaping?
7. Who possessed those winning ways that give the weaker half of mankind so much influence for good and evil over the stronger?