Fellow blogger Duane Morin (aka The Shakespeare Geek) has written a wonderful book called Hear My Soul Speak.

I’m going to tell you about it, but if this is your thing, you should already be reading his blog on a daily basis. If you came to this blog looking for steady news and conversation about Shakespeare, his was really the blog you were looking for. My blog is really more about a weekly riddle and a heap of good intentions. But I digress.

Hear My Soul Speak is a collection of quotes from Shakespeare that anyone can use for weddings. No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is required. Duane helpfully breaks down the quotes into different categories, whether you’re exchanging vows, giving a toast, or even proposing in the first place!

Even if you don’t have a wedding in the near future, it’s a fun book to read to geek out on Shakespeare quotes with Duane. With his trademark infectious enthusiasm, he offers insight on what each quote actually means, and when it is most appropriately used. He also offers suggestions on which quotes not to use, because their original context may not be as romantic as they first appear.

Hear My Soul Speak is available for download for just under eight dollars. It’s definitely worth checking out.

The Shakespeare Teacher received no compensation for writing this review.

I know I haven’t been blogging much lately, but we just reached 50,000 hits, and so what better way to celebrate the 4th of July than to break out our favorite cake? (I didn’t get a shot of the SiteMeter counter.)

The 50,000th hit came in from Palm Bay, Florida on June 27th at 9:41pm. The visitor followed a link from this page to get here.

At this point in time, the blog’s Technorati authority is 104.

Once again, many thanks to all who have visited, and continue to visit. I can’t really say I’ve earned the last 10,000 hits, but hopefully the milestone will inspire me to return to daily posting.

This blog just reached 40,000 hits, the week after celebrating its third birthday. It’s time for the cake and SiteMeter counter!

The 40,000th hit came in at 4:47pm on Thursday, January 7, 2010, via a Google search for “Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem,” the Latin translation of “All the world’s a stage.” As if to prove the point, the hit came in from Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany.

At this point in time, the blog’s Technorati Authority is 112. There are 636 posts (including this one) and 1,904 comments.

Once again, many thanks to all who have visited, and continue to visit.

Fans of this blog may also appreciate a link I found via the Shakespeare Geek. It’s a script of The Big Lebowski as it might have been written by Shakespeare. It’s extremely well done, and should be greatly enjoyed by fans of both the film and the playwright. It’s very appropriately called The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.

Enjoy!

It’s been a turbulent year, and there hasn’t always been time for blogging, but I would like to finish out 2009 with a quick listing of my ten favorite posts (and the discussions that followed them) of the last twelve months. Enjoy, and I’ll be back in 2010!

1. Conundrum: The Big Picture (July 28)

2. Arrested Development: A Freudian Analysis (October 16)

3. Word of the Week: Community (March 18)

4. Augusto Boal (1931-2009) (May 3)

5. Othello Prank’d (June 23)

6. Did You Know – Three Point Oh (May 13)

7. Good Questions (May 5)

8. Question of the Week (May 4)

9. Conundrum: Shakespeare Invites (May 26)

10. Your Move: Thursday Morning Riddle (February 19)

If you’ve stopped in over the past couple of days, you may have noticed that the blog wasn’t quite itself. It all started when I tried to fix a problem with the RSS feed in Google Reader, and everything got out of control. It took me some time to fix it, but everything seems to be back the way it was. We now return you to the blog, already in progress.

I say this because, even though I have not been posting, new visitor Dharam has been busy creating entertaining anagrams for us. First she did the Shakespeare anagram challenge from February. Then she started to anagram the Thursday Morning Riddle. You can see her efforts here, here, here, here, and here. In each case, her anagram is a riff on the riddle’s answer, and scores high on the Anagram Hallmarks. Her later anagrams even rhyme!

Well, at least someone around here is producing. Dharam, you have shamed me into returning to the blog. Thanks for that.

This is just a quick post to acknowledge that I was able to blog every day in the month of May 2009. And yes, this post counts.

Moving forward, my penance paid, I will to try to continue to blog on a regular basis, though it may not be every day. Please feel free to comment on new posts, or old. Check out the Active posts, or browse old Questions. And you can always check out the right-hand sidebar to see which old threads have been revived.

Thank you for being part of this grand experiment.

Shakespeare Teacher is going to bed.

Lawrence Lessig has been hailed as a man of brilliance and vision. With his recent innovation of e-mail bankruptcy, I am convinced.

I have unreturned e-mail going back almost two years now, and I blame the iPhone. I used to come home, check my e-mail, and respond to the most pressing items right away. Now, I can read my e-mail wherever I am. I can deal with the contents mentally, but I’m not always in a position to respond right away. When I get home now, I look at all of my new e-mail and say “Oh, I read those already.”

I’ve noticed a similar convergence/replacement effect with Facebook. Once I joined, I all but stopped blogging. A daily status update to my 200 closest friends felt like enough of a public presence. Plus, it was less effort on my part, more likely to generate feedback, more likely to reach people I knew, and was more interactive. But my voice was curtailed. I was part of a community, but it wasn’t my own space.

I’m going to continue with Facebook, but I’m back on the blog as well. It just took me a few weeks to sort out this particular convergence. Compared to the e-mail/iPhone problem, I worked this one out relatively quickly.

And now I have about twenty unreturned e-mails on Facebook as well. Ah, convergence…

Well, I blew it.

For the first time since the feature debuted in January 2007, I flaked on the Thursday Morning Riddle. Sure, there was that one time in August 2007 where I knew I’d be away and I posted a riddle-laden puzzle on Wednesday. I also didn’t riddle during my recent blogging hiatus. But those were deliberate. Yesterday, it just slipped my mind.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if the blog were brimming with fresh anagrams, discussion topics, puzzles, and reflections on the teaching of a certain writer whose name I am too ashamed to mention since I also missed blogging on his birthday. But lately, it’s been an all-riddle show, and yesterday it wasn’t even that. My apologies to all of the visitors who were let down. I’m grateful for all of the readers who – with almost unlimited options – choose to visit this site on a regular basis. Even with the lack of activity lately, this site is still one of the top 202,115 blogs on the Internet, and I don’t take that for granted.

I especially want to thank all of the readers who took the time to leave comments like “Hi! It’s good blog!” on this post from March 2008. I appreciate the thought, as well as the links you included. Please don’t take offense that I deleted those comments, but I just haven’t been feeling it lately. It’s not good blog, and it hasn’t been for some time.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I made a commitment to blog every day in November 2008, and I did it. So I now commit to blog every day in May 2009. And yes, this post counts.

The Shakespeare Teacher is in.

The Shakespeare Teacher has returned. We now return you to the blog, already in progress.

Thanks to DeLisa, Annalisa, Claudia, Ro, and Kimi for helping keep the ball in the air while I was away. Contest results will be posted in a few days. But first, we have some business.

This blog just reached 30,000 hits, and that means that it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, I was the 30,000th hit. I checked the blog last night when I got home from work at 6:22pm. I was checking to see how close we were to 30,000.

At this point in time, the blog’s Technorati ranking is 228,034 with an authority of 26.

Once again, many thanks to all who have visited, and continue to visit.