For Shakespeare's 400th I Did ... Nothing.

It's been an odd sort of year.  Once upon a time I used to post multiple times a day.  My average of several years was near 2posts/day at one point.  Now it's more like a few times a month.  Life gets in the way.  Social media has made it easier to simply like and retweet various stories quickly, instead of firing up a blog post to wrap them and send them back out into the world with my own "value add".  Every day I look at my backlogs of material to write about, books to review, stuff to giveaway, and wish that I could do nothing but Shakespeare full time.

Which makes this year especially troublesome for me because, as you may have noticed, it's the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.  So, as people tend to do because we like numbers with lots of zeroes in them, we've all been inundated with Shakespeare stories from every possible source and every possible angle for the last several months.  Every day for months I've scanned my daily headlines, seen another project of massive scale and thought, "I wonder what I'll do?"

Well, here we are, and I've taken the Cordelia option.

I thought about making some hipster jokes about how you my faithful Shakespeare geeks have been into Shakespeare since long before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon.  But that's not fair, because at the end of the day if all this hoop-de-doo makes new fans of some people, then I'm all for it. I'm not denying the latecomers.

Instead I like to think of what the Catholic priest wishes he could say to the standing room only congregation on Easter Sunday each year:  "Welcome!  Where've you been?"

Shakespeare makes life better. That was true yesterday, it's true today, and it will be true tomorrow and another 400 years from now.

Absolutely, celebrate the man and his works on his birthday. Just don't stop.