Shakespeare's Birthday and *+Lovers on Twitter

Today is Shakespeare's 446th Birthday and, in honor of that, I'm including as many Shakespeare images as I can in this entry being as much of an Anglophile as possible. It also happens to be St. George's Day, the long since abandoned national holiday of England. So, the whole Anglophile thing fits. (sidebar: my roommate is actually in England right now and I am beyond jealous of her)

I failed at eating fish and chips because the only fish and chips place in Amsterdam shut down. I bought falafel and chips instead. That counts, right? Now if only I could find some malt vinegar....

Failing the fish and chips, I'm drinking tea and about to settle down to watch Shakespeare In Love.

I know I know. I can hear you groaning. However! It's the only Shakespeare-related film I brought with me abroad and, without access to Netflix, I can't watch any of his plays online.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I'm watching Romeo and Juliet live on twitter right now. The Royal Shakespeare Company has started a new project called Such Tweet Sorrow. They've taken some of their actors, cast them in modern renditions of the Romeo and Juliet characters and let them loose on the internet (namely twitter, but several characters also have YouTubes, tumblrs and last.fm accounts).

The current buzz right now is that @JulietCap16 is about to have her sweet sixteen masked ball party (which just happens to be occurring on the Bard's b-day. Nice touch, RSC) and I'm betting @mercuteio and @romeo_mo are going to crash it. Just a guess.

I meant to plug this when it first started so that anyone interested wouldn't have to play catch up. Fortunately, the official site has a great running synopsis of the online action that, frankly, is a lot like No Fear Shakespeare. No, the actors don't tweet in iambic pentameter, but they do tweet A LOT. Sometimes I'll read the synopsis and have that familiar feeling I have when I read the actual No Fear Shakespeare of, "wait, really? How did you get that from that?"

Even if you didn't know it was Shakespeare's birthday (because I mean, really, who else is as big of a geek as I am?), I would recommend checking out Such Tweet Sorrow tonight because SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN Act I Scene V style.