shakespeare fan fic

[kip_w]

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The Bard himself was no stranger to borrowing, but what he inspired in others was a desire to continue his stories with his characters, using his voice as nearly as possible. Here's a lovely example, "Falstaff's Wedding," by Mr. Kenrick, taking the great sinner from where he was unceremoniously kicked to the curb by an faithless friend and carrying on in the nearest he could manage to the voice of Shakespeare.

You can read it on the screen here, and turn the pages of a facsimile edition (from the library at Rice University, where I worked for a while) as you go, or you can download it. If I were you, I shouldn't even bother with any attempts to turn the words into plain text, as archive.org has shown themselves to be fairly awful — and not in a good way — in that regard.

Speaking of awful, LJ has been doing stupid things to links lately, so here's the above link again, written out plainly —
http://www20.us.archive.org/stream/falstaffswedding00kenr#page/n7/mode/2up
— for you to copy and paste into a new browser window, if you wish.

Let me know what you think, if you develop an opinion. I haven't read very far into the play yet.
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Comments

[timill]

I think you may be in the Rich Text editor rather than the HTML one (tabs at top right of edit window).

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I go back and forth between them. It happens that if I start editing in RichText and then go to HTML, I get a bunch of confusing garbage in place of your paragraphs, so I generally stay where I started out, from self preservation. I should have taken a look at the entry after I typed it, but I was in a hurry to go somewhere else for something I don't remember now.

Must have been important. Anyway, I edited that.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's going to have to be a more readable text before I attempt this one. The "long s" alone is terminally annoying to me, and the sheer quality of the photography of the original maximizes the interference of bleedthrough.

The one thing I note is the first sentence of the preface with its description of "the remarkable ill success of preceding imitations of Shakespeare," and who's to say this isn't just another one? Not its own author, that's for sure. It does not increase my hopes for the quality of this particular subcategory of fan fiction.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I used to feel that way about long esses. I guess I'm just used to them now. The bleed-through could be better. All they had to do was put a black sheet behind the one being photographed — I do that all the time when I'm scanning. Even a fairly simple Photoshop adjustment would make that better.

It's not going to be their OCR, though. I went ahead and looked at it just now. A sample:

Enter Sir John Falstaff, folns*

FSR?I^ H A T a fcurvy quarter is this ? Not a bufh,
^sl 3o£. ^ or a blind Cupid, in the neighbourhood !
y^v W Jf^ 'fblood, my legs will fail me e're I reach a
13$ IF*" m taVem * phoo — Pno °— lt is fome comfort,
V&jF^j?3eJl( however, I efcap'd being fuffocated. The
-. green-apron'd rafcals, crowding after the

jjroceffion, had well nigh made an end of me;

AAAAA MY FREAKIN' EYES!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I see that, on top of its other problems, the OCR can't decipher the long s either.

[carbonel]

Alas, I find it too difficult to read, or I'd try to get the mostly off-again play-reading group to tackle it. And it's not on Project Gutenberg, though several works that appear there happen to cite it.

This story, from the 2010 Yuletide collection, is one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations.