All the world's a tweet at Wellesley College
WELLESLEY — The tweet’s the thing.
Shakespeare already has 14,000 lines, 154 sonnets and 39 plays to his credit.
For the first time, the marathon reading of the Bard’s complete works at Wellesley College will also be immortalized in 140-word news bites on the social networking service, Twitter.
‘‘24 Shakes,’’ billed by the school’s Shakespeare Society as ‘‘an all-day-and-night literary adventure’,’ kicked off Friday afternoon at the Shakespeare House, a Tudor-style campus cottage modeled after the great poet’s birthplace in Stratford, England. It is scheduled to end between 2 and 3 p.m. Saturday, and is free and open to the public.
At 3 p.m. sharp Friday, first-year English major Liz Wright and two friends dove right into ‘‘Coriolanus’’ in the society’s main room lined with wooden benches and a dusty portrait of Elizabeth I. In the adjoining music room, first-year religion major Callie Kovacs and two other ‘‘Shakers,’’ as society members call themselves, plunged into ‘‘Much Ado About Nothing.’’
A few feet away, junior Galen Danskin had a piece of technology Shakespeare hardly could have imagined: an iPod Touch.
She was twittering sentence fragments using the hashtag #24hrShakes ‘‘Richard III on the stage? Students from Smith helping us read upstairs? Virginity jokes in All’s Well? Exciting Afternoon!’’
About an hour later, the group was moving on. ‘‘Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus on deck (very soon!!)’’ Danskin tweeted.
The freewheeling event — where participants read several works aloud simultaneously, continuously dropping in and out of the play as they wish — was scheduled to run all night. Like a spoken-word relay, actors take turns dropping out for cat naps and coffee breaks, but at no time do the readings halt.
‘‘Shakespeare’s words never stop. That’s the rule,’’ said Shakespeare Society president Ashley Gramolini, a senior theatre major.
More than 50 people — society members, their friends and relatives, and Shakespeare loving faculty and community folk — are expected to stop by and play a role of some kind.
Danskin said when the group hosted the event in 2004 and 2009, it was pleasantly surprised by a 2 a.m. rush when post-partying students returned to campus and dropped by for a sonnet or two.
Active since 1877, the Wellesley Shakespeare Society is the oldest continuous society at the college, just two years younger than the school itself. College founder Henry Fowle Durant founded the group with 12 members who desired to undertake a ‘‘systematic study of Shakespeare as a means of mental development,’’ according to college lore.
Today, the society’s 36 members produce a full Shakespeare production each semester and organize special celebrations for the campus, including a party for the Bard’s birthday in April.
Wellesley’s marathon read-aloud session has inspired at least two similar collegiate spinoff events in recent years at Caltech and at Yale.
Reading marathons are a popular Massachusetts pastime. Perhaps the best-known is the annual recitation of Herman Melville’s ‘‘Moby-Dick,’’ hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum every January since 1995.
Devotees of the 14th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri have been meeting monthly since 2000 at Boston College to read his masterwork, ‘‘The Divine Comedy,’’ canto-by-canto. In Dedham, actors recite passages from James Joyce novels during the annual Joyce Ramble 10K road race every spring.
That Shakespeare often used men in women’s clothing to play female characters at his Globe Theatre productions in the early 1600s particularly amuses the 21st-century women at the prestigious Seven Sisters school.
Keeping to the spirit of their hero, Wellesley Shakers have been known to bind their breasts with muslin to play male parts and recreate epic battle scenes in the Celtic tragedy ‘‘Cymbeline,’’ said Wright.
‘‘We absolutely love the historical inversion,’’ she said.
To view "24 Shakes" in action, go here. Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com
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