On your marks, get set......

It turns out that my friend, let’s call him Andy, is a tricky customer. Despite claiming to have enjoyed the egocentric nature of last year’s effort he decided that the alphabet approach was too easy and threw down the challenge to use Shakespeare’s plays as the context for a series of personal portraits of my visit to Seattle.

I know much less than I should do about Bill and his work, though I once played the part of Caliban in a secondary school production and I have also seen Shakespeare in Love at the movies. My mum had a copy of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare on the bookshelf at home when I was a kid and in Australia I was lucky enough to meet someone from New York who performed two minute puppet versions of the plays: interestingly his name also was Bill.

Seattle and my experiences thereof does not immediately strike me as having anything to do with the titles of Shakespearian plays so this, coupled with my own ignorance forces me to ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE.

After an email or two of negotiation, because frankly Shakespeare’s titles are not always as inspiring as they could be and a full list runs to more than the alphabetic 26, Andy has submitted this as the final list to be observed

Hamlet
King Lear
Macbeth
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
Henry V part one
Henry V part two
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labours Lost
Measure for Measure
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter's Tale

If you ever have business dealings with Andy, be careful.