LibriVox loves Shakespeare, but getting his plays recorded has always been a very major undertaking. We have now only four completed as collaborative works, and one recorded as a solo. A fair number more are underway, but the task of cat-herding all the parts and bits and files and readers and pronunciations is unlike any other at LibriVox.
Laurie Anne did a MARVELLOUS job project managing this from the initial idea … starting the project on 21st April … marshalling a proof-listener, Brian, to check every file as it came in … and dropping me a note “hey, wouldn’t it be fun if you edited this?” I can’t quite imagine what I was thinking when I agreed to … and I can’t admit how long this actually took to edit. Een though I only did 4 out of 5 acts in the end (Laurie Anne did the fourth, I just ran out of time and energy.) But, lordy, it sounds great as an ensemble piece! And it has 440 downloads in 2 days. And I’m completely sure Will would approve.
A bunch of us LibriVoxers have been meeting periodically in London to record various works together, and the longest running of those has recently been catalogued. 17 chapters of recycled British folklore and gossip from the very dear T.F. Thistleton-Dyer have been amusing, bemusing and plain boring a dozen of us for a year now … we’ve ploughed through a chapter or three at every meeting. I shan’t be TOO hard on the fellow, because ridiculous though most of the stories are, they are at least split into lots of sub-sections, often with guest speaking voices, and we’ve had a lot of fun fooling around with those. I have the dubious honour of being the only LVer to have participated in every chapter, and I’m pretty sure that entitles me to my own straitjacket with TF-TD woz ‘ere on the back.
It’s interesting to record with other people around … I feel like I made fewer mistakes with people listening to me (the editors of these chapters may disagree!) And it’s quite sociable, too, gives an instant and limitless source of conversation in wondering at the lengths of TF’s literary poaching.
Probably the least expected of all the chapters is the one collecting stories of Dead Hands - linked below for your listening pleasure:
This takes my total catalogued recording time up over 61 hours, which is nice, because, what with struggling to finish an old solo project, putting in long-ago claimed chapters, and editing the Midsummer Night’s Dream behemoth, it feels like I’ve not been doing much “real” recording.
Another gem catalogued recently was the splendid essay by Agnes Repplier, (1855-1950), titled “A Short Defence of Villains”, in which she argues that Modern Literature is impoverished somewhat by a lack of really good moustache-twirling villains for its heroes and heroines to quest against. You’ll need quite a good background in the literature of her time to make sense of all the references, but it’s a lovely piece regardless.