Social Proof 2.0

Finding social proof was a bit more difficult this time around, just because I wasn't as likely to find a whole bunch of Fanfiction nerds that would be willing to find me a whole bucket-load of potential scholarly articles like they'd one with finding fanfics. I did have one minion go above and beyond by going through possibly every book on Shakespeare adaptation looking for stuff. I was eventually nice enough to just point her towards ProQuest, and we did a combined search together and pooled our results. One of my articles for the paper actually comes from that.

But what really helped was Mr. Greene. I think I mentioned him in maybe my second post here on the blog, but a bit more detail might be nice, yes? He was the Honors English teacher in my high school for ninth and twelfth grades (an intro and a conclusion to our high school education), and has a Masters in English Education... or whatever Masters it'd be. He's also a specialist on Shakespeare adaptations. When we were first going through Romeo and Juliet our freshmen year, he actually took a week out of the school schedule JUST so that we could watch Romeo + Juliet. Quite honestly, it was an amazing week.

He's also the one that took us to see the Westernized version of The Taming of the Shrew in my senior year. He's done a lot of research into the idea of adaptations--he loves Henry V with Branaugh... or whatever his name is...and knows quite a few people in the scholarly department concerning the topic. He had one article immediately on hand for me to ask about when I first emailed him--the one about staged versions of Shakespeare--because a friend of a friend was the husband of the author. At least, that's what he told me. But he also took the research even farther. He's a big believer in printed books--he's an English teacher, it's practically a criteria for the job--and he found me a few different ones on Google books that might have worked. In the end, however, the information that I was really looking for was again found on ProQuest (by him). We've taken time to email back and forth over the last little while, and he even helped me flesh out a basic thesis that I was able to build from once I got my final scholarly articles.

It should be noted, though, that he's a bit skeptical about Fanfiction. It's expected.