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Shakespeare & Beyond

As You Like It in Esperanto: Washington, DC, 1910

Folger Finds delivers delightful and insightful moments with the Folger collection. Sarah Hovde, a cataloger at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shares the story behind a 1910 Esperanto edition of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  

Comments

Delighted to see this. Now 80, I learned Esperanto at 20 and used it for correspondence, club events, and travel in Europe and China.

EJames Lieberman — November 19, 2015

Have used Esperanto from age 20 (now 80) in U.S., Europe and China. It’s helped me understand much about linguistics.

EJames Lieberman — November 19, 2015

This was very cool. Thank you for the description of the event. Obviously, i’m an Esperantist, so i’m interested. I hadn’t seen this much information about the event from that time.

Not unrelated: I went to the http://babel.hathitrust.org/ site and tried to download the play, in Esperanto, “made available … under Creative Commons license”, but since i’m not an affiliate of the organization i’m not allowed to download the whole document except one page at a time! They have some convoluted explanation about how it might be available on Google Book Search, so why i don’t go there and leave them alone!

This is the kind of thing that was supposed to go away with a free and open internet. I’m an Esperantist and i can’t even get, free, open-sourced information about my own movement’s history. Thank you for allowing me, and everyone, free access to your information about this Esperanto event from 1910.

trio — November 19, 2015

I researched this in 2010, Here is a post I just wrote on the subject: http://gxirafo.blogspot.com/2017/05/as-you-like-it-in-esperanto-washington.html

Ralph Dumain — May 13, 2017

I am #8 of Maurice H. Jarvis’ 9 children, and I was so excited to find this great information on the Internet. Maurice Jarvis played “jaqucs” in the 1910 play in Esperanto in DC. He belonged to The Shakespeare Society in Washington. At the time of the play he was 25 years old – 20 years before I was born. I have his original picture, which is pasted on black cardboard. However, I never knew in what year the play was held. As a little girl, I remember him often going to the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Margaret (Jarvis) Bowen — July 1, 2017

[…] Related: Take a look at our Esperanto translation of As You Like […]

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