LC Hosts Bard Madness A Contest In Search of Shakespeare’s Greatest Play

In celebration of the Royal Shakespeare Company's unprecedented five-play, six-week residency this summer at Lincoln Center Festival 2011 in Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center announces Bard Madness, possibly the first Shakespeare tournament of its kind. Not unlike the brackets familiar to sports fans, Shakespeare fans can fill out a grid to determine Shakespeare's greatest play - with prizes going to those players whose choices most closely line up with the winning brackets.

Starting on Monday, March 28 and going until midnight on April 13, Shakespeare fans should visit Facebook.com/LCFestival or Facebook.com/Shuttlespeare to enter the competition. Visitors will be asked to fill out an online bracket, predicting the fates of 32 of Shakespeare's plays - does The Taming of the Shrew beat A Winter's Tale? Is it King Lear or Macbeth? - whittling the candidates down to one final play.

Then, from April 14 through 23, the "games" take place. A couple of the matchups will be decided each day, by a combination of 60% public participation and 40% on the decisions of a panel of experts that includes Lincoln Center Festival Director Nigel Redden; scholars David Scott Kastan (George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University) and James Shapiro (Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University); Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection; and British stage actors Tricia Gannon and Lloyd Hutchinson.

Participants are invited to come back to Facebook every day to make a case for their picks; participants can follow all the fun and advocate for their favorites by commenting on Facebook or using the Twitter tag #bardmadness. The cleverest comment each day will win a bonus copy of Shakespeare's complete works, courtesy of Arden Shakespeare. On April 23, Shakespeare's birthday, Lincoln Center will announce the winning play and The Players whose brackets came closest to the final results.

Lincoln Center Festival and Park Avenue Armory, in association with The Ohio State University, are bringing the Royal Shakespeare Company to New York for this six-week engagement, July 6 through August 14, 2011.

The prizes:
Grand Prize (one winner): Five pairs of tickets, one pair to each of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) plays in New York this summer; Two Round-Trip Airline Tickets* Courtesy of United Airlines, Official Airline of Lincoln Center, Inc.; plus a copy of the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works;
First Prize (five winners): One pair of tickets to a RSC performance in New York.
*The two round-trip, coach cabin tickets will be booked using up to 50,000 Continental Airlines OnePass® miles, provided by Lincoln Center. Terms and conditions apply. See rules for full details.

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