Sonnet Popularity

On the whole plays vs poems thing, Carl just gave me the idea to search for “Shakespeare’s sonnet ##”.  Want to know which ones are the most popular? First is #1, which I suppose makes sense, gotta start somewhere. Second is #20.  That’s the, ahem, "gay one".  That is, that’s the one that’s supposedly proof that Shakespeare’s homosexual. Next comes #30.  I have no idea why that one’s so special. Then we get to some favorites: #18 (“Shall I compare thee”, perhaps the most famous of them all) #29 (“When in disgrace, with Fortune and men’s eyes”).  I wonder if the Rufus Wainwright musical version has anything to do with that. #73.   I like this one. #130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). #116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds….”) aka the Wedding Sonnet.   Although the order is questionable, I guess the only real surprise is #30.  One of my experts out there want to enlighten us on why that one deserves to be in the top 10?   D

Guilt

This will sound like a homework question, but it’s been 20something years since I was in high school so you’ll have to trust me that it’s not :). It’s easy to find ways in which Shakespeare’s villains feel guilt for their actions, whether it’s Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, or Claudius’ outright “My offense is rank, it smells to heaven” prayer.  Should we count Edmund’s last minute redemption, too? What I’m interested in is bad guys who feel no guilt at all.  I was trying to explain to my boss last week why Iago is such a nasty son-of-a-gun, and I realized that when it comes to his actual crimes, there are other bad guys that did far worse.  It’s just something about him.  I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that, as far as I can tell, he never feels a shred of anything for his victim, right up until the last words we hear.  That’s what’s so scary. Who else?  I’m expecting Richard III to make an appearance, though truthfully I’m not familiar enough with the play to know if he has any moments where he stops to think about other people.

Shakespeare Plays, or Shakespeare Poems

Here’s an interesting question for a Monday might.  I’m playing around with the Google Suggest API, and I noticed that if you just feed it “Shakespeare” you get some interesting results. First, “Shakespeare plays” is one of the most common queries, coming in at 2million hits.  Pretty big, given that “Shakespeare quotes” only gets 800k, and “Shakespeare sonnets” gets 600k. But something else got 5 million hits.  Know what?  “Shakespeare poems.” That’s odd to me.  [It’s not a quirk, if I switch to searching on the possessive “Shakespeare’s”, then the poems still come out ahead by almost twice as much over the plays.] I almost never think of the Works as poems in the traditional sense.  If I mean the sonnets I say the sonnets.  I’m pretty sure that the long narratives aren’t carrying that kind of traffic by themselves. Is it some cultural thing I’m unfamiliar with?  Over in Europe are they referring to the Canon in general as poems?  What’s the explanation for this odd statistic?   [By the way, the winner, with 7 million hits … is the movie Shakespeare in Love.  That doesn’t count. :)]

Nighttime for Geeklet

Been a while since I posted one of these stories.  The other night I’m putting my son (now 3) to bed. “You want me to sing you a song?”

“Yes!”

“Which one?”

“Shakespeare!”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What a piece of work is man, how…”

“No, Daddy, Shakespeare!”

“Why, what was I singing?”

“Hamlet.”

“Oh!  You know, you’re right.  Shall I compare, thee…”

“You tried to sing Hamlet instead of Shakespeare!”

“I did.”

“That’s silly!’

Least Popular Works, Demonstrated

People following me on Twitter watched this play out, but I thought it’d make a blog post as well.  Wandering through town today I stopped into a used book store. High up on the top shelf I saw a stack of small books that read “Temple Shakespeare", $15/volume.” I googled around a bit to see if there was anything special about the collection, then decided to go check it out anyway.  What volumes did he have, I asked? Merry Wives Richard II Troilus and Cressida King John All’s Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Two Gentlemen of Verona Titus Andronicus Rape of Lucrece Venus and Adonis … That certainly says something about the popularity of the works.  If you’re gonna pick over a collection volume by volume, you can see the Hamlet and the Dream and such going first…these are the leftovers.   I went with the Venus and Adonis.  Fourth edition, 1899.  I’ll let you know more about it once I have time.