Month: May 2011

According to Google, the following are the most popularly asked questions that still remain unanswered. Who wants to be first with some answers?

• What kind of person does Cassius seem to be?
• Why won’t Brutus take an oath?
• What lie does Iago tell Montano about Cassio?
• How does Oberon find Titania and Bottom?
• How does Petruchio tame Kate?
• How does Romeo describe Juliet’s beauty?

Most of these don’t seem especially difficult, I just think that patience is required to formulate an answer. After all, doesn’t Romeo spend most of the play describing Juliet’s beauty? That’s a lot of text to cite 🙂
Thanks to everybody who’s been providing the answers!!

Its late on a Friday so I don’t expect this post to get much traffic, but we shall see :).
The post about Iago’s convincing of Roderigo to kill Cassio got me thinking — what scenes does Shakespeare *not* give us, that you wish he did? Imagine Shakespeare was alive today and we got a sort of “director’s cut” of your favorite play, including deleted scenes. What scenes are on your wish list?
The Iago / Roderigo example is a simple one (because its inclusion doesn’t really do much for the plot). Hamlet’s loaded with them — the initial confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia (during his feigned madness), Ophelia’s death as Gertrude watches…
What else?

Today is Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday. To celebrate, Bardfilm and Shakespeare Geek have compiled a list of his Shakespeare-related songs. It’s not just the ubiquitous “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells” from “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” you know!

Bob Dylan’s Shakespeare Songs

Won’t You Come See Me, Queen Mab?

The Times, They Are A-Changin’: O Cursed Spite, That Ever I was Born to Put Them Right

Rainy Day Women #12 (Goneril) and 35 (Regan)

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, For The Rain it Raineth Every Day

Something’s Happening, but You Don’t Know What it is, do you, King Lear?

Fool Wind

It Ain’t Me, Ophelia

Come in, Gloucester Said, I’ll Give You Shelter from the Storm

Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Sack

Oh, Sister (Sung by Angelo to Isabella)

I Ain’t Gonna Work on Oliver’s Farm No More

Cordelia, Cordelia

Blowin’ in the Windy Side of Care

Stuck Inside of Ephesus with the Syracuse Blues Again

. . . and, of course, there’s Bob Dylan singing the plot of Measure for Measure, which you really have to see (and hear) to believe.

Happy birthday, Bob!

Our thanks for this guest post to kj, the author of Bardfilm. Bardfilm is a blog that comments on films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare.

Some of my most potentially productive work time is during the commute. I’ve got a good hour a day where I’m going to be listening to my ipod *anyway*, so I might as well make use of it. Typically I’ll follow a variety of podcasts, and occasionally an audio book.
I’ve never been much for Shakespeare via audio. But, that can change.
So, this is an open discussion – who is putting out audio Shakespeare content? Tell me. If you’ve got your own show, this is your opportunity to plug it.
I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. I don’t want to listen to audio versions of the plays. I don’t have that level of concentration while driving. Likewise, i don’t want to listen to a show where people do nothing but talk about their own personal opinions of Shakespeare – that’s far more likely to bore me in the other direction. The ideal content for me would be a heavy amount of Shakespeare, condensed for presentation, if that makes sense. I don’t need two hours’ traffic of my MP3 player – how about doing selected scenes? Or encapsulating info on a play that maybe I’m not as familiar with, so that I can come up to speed? If somebody said “Here’s a series of podcasts where we spend 1 hour per play” I would almost certainly pick through it and grab the plays I’m least familiar with. But while I may find “Here’s a podcast on nothing but Hamlet” interesting, it wouldn’t be for me — for something like that I need to be able to read and skim, because I know that there’s an infinite amount to talk about and I want to decide for myself where the interesting bits are.
So, who’s got one?

I bookmarked this conversation over on reddit too late to join in the fun, but I thought that my Shakespeare Geek readers might get a serious kick out of what happens when you put the problem in front of geeks of the more traditional sense.
I can’t really hold my own with the kind of mathematical experience they’ve got over there, but the way I’ve always imagined it is that “infinite” and “all” are, for the purposes of an abstract problem such as this, basically interchangeable. If you have a problem set of X possibilities, and then you say that you’re generating an infinite number of variations on X, then by definition one of them will be X.
Any attempt to discuss how long this would take, or the odds that it could ever happen, or comparison to atoms in the universe, seems to miss the point entirely.
The closest I’ve seen to an argument that makes me curious is the idea that by saying “monkey” you are not necessarily saying “a true random number generator.” Therefore you could argue that even with an infinite number of monkeys, your distribution does not follow a normal random distribution, and thus you can’t do predictions based on that curve.