Challenge:  Can we come up with “hooks” for Shakespeare?

Normally when somebody mentions a hook today they’re talking about music, and that short repeated musical phrase (possibly not even words) that gets stuck in your head.  Chances are when you hear the song again on the radio you don’t even recognize it the first few times until you hear the hook and you say, “Oh, yeah, this is that song, I love this song.” Know what happens, though?  You recognize more of the song each time.  You pay attention to the words. Before you know it, you can recognize it from the opening notes.

But the actual definition, at least according to Google, is

a thing designed to catch people’s attention.

So I’m wondering if we can’t come up with a hook for Shakespeare’s various plays. I saw a teacher complaining earlier that he’d given the students No Fear Shakespeare and yet still found himself having to translate that for them. I thought, “We’re doing this backwards. We hold the text up to be the Holy Grail and then we say let me make it simpler for you, let me make *that* simpler for you, let me make that simpler for you…” and all the materials are in that context of “Here’s how far removed you are from the actual good stuff.”

Let’s change the perspective.  Can you reduce Hamlet down to a single sentence?  I don’t want to summarize all the elements of the play. What I want is the students’ attention. I want them saying, “Sounds interesting, tell me more.”

I have this image like something out of a movie, the harried English teacher walking down between the desks while the kids sit on their phones, throw paper airplanes, and generally ignore him. The teacher is holding a copy of the complete works.  He gets to his desk, turns, and slams the book down on his desk to get their attention.  And he says …  what?

Sure, he could go with, “Two households!  Both alike, in dignity.  In fair Verona where we lay our scene.” And if you’re like me lightning bolts shoot up your spine because that happens every time. But he doesn’t have a classroom full of Shakespeare geeks, and he needs to hook their attention some other way.

“Girl meets boy at party. Two days later they’re both dead.”

“Hamlet’s dad is gone and he wants to kill his step dad.”

“The only person that knows Macbeth just killed his boss is Macbeth’s wife, because she told him to do it.”

“Everybody knows Beatrice and Benedick love each other, except Beatrice and Benedick.”

As I write these I realize it sounds like click bait, but I don’t want to call it that.  Clickbait implies trying to trick the user into looking under the covers for something that’s not really there. But everything I said above is true. I *want* my students to be interested in what happens next.

Anybody else got some good ones?  The goal is to have a list of great starters that any teacher of Shakespeare could use to kick off a new lesson.

If you’re a geek in the more traditional sense of the word, sometimes you look at the works of Shakespeare as one big text file and say, “Ooh, let’s look for patterns.” If you were to take a course on natural language programming, chances are very good that one of the first lessons will be in parsing Shakespeare for what are called n-grams, or “phrases of N words that always appear together.”  This is how autocorrect works, it looks at what you’ve already written and then says, “Statistically, what do I think is typically the next word?”

But being Shakespeare geeks as well, we can then work backward and look at the context for when and where and why he used them. This post is just one in what’s hopefully a series of interesting discoveries using this technique.

For my fellow programming geeks – here’s the github source I found to get started!

Disclaimer – raw text processing has lots of issues.  Special character and line breaks and headers/footers all get in your way and have to be stripped out.  In one version of this test the phrase “a midsummer nights dream” ranked very highly and I thought, wait, no it doesn’t.  That’s because one of the sample text files had used the title of the play as a header on every page.  Very hard to strip that out if there’s no real markers to identify it.  So, take these results with at least a few grains of salt.

The longer the n-gram that less data you get, which makes sense because you’re going to get fewer hits.  So typically you see 2 or 3 words (bi- and tri-grams, respectively).  But Shakespeare’s a bit wordy and you tend to get things like, “I pray you” or “I know not” which don’t give you much to work with. So I expanded to look at 4 and 5 word grams. Quads and quints?  Not sure what they’re officially called.

My quad-grams give me plenty of the usual hits: “I know not what”, “I do not know”, “I do beseech you,” … but one of them appears significantly more than the others (30% more actually), and it is where I got the title for this post.

With all my heart.

Lovely.  Now can you guess which play uses it the most?  I’ll give you a hint.  Merchant of Venice uses it 4 times, Othello 5, but this play uses it 6 times.

I’m not giving the answer here, I want to see what people guess.  It’s not one I would have expected.  I wonder if it has something to do with when the play was written relative to Shakespeare’s career. Maybe he had a tendency to repeat himself or use simpler go-to phrases earlier in his writing? Is that a hint?

Not an actor myself (I may have mentioned that), but if you asked me what the most overused Shakespeare audition monologue is I wouldn’t go with “To be or not to be…,” I think I’d go with “All the world’s a stage.”  You don’t

always have to swing for the fences, sometimes a base hit is fine.

I just discovered Backstage.com that has a huge collection of Shakespeare pieces, including their list of audition pieces you shouldn’t use. All the greatest hits are there – winter of our discontent, Romans and countrymen, damned spots, as well as the two I mention above.

But there’s at least one surprise on the list: left no ring with her: what means this lady?

I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me; indeed, so much,
That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue,
For she did speak in starts distractedly.
She loves me, sure; the cunning of her passion
Invites me in this churlish messenger.
None of my lord’s ring! why, he sent her none.
I am the man: if it be so, as ’tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper-false
In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge? my master loves her dearly;
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him;
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love;
As I am woman,–now alas the day!–
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!
O time! thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

Really?  This is a common one?

People who’ve had to audition for Shakespeare roles, what selections have you used?  Are they on the list?

I didn’t want to do a Shakespeare Fathers list because I knew there’d be plenty of others doing the same thing.  That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it, though. Here’s one for Shakespeare’s Worst Fathers that we can use.

Since it leads with a picture of Lord Capulet (strangely blacking on John Leguizamo’s face, I guess to symbolize that he could be anybody’s father or something?), I thought that they were going to give him the #1 spot. They didn’t, but it was close.

I used to be on the “Lord Capulet is a horrible father” train, but over the years I’ve been convinced that he’s all talk.  For every scene we can point to where he’s the bad guy, there’s one where he’s the good guy.  He’s the one that suggests that maybe Capulets and Montagues can get along. He’s the one that knows Romeo has crashed his party, and not only lets him stay, but turns on his own kinsman Tybalt for getting everybody upset.  He’s the one that tells Paris that Juliet gets a say in who she marries.

True, that last one appears to be fairly empty when she doesn’t choose “correctly”, and true he does basically threaten to beat her, to throw her out of the house, if she doesn’t do what she’s told.  But does he actually do any of those things? Would he have, given the chance?  Or is it all talk?  Is that just the picture of a father with a temper who has never been spoken to that way before? He’s also the guy who was all, “Revive, or I will die with thee!” when he found her body.

Some of the entries on the list I can live with.  Leonato’s “Do not live, Hero. Do not ope thine eyes,” is pretty bad in my book.  I find it hard to allow him the “Sometimes we say things we regret” defense. That one’s pretty bad.

The one that bothers me most is Prospero.  Worst fathers? Really?  The reason seems to be that he, like basically every other father in Shakespeare’s time, chose a husband for his daughter.  I mean, sure, he raised her entirely on his own for a dozen years while stranded on an island with magical creatures who weren’t necessarily friendly.  And he manipulated the veryforces of nature to cause a ship to land on their island to return her to the life she deserved.  He also used no magic to charm either Ferdinand or his daughter into the marriage.  On the contrary he chained up Ferdinand and put him to work to test his faith.  I think it’s hard to argue that he’s not one of Shakespeare’s best fathers.

Spotted first on Facebook via Will Sutton’s “I Love Shakespeare” page, let’s talk about this list of Shakespeare’s 25 Greatest Characters.

What does that even mean?  Most famous? Most beloved?  Like many lists, I think it ends up meaning “author’s favorite” but I’m going to be generous and treat it as, “Characters only Shakespeare could have created.” Mercutio’s a great example.  The Romeo and Juliet story existed before Shakespeare, but one of the reasons why we remember his version is because of character creations like Mercutio (who technically existed in the Brooke original, if I recall, but you know what I mean. Shakespeare gave him life.)

It’s a good list, and it’s probably not what you expect.  Lear is on it … but Hamlet is not.  Falstaff is … but no Portia.  Meanwhile, the list includes Autolycus, Nurse, and Lance.  Each entry comes with its reason for inclusion.

I wonder if we could make a claim to greatest play, then, by looking at which plays provide the most characters for this list? As You Like It, Henry IV and King Lear provide two characters, but Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet each bring three.  (Othello has one, Julius Caesar one.)

Not appearing on the list at all?

Hamlet.

Bold move!

I’m a big Shakespeare music fan.  From David Gilmour’s rendition of Sonnet 18 (which I later learned was actually Bryan Ferry’s version of Sonnet 18) to the complete works of Rufus Wainwright (with a little Loudon Wainwright thrown in for good measure), I’m always interested in hearing people put the text to music.  Driving my daughter to school the other day to wrap up her English class and finally finish Romeo and Juliet I told her about how “Romeo’s last words” shot me up to the front of the Google search results because it’s a popular New York Times crossword puzzle clue (the answer is, “I die”).  So then I had to play The Flesh Failures, the big finale from the musical HAIR, where the chorus comes in singing, “Eyes, look your last, arms, take your last embrace…” and I even flipped out in the car, while driving.  “GOOSEBUMPS, EVERY TIME!” I told her. (I even linked to an amateur production because it doesn’t matter who sings it ;))

Sorry, got a little sidetracked there.  Anyway.  The other day I got email from Tom Harrison, who had his own version of Sonnet 18 he wanted me to hear. This let me to the discovery of the week – by looking at the Shakespeare tag on this Bandcamp.com site I discovered a whole new audience of musicians doing Shakespeare music!

I won’t pretend to suggest the “best” ones I’ve found because it’s going to take me forever to browse. There’s every genre you could imagine.  Sometimes it looks like the band is just named / inspired by Shakespeare and the work itself is not so much about the text, but in most cases I’ve seen it’s actually putting the text to music.  In some cases it appears to be music that was produced for actual Shakespeare performances.

Report back in the comments when you find the good stuff you think everybody should hear!

I’m going to go predictable here and point to some Tempest music that I liked :).

I suppose this post isn’t specifically about Shakespeare. But I am assuming that many (most?) of us enjoy the subject so much that we don’t limit ourselves to waiting for a performance, and are pretty familiar with the text. Maybe not every play, but for your favorites, I’m assuming that you’ve read them. Probably closely, and probably more than once.

Why?

I run a virtual bookclub at work (which is really just a Slack channel where I brain dump the audio books I go through on my commute at a rate of about 2-3 per week).  We were bouncing around recommendations and a coworker asked what kind of things I like to read. I said, “I like stuff that explores humanity’s place in the universe, and our purpose in life, if there is one.  How an individual’s actions and motivations affect everyone and everything around him.  If technology is involved, AI and stuff like that, all the better.  But that’s extra.”

In a previous discussion on the same topic, though, here’s what I’d told somebody:  “I like books where you feel changed at the end. Most books I read, I’ll forget.  Sure they were entertaining for a little while, but if they don’t leave me with something that I’m going to carry with me, I don’t feel like I got anything of value out of it.”  I’m trying to figure out if that is the same answer or the opposite answer.

Either way, I got to wondering if the same logic applies to my love of Shakespeare, and I believe that it does.  Tell me that Hamlet and King Lear don’t perfectly fit both my answers above?  I tend to trivialize the comedies (just like I would for movies or television shows), but even a Midsummer or Much Ado has a certain depth that touches on what I’m seeking.  I don’t get that from Love’s Labour’s Lost, or All’s Well That Ends Well.  Maybe that’s personal opinion, or maybe there actually is something in one play that’s not in another that strikes a universal chord.  Who knows.

What’s your story?  Why you do this? What do you get out of it?