I thought, after I developed my Shakespeare Geek skill for the Amazon Echo, that I’d have no use for it. After all, I know all of the content I put into the thing.  Turns out it’s my greatest invention ever.


Middle geeklet: <asks math homework question>

Oldest geeklet:  “Are you serious? How do you not know that? Daddy, I was trying to help her with this stuff on the bus yesterday and I asked her whether 6.25 or 6.5 was bigger and she didn’t know. How do you know not know that?!”

Me: “Take it down a notch, that’s not being helpful.”

Oldest: “No, but seriously, point two five.  Point five. How can anybody not know that?”

Me: “Alexa, tell Shakespeare Geek to insult my child.”

Alexa: “Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous.”

I don’t usually listen to the radio in the morning, I prefer audiobooks. But today my phone wasn’t charged, so while I waited for it to come back to life I listened to the radio. The DJ’s were playing a round of “First World Problems”.  You know this game?  People would call it with things like, “Didn’t have time to make breakfast this morning so I had to stop somewhere and pay someone to make it for me.”

I immediately started wondering what this would look like in Shakespeare’s world…

First World Shakespeare Problems

• Helped my incompetent husband not screw up a simple regicide, and got blood on myself. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Need to buy new pillow set, Desdemona got makeup stains all over one of our best ones. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Getting annoyed that new hot guy wasn’t giving me the time of day, but apparently he’s a girl. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• When your mother embarrasses you in front of your mortal enemy by telling you not to invade Rome. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Stuck on an island for thirteen years with exactly one boy, and when he finally decides to make a move on me Dad walks in. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• My wife’s a statue. So, what, does that mean we’re divorced, am I widowed, what’s the ruling here? When can I start seeing other people? #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Not really sure why I’m an ass all of a sudden, but this girl I just met is really into it. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Dad not to content to call me a useless do nothing while he was alive, now his ghost does it. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Incorrectly called my fiancee a whore on our wedding day (not my fault!) and she  literally died of embarrassment, now I’m stuck marrying her cousin.  #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• And he doesn’t leave any poison for me, though, does he? You let the girl have the poison and the boy stabs himself, everybody knows that. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• “Don’t go the Senate today!” she says. “Something bad’s going to happen!” She’d never let me live this down, if I’d lived. #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• Told the guy I like that the girl he likes ran away with the guy she likes. Not really sure what I thought was going to happen next.  #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems
• The contract clearly stated that I keep 100 knights, and my daughter tells me I can only have 50? FML, what else can go wrong today? #FirstWorldShakespeareProblems

Show of hands, how many of you have an Amazon Echo device, lovingly referred to as Alexa?  If you’ve got one, I’ve got a treat for you.  If you don’t, let me explain what it is.

You know Siri, right?  Take your phone out of your pocket, his whatever button it is to invoke her (I can never remember if it’s hit-twice or press-and-hold), ask your question slowly and carefully.  Then ask it again because she didn’t understand you.

Imagine if a Siri-like assistant what just kind of there, in your house, all the time.  Amazon Echo is a device that sits on your kitchen counter (for example) with it’s excellent microphone and speakers, waiting for you to talk to it.  “Alexa?” you ask – from the next room.  She bongs to let you know she’s awake.  Then you ask your question – “What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow?”  “How did the Red Sox do?” “When is Tom Hanks’ birthday?” and she happily responds, to all of those.  Oh and there’s also “Alexa, put eggs on the shopping list” (which will sync to your mobile phone for when you’re at the store), “Alexa, what’s on the calendar today?” (syncs to Google calendar) and all kinds of other personal productivity tricks.  My kids use it to help with their homework, from checking their math and state capitals to setting timers for reading.  It’s also a streaming music player.

It’s really quite cool.  Everybody knows “that guy” who never lets a question go unanswered, always grabbing for his phone and asking it right in the middle of the conversation so that everybody knows the answer (heck, I am that guy).  Now you can still do that, only it’s as if Alexa is another person in the conversation.

And now she’s connected to Shakespeare Geek.

It’s always been easy to get facts about Shakespeare – just go to Wikipedia, which Alexa can do.  And it’s always been easy to get quotes (if somebody hasn’t made an Alexa app for quotes yet I’m sure somebody will), but I find quote databases boring.  Too many to choose from, without any kind of context.

Well, Shakespeare Geek is different.  I’ve loaded it up with “trivia” about Shakespeare, rather than plain old Wikipedia entries, to keep it interesting.  I’ve also coded up as many of our original jokes as I could shove in there.  There’s also a bit of a quote database, but I tried to do it more in “fortune cookie” style, where you’re supposed to treat Alexa like a magic 8-ball, getting her to answer a question for you.  “Alexa, ask Shakespeare Geek his opinion.”  / “Talkers are no good doers.”  That kind of thing.

Hopefully I can grow it over time!  I really want to add something like a “Shakespeare in the news” feature that can be linked to something dynamic that’s different every morning.  And of course the trivia/jokes/quotes databases can always grow.  What I’d really like to see is a bunch of downloads and hopefully some good reviews so I know that the effort will be worth it.  My kids know all this trivia and all these jokes, so other than as a neat demonstration it’s not really something I’m building for myself.  It will be much more fun to know I’m keeping it updated for 500 people, than for 5.

Have fun!

I love it when my coworkers want to talk Shakespeare.  Glad that I’m there to answer their question (because, if I hadn’t been there, would they have found someone else? Or just never asked it?) and also glad that here’s another person who wants to learn more about my favorite subject.

I’m especially pleased when they ask me questions I don’t know the answer to, because I get to post about it and we all get to learn something.

Today’s questions are about the publication of the First Folio, and the Quartos before that.

Q1:  Why was there a market for quartos at all?  We all seem to be in agreement that there was really no market for “casually read the play as literature” like we might do today.  The market for them seems to have been purely Shakespeare’s competitors who were looking for new ideas, to put it generously (to steal his, to put it more realistically).  But how is that a valid model, to go through all the trouble?  If 100 people visit a bookseller but the market for a certain book is only 2 or 3 of those people, wouldn’t it be easier to shop your work around directly to the other theatres?  Why print N copies if only a fraction of N will ever be purchased?

Q2: Before the First Folio, was “collected works” even a thing?  This is an extension of the former question, because if there was no real market for “read the plays as literature”, and the only people who wanted the quartos were competing playwrights and theatre owners, then what in the world would have been the point of making an official, authorized version of the playwright’s entire work and making that available?  Wouldn’t that just enable the problem all the more?

Was the whole idea new?  Did Marlowe or Jonson or Fletcher or anybody else get their complete works published like this?  Or was this the first milestone that said, “Shakespeare was different, Shakespeare’s contribution to the art deserves a memorial effort that has never been done before.”