Month: October 2006

Ok, my friend Rob points me to this theory that the movie Strange Brew is based on Hamlet.  You know, the movie with Bob and Doug McKenzie in it.  Hamlet.  I am saying all those words together, even if your brain refuses to read those sentences. Check it out, it’s actually more than a theory.  I find it hard to believe that everything takes place at “Elsinore Brewery” and that the “owner” is killed by brother “Claude” being all just a big coincidence.  

Anybody besides me want a Shakespeare Portrait made up entirely of the script from Hamlet?  I’m just geeky enough to find that very cool.  Maybe it’s because I’m from the days of making ASCII art on your printer.  

Ok, somebody tell me how come I’d never even heard of Arden of Faversham, one of the “missing plays” of Shakespeare?  I’m familiar with Cardenio, Love’s Labour’s Won and Sir Thomas More, but Arden of Faversham is a new one on me.  Apparently it’s about the 1551 murder of Thomas Arden, mayor of Faversham, by his wife.    Anyway, a bunch of scientists claim to have proven once and for all that Shakespeare wrote it.  Using “computational stylistics” they’ve essentially created a fingerprint for Shakespeare’s style, and they say that the play matches with a high enough accuracy to state that it was written by the same man. Of course, nobody’s mentioning this idea that if you don’t believe Shakespeare wrote *any* of the plays, then this doesn’t really prove anything :).  What they’re really saying is that “Whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare also most likely wrote this one.”

I may have heard of the Juliet Club before.  Something about answering letters written to Juliet about love and romance advice.  Apparently there’s a contest for the best one. Neat site, especially if you’re a Juliet fan.  They even offer a CD full of everything you could possibly want to know about Juliet.  

I’ve done this topic before, but Sonnet Writers has a nice article up that explains iambic pentameter graphically, putting the emphasized syllables in bold.  Some of it is a little borderline to me, obviously coming from the “sonnet writer” camp and not the Shakespeare camp, like where he says “Sonnet 30 follows iambic pentameter very nicely.”  Oh?  In which sonnet does he not do that, exactly?  And “there appear to be some exceptions” to the 5 (he says 10) iambs per line rule, although there are “logical reasons for these.”   Maybe he just said that wrong — they *appear* to be exceptions, but they’re not, and here’s why. Other than that, though, he breaks it right down to the individual syllable, explaining when some words run into others (“many a”, 3 syllables,  becomes more like “man ya”, 2 syllables) or the other way around, where “be-moan-ed” is 3 syllables but “van-ish’d” is 2.