Shakespeare’s Grammar: Rhetorical Devices is really something out of a high school English class, but I love the use of examples from Shakespeare to show such vocabulary lesson concepts as alliteration, anaphora, and onomatopoeia. Ok, I’ll admit some of the terms are new to me, too. Fair is foul and foul is fair? That’s your basic “chiasmus” right there, ya see. And “Take thy face hence?” What you’ve got there is a synecdoche.

Did I ever tell you about the time I tried a new Mexican restaurant, and told the waiter, “I’d like the chicken and cheese chimichanga, because you can’t pass up an alliteration like that.” He didn’t appreciate the poetic significance.

How do you spell onomatopoeia? Just like it sounds.

Tags: Shakespeare

Interested in the Francis Bacon theory of Authorship? The Shakespeare Code is a $3.95 ebook, coming soon, that aims to be “the one true history of Francis Bacon.”

Tag: shakespeare

I don’t know what Light of Truth is, exactly, but it’s definitely Shakespeare, and definitely geeky. I’m not even going to try to describe it, because I don’t understand it.

Tags: shakespeare

Ok, I’ve got to show some love to Irregular WebComic, a comic strip that’s basically Lego characters with dialogue balloons over their heads. I’m digging it because he didn’t just do a Shakespeare gag, he has a whole Shakespeare theme.

(I do wish it was a bit funnier, though! Lord knows I love a good Shakespeare pun, but they have to be quick and off the cuff, you can’t think of the pun first and then fit the comic to the punchline. Then again I haven’t read every one so maybe some of them are better than others.)
Thanks to whoever stumbled me, by the way! I hope people stick around and browse awhile!

I got a message today about Clusty’s Shakespeare Searched engine. Althoug such things exist all over the place, it’s nice to see some major search engine love bestowed upon our favorite bard.
It appears to work well enough, allowing you to break down your search by play (or sonnet) as well as character, which is a nice touch. For kicks I just told it to picK Rosencrantz and sure enough it gave me every line of his. Reads like a Tom Stoppard play :).

Unfortunately this one fails in the same way most others do, and that is spelling. Shakespeare often got creative with his spelling, particularly when doing his iambic pentameter thing, and often would skip lett’rs complet’ly. So if you search all the works for “If it were fill’d” you’ll correctly get Sonnet 17, but if you didn’t know that and searched for “If it were filled” then you get nothing.
Failing #2 is when to use quotes and when not. Search for “to be or not to be” and the appropriate Hamlet soliloquoy pops up – but search it without the quotes and you get King John and Timon of Athens before Hamlet shows up at number 5. But on the other hand search for “is this a dagger that I see before me” with the quotes and you’ll get nothing. Search it without the quotes and you’ll properly see that the word is “which” I see before me, not “that”. So depending on what you’re searching you’ll often have to try both ways.

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