Month: August 2007

From The Advocate in Louisiana comes this interesting letter looking at the common confusion of quoting Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Bible.  It caught my eye because while discussion of Shakespeare vs the Bible is quite common, I don’t often hear Lincoln thrown in there.  As a matter of fact I had no idea that Lincoln was a Shakespeare fan (apparently Macbeth was his favorite play, and John Wilkes Booth had played Macbeth). Unlike many articles on the subject, however, the author does not answer any of his “Who said it first” questions.  So you’re not going to learn anything new.  As a matter of fact the whole letter is actually written by a commitee member for the Lincoln Bicentennial. 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2150903,00.html [via An Alternate Kettle of Fish] Interesting (and lengthy) article all about Anne Hathaway, better known as Mrs. Shakespeare.  What’s her story?  More to the point, what’s her relationship to the sonnets?  After all, we’ve spent 400 years talking about whether Shakespeare was gay, and who the Dark Lady was, but rarely do we have any glimpse into Shakespeare’s relationship with his own wife.  The author of the article, Germaine Greer, wonders under what circumstances Hathaway first saw the sonnets (remember they were published in 1609 but some where written as much as 20 years prior).  Her theory is that she was given a copy after they were published, and not by Shakespeare.  What happens next? Very interesting glimpse into a subject not typically covered in the usual Shakespeare biography.

“I know who owns these woods, it’s a guy from in town.  He won’t mind if I hang out here for a minute.  My horse has no idea why we stopped out here in the middle of nowhere, though, I can tell by the way he’s shaking his harness.  It’s pretty quiet.  Anyway, nice woods, but I’ve still got a long trip ahead of me.” There you go, now you don’t have to ever read “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost.  Enjoy. Look, I can do it with anything.  How about “O Captain, My Captain” by Walt Whitman? “Hey Captain, that was a pretty scary trip!  But good news, we found the prize we were looking for, and now we’re almost home.  I can hear the bells ringing and the people waiting for us on the shore.  Oh no!  There’s blood on the deck, the captain is dead.” Ok, one more.  Anybody like Poe? “One late night I was in the library, and I had nearly fallen asleep when I heard someone knocking.  ‘Must be someone at the door,’ I thought.  I remember it well, it was a cold December night and I’d been watching the fire in the fireplace, trying to get my mind off of my lost Lenore.  …”   Raise your hand if your sarcasm detector is going off. 🙂  Your friendly neighborhood Shakespeare Geek just read one too many stories about yet another dumbed down Shakespeare where “Is this a dagger that I see before, the handle toward my hand?  Come let me clutch at thee, I have thee not and yet I see thee still”  would be translated as “Oh look, a dagger.  Why, that’s odd, my hand went right through it, what’s up with that?”

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Hamlet.doc?” starts out with a nice discussion of the multiple Lears and Hamlets problem.  No scripts exist in his hand.  We don’t know when something is his own idea, or a memorial reconstruction from his actors.  Sometimes it’s just a plain mistake, and we might think it’s perfection. Then the article goes on to say “but what if Shakespeare was using a word processor?”  He could have made backups.  He might have had version control.  Tracked changes.  “We might have learned that the play was originally called Great Dane.” 🙂 The article uses a term I quite like, “born-digital.”  Literature, in other words, that has only ever existed in digital form.  We in the software world like to say, “As soon as you print it, it’s out of date.”

Last week on vacation I reported purchasing a “Shakespeare action figure”.  Without even opening it, this has fascinated my children.  “Mommy bought Daddy a toy?  Are you excited, Daddy?  When do you think Mommy will let you play with it?” and so on.  Suddenly it’s like I’m one of them.   The best part, though, came the day we got home.  While unpacking, Mr. Shakespeare was left sitting on the kitchen table, and was still there while we had lunch.  That’s when the real questions came.  “Yes, but Daddy, who was Shakespeare?” my 5yr old asked.  “What did he do?” “Well he wrote stories,” I said. “What kind of stories?  Were there any girls in the stories?”  My two oldest are girls, you see. “Oh sure, he wrote stories about girls all the time.  There’s that one about the girl named Miranda on the island that I’ve told you about, Shakespeare wrote that one.”  Speaking of The Tempest, by the way. “The girl on the island is a princess!” my 3yr old pipes up. “As a matter of fact she is a princess,” I confirm.  “But she doesn’t know it yet.  A long time ago she was forced to leave her kingdom with her father, who was a very powerful magician named Prospero, when the bad guys came and took over the kingdom.  Miranda and her father escaped on a boat and ended up on the island.” “A boat?  Are there pirates in this story?” “You know, there are pirates in this story, I’m glad you asked.  Two pirates named Stephano and Trinculo were washed up onto the island when their ship crashed.  There they met the seamonster named Caliban, and together they tried to take over the whole island!” …and so on.  This went on, off and on, all day.  Over dinner my 5yr old asks, “Was Caliban nice to Miranda and her Daddy?” and from down the hall in the bathroom I hear my 3yr old yell, “Are you talking about Shakespeare?” I turned to my wife and said, “You realize I’m in absolute bliss right now, right?” By the way, I’m not supposed to get the toy (which has disappeared from the kitchen table) until Christmas.  But after seeing results like that I might buy them their own!  There was another series of smaller, almost “Little People”-esque figures called “Lord Crumwell’s Oddfellows Genius Collection” that might be worth investing in, especially if I can come home one day and find my 3yr old playing with Shakespeare and Beethoven alongside her Barbies.