Month: February 2009

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=556 This is apparently from 2002, but I don’t think I’d ever seen it.  A chess/Shakespeare/computer crossover?  Love it! Seems that the computer (one Deep Fritz) may have been heckling the world champion (Kramnik) using Shakespearean taunts.  The conspirators rigged up several speakers around Kramnik’s chair and set them at volumes low enough that only Kramnik might hear the computer’s chatter. That the computer was talking to him doubtless distracted Kramnik; that Fritz was speaking entirely in Shakespearean verse surely drove Kramnik mad, prompting the questionable, Morphy-esque Knight sacrifice at f7. (I am pretty sure, by the way, that the whole thing is a joke :)).

http://www.slate.com/id/2211066 A quick history of the sonnet form, by Robert Pinsky.  Extra credit for mentioning Shakespeare, but then never actually using a Shakespeare sonnet as one of his many examples of the evolution of the form. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets as part of a literary vogue, the great sonnet fad of the 1590s. Inspired by Sir Philip Sidney‘s sequence "Astrophil and Stella" (itself based on the Italian sonnets of Petrarch and popularized via early, Napster-like piracy), English poets and booksellers of that decade produced hundreds of sonnet sequences. The product in each case was a series of witty, hyperbolic 14-line love poems, addressed to a lady who, in theory, would be flattered and won by the poet’s elaborate, inventive descriptions of her tremendous beauty, her cruel resistance, and the agony she inflicted on the author. She tortures him with her beauty and coldness, he says; and yet his praises, and his clever descriptions of the pain she causes him, will make her immortal. When you put it like that, it makes the whole Fair Youth / Dark Lady autobiographical conspiracy theories sound sort of…dumb?

I’m a pretty big believer in that whole “eyes are the windows to the soul” thing.  Ask me if there’s beauty in a person, and I’ll look at the eyes first.  Does that make me an eye man?  Ain’t nothing in the world like a big-eye’d girl, as the song goes…;) But let’s talk Shakespeare.  When I picked Sonnet 17 to be “our” sonnet (that being my wife and I, not you my dear reader), it was this one line that stood out:  If I could write the beauty in your eyes, and in fresh numbers number all your graces, the age to come would say “This poet lies, such heavenly touches never touched earthly faces.” (Yes I was lazy with the syntax of the original there.) For Valentine’s this year, on the card for my wife’s roses, I wrote this: The bath for my help lies where Cupid got new fire – my mistress’ eyes. That’s from Sonnet 154. Then of course there’s the famous sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…” I’m at work and don’t really have time to write a small novel on the subject, so I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion – were eyes a particular theme of Shakespeare’s more so than other things?  Am I just seeing what I want to see?  I went combing through the sonnets last night and actually found him referring to his own eyes (most often in the context of “I get to see how beautiful you are”), but very often he does speak of “thine eyes” or “mistress’ eyes” and so on.   I figure Carl’s going to have some input (and tell me to read his book :)).  Anybody else?  Don’t be shy.

http://mashable.com/2009/02/12/shakespeare-twitter/ Don’t miss Twitter Of The Shrew this weekend!  “Spanning 19 Twitter accounts and presented over 12 days (one scene daily), Twitter of the Shrew attempts to live up to Shakespeare’s “Brevity is the soul of wit” proverb, by condensing the play’s iambic pentameter dialogue down to updates of 140 characters or less.“ The poor author of the article doesn’t seem to get the meta-culture value of the project.  He says, “I don’t see a classical play functioning too well in this form.”  No kidding.  I think that’s part of the reason they didn’t choose Lear or something, they chose a play about relationships and gossip and stereotypes, exactly paralleling the Twitterverse.

http://www.physorg.com/news153595290.html I am still trying to absorb this aticle, and I have not watched the video yet, but the subject matter is so up my alley that I can’t wait to post it.  It’s all about a technique for analyzing large groups of stuff called “feature frequency profiles”, or FFP.  In theory, you can apply the technique to anything that might have patterns in it – DNA, music taste…and, of course, the works of Shakespeare. Kim and his colleagues later applied the FFP technique to a comparative analysis of the works of William Shakespeare, contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, plus several works from the Jacobean era that were once attributed to Shakespeare but whose authorships are now in question. The results cast new doubt on Shakespeare having been the author of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and point to his authorship of the comedy Two Noble Kinsmen, for which in the past he has only received partial credit. In that particular case I don’t think of it so much as a discovery, since there’s already been doubt on those plays – but if the FFP algorithm also kicked those out as questionable, without having been told, that’d be pretty impressive.