When you see an article about the Top 10 great people in history who might be gay, the question is not whether Shakespeare will be on the list but what number he’ll come in at. In this case, the author has him at #10.  No big surprises and no editorializing, either.  In fact his case is full of “people think” logic, primarily about the sonnets.  Nothing new under the sun:

The only indication that Shakespeare could have been gay was his sonnets, which were not intended for publication. A huge fraction of these sonnets address his love for, they say, a young man. If you read them, you’ll be blown away by the intense romantic feelings in them that would really make anyone easily conclude that the poet was actually involved in a homosexual affair.

What I love, though, and wish the article’s author had picked up on, was that he’s got Sir Francis Bacon at #5 but doesn’t mention the Authorship connection at all.  This guy would have been my new favorite person if his description of why we think Bacon was gay had included

The only indication that Bacon could have been gay was his sonnets, which were not intended for publication. A huge fraction of these sonnets address his love for, they say, a young man. If you read them, you’ll be blown away by the intense romantic feelings in them that would really make anyone easily conclude that the poet was actually involved in a homosexual affair.

Ah well, next time.  I can only imagine what they’re saying about this one on the “Alexander The Great Geek” blog. 🙂

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8270688.stm This article on the value (or lack thereof) of “frivolous” research starts out with the example of whether monkeys can write Shakespeare.  The answer is no, they just basically poop on typewriter, though they did tend toward a fondness for the letter S.  This cost a month of research to find out. The thing that bugs me most about this is that it is the definition of frivolous.  Which researcher misunderstands the concept of infinite? It is NOT an experiment in the intelligence of monkeys.  It is a statement of statistical probability at infinite scales.  The question was never *can* they, it was always *would* they.  Because theoretically the answer is yes.  Quick reasoning : Have you typed the complete works of Shakespeare yet?  No?  Then keep typing.  Repeat until you do. The problem is that, realistically, you end up with a more meaningful answer like “It would take greater than the age of the universe to even get through one play.”  So while it might be a true statement, it is a uselessly true one. On a different note, I’ve lost track the different ways I hear the theorem quoted.  One monkey, infinite typewriters.  A thousand monkeys, a million monkeys.  “Now that we have the Internet we know this to not be true.”  haha.  Insert “twitter” for “internet” and haha again. My favorite?

If you locked William Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for a long enough period of time, eventually he would type the complete works of The Monkees.

Update :  Speaking of monkeys, Savage Chickens chimes in today with a particularly relevant comic 🙂

Has everybody caught the new Burger King commercial, the one with Tony Stewart in a lie detector? The story is that Burger King’s new pitch man will be connected, live, to a lie detector and asked how much he loves the new Whopper.  Interesting? I’m pointing it out here because one of the questions the examiner asks is, “Do you love the Whopper more than the works of William Shakespeare?”  He, of course, says yes. He is not a Shakespeare geek. (*) I’m looking for a video, or the transcript, but can’t find either yet.  So if anybody knows the exact Shakespeare quote, let me know.

I’m taking this one straight out of Emsworth’s blog because he basically called me out by name:

If the Shakespeare Geek were inviting his readers to rank their favorite practical joke scenes in Shakespeare, our favorite would be the trick Falstaff’s fellow villains played him on the highway near Gadshill. (Our second favorite is the hilarious scene in All’s Well in which the blindfolded Paroles all too readily betrays his comrades.)

Ok, people, whatcha got?  Do we count Puck’s translation of Bottom as a practical joke?  Does setting up Beatrice and Benedick count as a joke?  Should we make a list of what all the practical joke scenes *are*, before we discuss which is best?

David Bates of “Reading Everest” introduced himself and his blog to me this weekend, and I find his current post about Macbeth pretty cool.  Quoting Harold Bloom he refers to Macbeth as the killing machine – but then goes on to point out that Macbeth is only responsible for 3 deaths, and those offstage.  Hamlet, meanwhile, Shakespeare’s most intelligent character and certainly the darling of Bloom’s work, is directly responsible for the deaths of Claudius, Polonius (even if he didn’t know it was Polonius, he still wanted him dead), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  He’s debatably got a hand in Ophelia’s insanity and eventual suicide.  As David asks, what would he have done to Gertrude if the ghost hadn’t stepped in?  (Actually he asks whether Hamlet would have done Gertrude in before Polonius, but I don’t think that was ever a possibility.  After, though, when he’d gotten himself worked up….) Macbeth *is* a killing machine.  He’s introduced that way.  Everybody loves the “unseamed him from knav to chaps” line, describing Macbeth’s prowess on the battlefield.  I think that his physical size and power has a great deal to do with the point of the story.  It’s not about who’s the biggest and strongest.  Macbeth the monster is manipulated by his wife.  She then goes down to her own internal demons, not to some assassin’s blade.  Does Macbeth remain a killing machine at the end?  Is Macduff fighting the same guy he would have in the opening scene?  Or is the monster a broken shell of himself at the end? UPDATE : Link to the original post, which I shamefully forgot when I originally posted this.  My sincere apologies to David.