This article on How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know? seems to be from 2002, but it’s making the rounds on all the bookmarking sites lately so somebody must have dug it up.  In short, Shakespeare used about 31k words and we predict he “knew but didn’t use” another 35k, for a total of 66,000ish words. What that *means*, I have no idea.  I could not for the life of me give you even an order of magnitude guess at the number of words I know.  What does it mean to know a word?  If I’ve never used the word myself, but saw it written down and could figure out what it meant, do I know it now? Did I know it before then, too?  You can’t exactly just start at the beginning and write down all the words you know.  

Ok, I’m back from vacation and we’re coming up fast on Shakespeare’s birthday.  Got plans?  I hope to put out a plethora of posts over the next couple days (last year I want to say I did 10 posts on April 23 alone), so stick with me!

As mentioned on Twitter, it appears they’ved turned the Letters to Juliet book into a movie!

I expect the wife and I will be going to see this one. 🙂

There was a day when I would have kidded myself into thinking I’d write this, but it’ll never happen so I put it out here in the hopes that somebody else with more resources might decide to run with it. I was speaking with Stefanie from MadShakespeare today about the future of Shakespeare on the iPad (since Shakespeare In Bits is leading the way with an iPad version of their Romeo and Juliet experience, which we are giving away, hint hint big hint).  While I think that the iPad itself might not change the world, I think it is ushering in an age of “tablet as primary interactive device”, which I think could be huge.  Here’s what I want: You know how on YouTube right now there are short clips of just about everything under the sun?  I just posted some King Lear earlier today as an example.  Sometimes you only get a snippet, sometimes if you look you can find a whole movie that’s been broken down into a dozen pieces. What I want is a directory of Shakespeare video that allows you to stitch together all those videos into a meaningful form.  Say, for instance, that I was looking for King Lear.  I’d get a list of all the versions of Act I Scene 1 there are on YouTube (assuming I wanted to start with I.1).  And then I could compare them.  Maybe I put the Olivier up next to the James Earl Jones and see what they do differently, or similarly.   Maybe I can see a whole list of Olivier’s Shakespeare videos, and jump instead to his Othello. While I’m doing this I would also have some sort of note-taking application available so I could jot down ideas, either for myself (such as if I’m doing research for an article or a paper), or directly onto the video with the intent of sharing my thoughts with anybody else who watches the video.  And of course  there would have to be some sort of snipper/highlighter for capturing, well, highlights. This would be perfect for an iPad type of application, using the interface to essentially build your own Shakespeare movie.  Maybe I could combine my highlights and my notes into a research paper, and publish just the descriptor file so that anybody with this browser could load up what I created and play it?  The original videos wouldn’t have to change, just the way you access them. It’s really a very simple idea.  Somebody would have to host a  directory where people register their videos, stating some simple meta information – play X, act Y, scene Z.  It’d be nice to believe that you can scrape YouTube for this, but the simple problem with that is that the edges are rough and you don’t always find apples-to-apples comparisons.  You could even start it yourself by priming the pump manually, scraping YouTube for whatever you can to start with. I expect that there’s something in YouTube’s terms of service that would prevent such an app from being created.  That means that if anybody does want to build this for real, their future would probably involve becoming a video hosting/streaming site of their own, and that’s big business.  So maybe it’s not so easy on the execution.  But then again that’s why I never build these things, I always talk myself out of them.

There’s not a great deal new about Shakespeare in this piece from the Examiner detailing examples of classic authors bashing other classic authors.  We’ve got George Bernard Shaw who despises nothing as much as he despises Shakespeare, and Samuel Pepys who found Dream to be the most insipid ridiculous thing he’d ever seen. What I found fun, though, was seeing how long I could trace through the list.  For instance: William Faulkner bashes Mark Twain (#25) Hemingway bashes Faulkner (#27) Nabokov bashes Hemingway (#1).  Bells, bulls and balls! And so on.   Can anybody find a longer connection?  Who gets bashed the most, who does the most bashing? BONUS for Shakespeare Geeks! For every time we’ve spotted “Harry Potter” on a list of most influential/popular/blahblahblah books, beating out something by Shakespeare, here’s the illustrious Harold Bloom giving JK Rowling a good swift kick (#9):

How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.