Apparently at the ISC (International Shakespeare Conference) last week, there was much ado about what to do with Shakespeare in an online, connected, social world. All I can say to that is, welcome to the party, what took you so long? I don’t expect that the argument is a new one, it’s just the scale that is changing. Who is entitled to talk about Shakespeare? Should that pleasure be limited to the academics who’ve spent their lives researching the topic? Or can any ill-informed so-and-so with a blog start making stuff up? (Thanks to Mark Kubus at Blogging Shakespeare for ‘ill-informed so-and-so’ :)) It should be obvious what side of this discussion I’m on. I secretly hope that somewhere during that closed-door discussion, my name came up :). I don’t even really care which side of the argument, either. I’d just like to believe that when people actually talk about Shakespeare for a living they know how to do things like google “Shakespeare blog” and follow a couple of links. I do know that suddenly got inquiries from very important people during the conference… What troubles me is this sudden new movement, even from places like the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, to make Shakespeare more accessible. Where ya been? Seriously. There are plenty of people out here doing their best to make it accessible without you. The very fact that you think you control access to begin with is rather upsetting. It does a disservice to Shakespeare and his work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy to have everybody coming around to the right side of the argument, I just wish that there was a little more acknowledgement to how accessible Shakespeare has already become, and the efforts its taken to get him this far. It kills me that Blogging Shakespeare contains no blogroll or other links to Shakespeare blogs in any prominent matter, and I’m begging them to change that. Everybody is welcome to discuss Shakespeare in this forum that I and others have created, whether you’ve got academic cred or not. The folks that are currently discussing how to make Shakespeare more accessible? Can’t say the same thing. I even asked whether I could have access to a particular paper that was presented re: Shakespeare and Twitter, and was told it’s not public. Fair enough, but the very fact that I have access up the chain to even ask the right people says volumes about how far we’ve come toward accessibility, at least in one direction. Now we have to fix the system so that either the answer becomes “Yes”, or even better, I don’t have to ask – it just shows up in my blog feeds because they voluntarily make it public.
Month: August 2010
Women Speak Two Languages, One Of Which Is Verbal
Best research I can come up with at the moment suggests that this Twitter “Top Retweet” comes not from Shakespeare, but from someone named Steve Rubenstein. I have no idea who this is, perhaps someone could tell me. A magazine editor of some reputation?
What I find amusing in cases like this is to see when the quote shows up on Yahoo! Answers. If you’ve ever needed a reason to prove why community-sourced answers are as good as you pay for, check it out. The user is smart enough to ask, “If this is by Shakespeare, somebody tell me the source citation.” Best answer, chosen by voters, is a simple “It’s by Shakespeare.” An entirely wrong, by definition, answer. I don’t know what’s more annoying, the person who answers the question incorrectly just to get whatever points are offered (depending on the engine), or the people voting for it as a good answer.
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
Personally I’ve never seen this one attributed to Shakespeare, but when the topic came up today at lunch this is the one my new boss pulled up to test me.
“The pen is mightier than the sword” actually shares a bit of infamy with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Both, you see, were by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The latter actually inspired a contest to write in his rather unique style.
Just to regain my cred a bit (since I did not have the answer off the top of my head), I had to show my boss that Shakespeare Geek covered the topic back in April of this year, and it was reader Alexi who offered up the appropriate comment:
The one I always hear is "The pen is mightier than the sword" which is not from Shakespeare but from the 19th century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose other contribution to literature is the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night," which is also usually attributed to someone else. In this case, Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts.
Exhausting Sonnet 29?
Great article by Paul Edmondson over at Blogging Shakespeare with a simple premise : get a group of people together to talk about just one sonnet, in this case sonnet 29, for an hour. What happens? Can you still learn something new every time? To steal from the closing sentiment of the article, can you exhaust it? Or will it merely exhaust you (temporarily)? We talk about sonnet 29 frequently here. Once Rufus Wainwright put it to music I found it easier to memorize, which in turn caused me to pay more attention to the emotional power behind the words. I’ve since added it to my wedding book for its potential in that arena as well. I started to do my own analysis here, but that’s not really fair to the original post. Go check it out.
Which Is The Easiest Play?
There’s many reasons why people can claim that Shakespeare is hard to understand. First, there’s vocabulary. It’s not really as bad as people make it out to be, but some plays certainly make heavier use of archaic/obsolete words than others. Expressions that no longer have context, on the other hand, are a big problem. Jokes that would have gone over huge with Shakespeare’s crowd that no longer make sense without a little training. That’s a problem. And then there’s all the offstage stuff that happens. When somebody walks on stage and explains about a war that’s going on, dropping names left and right about who did what to do, it’s easy for a modern user to get lost because they didn’t see it. They don’t know who those people are. With that in mind I ask, what’s the easiest play? You can define it however you like (given the rough framework I provided), but I’m not just looking for most popular. You might think Lear is easy, from certain angles. It’s deep, absolutely. But hard to follow? I don’t know about that. I’m wondering which of the plays have all the action taking place on stage (so there’s no need to exposition about what we can’t see), while relying on relatively simple vocabulary that a modern audience could easily follow. Motivation : Whenever I make my wife come see Shakespeare with me, and she brings a friend along for company, I typically explain the plot of the show before we go so they’re not lost. At intermission I refresh the details of the story now that they’ve seen some characters, and answer any questions. Inevitably at the end they’ll say, “I did understand it – but thanks to what you told us in the beginning. I’m not sure I would have followed it without that.” I’m wondering what the best candidates are for a play that they would be most likely to follow, without me having to walk them through it. I think that creates a barrier to truly feeling like you’re enjoying the work, if you need a middle man to translate for you.