Month: May 2011

Introducing A New Site!

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

For the longest time I’ve had this idea. “How old is Romeo?” and many variations on that question are, by far, my most popular search topics. This points to a growing trend – people do not just type keywords into their search engines. They ask questions. Many “answers” sites have sprung up to focus on exactly this trend Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Answers.com …
Here’s the problem, though. All of these communities are general purpose. They all run on that Wikipedia, “the community will take care of itself” model. I disagree that this works for specific topics. What if you ask a Shakespeare question on an answers site where there’s not enough Shakespeare expertise? Trust me, I’ve been there. I hang out on some of these boards. It upset me to see answers that were often low quality, badly explained, and sometimes just plain wrong.
Thus Shakespeare Answers was born. With it I hope to create the #1 destination for answers to Shakespeare questions, from the easy “What happens in Act 4 scene 1 of Hamlet” questions to the more open ended stuff like “Did Gertrude know what Claudius did?” You can ask questions, answer questions and comment, as well as voting on your fellow geeks’ efforts.
What’s in it for the answerers?
Well, you get to create a profile for yourself, which includes a link to your own site. From there you start building up reputation. Everytime you answer a question and people vote for your answer, you gain some credit. Credit gets you various badges/achievements on the site. If you’re at all interested in associating your name and presence on the web with “hey, I know a little something about Shakespeare,” then this is about to be a great way to do that.
With a little programming I was able to coax Google to spit out a few thousand Shakespeare questions to get us started. Several blog regulars have already been hard at work getting a headstart on their reputation scores by digging in and answering questions about their favorite plays. There’s plenty to choose from. Multiple answers to questions are welcome (and encouraged!), especially when opinion or interpretation come into it.

If you can’t find any questions you’d like to answer, don’t be shy about adding your own! And yes, you can answer your own question.
What’s in it for the askers?
There’s competition in this space, no doubt. You can just as easily head off to Yahoo or WikiAnswers with your question. What’s the difference? Here, we’re creating a community that’s entirely about Shakespeare, run by people who deeply and truly care about getting you the best possible answer because they want more Shakespeare in the world and this is one of a myriad ways for them (us!) to do that.
I hope that anyone with a Shakespeare question who ends up on Shakespeare Answers will come away not just with a cut and paste answer that they can drop into their homework. Instead I hope to spark something in people that interests them in the subject, and makes them stick around to learn more.
Everybody, VOTE!
A site like this lives and dies by votes. Who had the best answer to a question? Which questions are the most popular? The only way to know the answer to either of those is for as many people as possible to vote. Don’t be shy. There is no limit to the voting (although, of course, logical limits apply – like you can only vote for something once).
I can prime the database with a few thousand questions. But what we really need for success is a few thousand users, and for those users to be voting. This will enable the site to take its own shape. What will be the most popular play, Hamlet or Coriolanus ? What sort of answer will be the most popular – long and encyclopedic, or short and snappy? I can’t choose – those will only evolve over time, and with your input.
Questions, Comments?
I’d love to hear people’s feedback on this idea. I’ve had the domain and the database for a long time, and had always hoped to build a site from scratch to my specifications. That wasn’t happening. I did however find a framework from bringing such a site up in a hurry. What this means is that, to my eye, it’s not exactly what I wanted. I see the rough edges perhaps more than others will. So it’s very important to me to hear what people think, and how I can make the site better. I plan to take a backseat on this one – I will not be racing people to the #1 karma spot. I fully expect somebody to earn that honor. What I can do is manipulate the look and feel, and overall functionality of the site.
I’m especially interested in ways to give the site a Shakespeare theme. You’ll see little details like requests to “ask thy question.” I’m open to more of that. Anywhere you see text that you think could be spun into something a bit more Elizabethan / Shakespearean, tell me tell me. I’d love to hear it.
Most importantly, spread the word! Tweet it, share it on Facebook, take it into your classrooms and have your students post their questions. I know I’ve got a fair share of teachers here, and I’d love to work *with* you on this one. I very much do not plan to make a “do your homework for you” site, I hope everybody knows me well enough to know that. Have faith, teachers, that if one of your students ends up looking for the answers on a site of mine? They’re going to come away with more Shakespeare information than they know what to do with!
Ok, time for me to shut up and let you check out Shakespeare Answers!

Wherefore Art Thou JM?!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Yes, yes, relax, I know what wherefore means. Got your attention though, didn’t I?
One of our long time contributors, JM by pseudonym, hasn’t been around in a good number of months. His blog, The Shakespeare Place, has gone untouched since January of this year. When fellow BardBlogger Gedaly disappeared on us for a little while, JM was right there with the public plea for him to come back.
So, I’m returning the favor on behalf of our little community. JM, where are you?
Anybody been in touch, and / or know why he may have taken his leave of us for a few months? I know that he’s quite active in the Shakespeare world at large, does a great bit of teaching and all that, so it’s quite possible that the real world got too busy and the online world suffered for it. Or, the Oxfordians may have gotten him.
Of course he could just be lurking, in which case I hope that cringe-worthy title of this post caught his attention. Wake up, J, and let us know you’re still alive!

Review : The Great Night, by Chris Adrian

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Imagine, for a moment, an Oberon and Titania who live in modern day San Francisco. Oh, they’re still king and queen of the fairies, still magical creatures. But, just like mortals, they have their flaws. They fight, they make up. After one particular fight, Oberon brings Boy to Titania as a peace offering. This is not new, the fairies often snatch young boys from the surrounding neighborhood and bring them to live “under the hill” for a time. Not as equals, of course. As toys. And, when they’re bored of their toys, they throw them back.
Something is different about this one, though. This one is not a toy. This boy they treat as a son. Titania deeply loves the boy, an emotion that is also deeply foreign to her (and she does not always like or appreciate it). Sometimes she can not live without him, other times she curses Oberon for ever bringing him to her.
Something else is different about Boy — he has leukemia. What happens to Titania and Oberon next is some of the saddest fiction I think I’ve ever read. The author’s descriptions of parents inside a hospital cancer ward as so realistic you feel like you’re right there with them (and it is not a place you want to be for long). This only stands to reason since Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night, is in real life a pediatric oncologist. So he, however unfortunately, knows all too much about this area.
I’m three paragraphs in, and that’s just the premise for the story. I could take a whole novel of that. “Titania and Oberon living in modern day San Francisco. They kidnap a boy, learn what it means to love him and to be parents, and then have to deal with his mortality as leukemia takes him away. Boom. Go.” I would buy that book.

But this book is more than that. This book is Adrian’s retelling of Shakespeare’s entire story, with a few twists. Oberon, after a particularly horrible fight with Titania (who blames him for all of their pain), has left. Titania desperaretly wants him to return and sends her fairy servants out in search of him daily. In this story, though, Puck is not a mischievous sprite – he is an untrustworthy creature who spends his time in chains. Puck is able to convince Titania, in her grief, that he will surely find Oberon if only she unchains him. She does so and we discover what the other fairies already knew – that Puck is a world-eating monster. The rest of the story is spent with the fairies alternately running away, attempting to fight, or basically kissing their fairy behinds goodbye because the end of the world is surely upon them.
Meanwhile, up in the human world, three distraught lovers have become lost in the park. Each has his (or her) own backstory about how love, sex and relationships have gone horribly wrong. It doesn’t take long for these mortals to run into the fairies, and they all flee from Puck together.
But wait, there’s more! What of Bottom and the mechanicals? Here we get a band of homeless people who have become convinced that the Mayor is solving the city’s homeless problem with cannibalism. So, naturally, they decide to stage a musical retelling of Soylent Green, the old science fiction movie about the same topic.
How does it all end? Well, with lots of sex, I’ll say that. I don’t know if that’s a statement that the author’s making about Midsummer or about San Francisco, but he certainly doesn’t need any double entendres or innuendos to make his point.   
The story is not an exact retelling of Midsummer, and doesn’t try to be, as you can see. Ultimately, I found that I liked the Shakespeare bits and didn’t care much one way or another for the rest. Like I said, I would have read an entire story of nothing but the backstory about Titania, Oberon and Boy. Or how Puck had come to be captured, I’m sure that would make a good story as well. It’s just that, when you start adding characters to Shakespeare, you lose me a bit as your audience. I’m in it for the Shakespeare, and coming at it from the angle of what you do with the Shakespeare. When you take some Shakespeare out and add some of your own creation back in? Well, now you’ve basically asked me to put the two side by side … and I’m not sure what modern author would win that battle.
Chris Adrian was named as part of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” and, as mentioned, is currently in his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. This is his third novel.

Shakespeare + Opera + Ballet

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

If you like a bit of ballet or opera with your Shakespeare and you’re in the neighborhood, the Royal Opera House in London is staging both Verdi’s Macbeth and Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Romeo & Juliet later this month.

Verdi’s Macbeth is always a popular opera, with instantly appealing music and a familiar story taken from Shakespeare’s play. The treacherous and scheming couple at its centre make for wonderful operatic villains – the type of strongly drawn characters that Verdi portrays in his music so well. With Simon Keenlyside making his Royal Opera debut in the title role, and with Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera, conducting the opera, this is a revival with an extra thrill. Macbeth’s ‘dagger’ soliloquy and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene are just two of the play’s famous moments that inspired Verdi to wonderfully inventive and atmospheric music. The heroic Macduff, a chorus of witches and the vivid apparition of the eight kings complete an opera that has the composer at his most theatrical. Phyllida Lloyd’s production, last presented by The Royal Opera in 2006, uses Verdi’s 1865 revision, especially noted for Lady Macbeth’s great aria ‘La luce langue’ and the wonderful Act IV opening chorus, and brings out the dark motivations of the Macbeths and the light of justice for those they wrong.

The Royal Ballet is thrilled to announce that it will perform Kenneth MacMillan’s timeless classic Romeo and Juliet at The O2 in June 2011. This will be the first time the world-renowned ballet company has performed in a UK arena and promises to be a ballet spectacle to remember.

A stellar cast of Royal Ballet dancers including Carlos Acosta, Tamara Rojo, Mara Galeazzi, Edward Watson, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg will dance the roles of the famous star-crossed lovers for four shows, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the Royal Ballet Music Director, Barry Wordsworth.

Any geeks out there an opera and/or ballet fan, and want to tell us about it? I have to admit I’ve seen neither ballet nor opera with a Shakespeare twist. I would say “other than the occasional channel surfing past PBS” but as I think back I’m not sure I’ve even seen that much.
I can, however, tell you about the time a professional wrestler stopped mid match to quote Hamlet’s Yorick speech. True story.

You Are What You Read

~ duane ~ 8 Comments

Although this article makes the Harry Potter comparison , I’m still very interested in the underlying idea that when you read, you”psychologically become part of their world and take away emotional benefits.”
Forget wizards, let’s talk Shakespeare. Isn’t this describing exactly what we’ve always known Shakespeare to be great at? We love the Henry V speech because *we* take our own personal motivation from it. We get all deep and existential with Hamlet because hey, it’s not like we know any more about the undiscovered country than he did, and we’re still just as consumed by it.
A fairly obvious question would be, “Doesn’t all fiction do this?” and I suppose the answer is “Yes…to an extent.” Sometimes to an extent so small that you don’t even notice. It takes a master to build universes. Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and yes even Harry Potter. For every “classic” (forgive me for calling Harry Potter a classic already), there are hundreds of knockoffs and wanna-be’s that tried to paint an almost identical universe, and came up short.