Month: June 2011

The inventor of Mad Libs, Leonard B. Stern, has died.
It seems only fair to mark his passing with a little Mad Libs Shakespeare. This is a quicky so it’s not formatted well (and you basically have to DIY), don’t read the second half until you’re ready to fill in:
1 Verb
3 Noun

4 Noun
5 Verb
6 Plural noun
7 Plural noun
8 Adjective
9 Noun
10 Plural noun
11 Noun
12 Plural noun
13 Verb
14 Verb
15 Verb
17 Number
18 Adjective
19 Plural noun
20 Noun
21 Past-tense verb
(*) I realize that a few numbers are missing, I realized after doing this that words were repeated but didn’t feel like renumbering all the slots 🙂
To __1__, or not to __1___: that is the __3___:

Whether ’tis nobler in the __4___ to __5___

The __6___ and __7___ of __8___ __9___,

Or to take _10____ against a __11___ of __12___,

And by opposing __13___ them? To __14___: to __15___;

No more; and by a __15___ to say we end

The heart-ache and the _17____ __18___ __19____

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a __20___

Devoutly to be _21____.

I hope that regular reader/contributor Bill doesn’t mind me reposting this message he sent me on Facebook, but I thought it would make great conversation and surely more opinions on a question like this is better than a few.

Question: I’ll be teaching a semester long Shakespeare class this year. If you were in high school again, and were able to take a class like this, what are some issues that you’d like to tackle.

Reading list: Othello, Shrew, Merchant, Tempest, and one more, undecided.

Any thoughts?

I’m not sure the range he has to work with (i.e. is he specifically asking about parts of the text to study in detail, or ways to structure activities in the class), but maybe he’ll chime in with answers.

One thing that comes to mind, which I take from the local Rebel Shakespeare group here, is to include performance. Public performance. “Bill’s Class Presents, Scenes from Shakespeare!” Preferably outdoor, if you can find a place. Or in a classroom if you must. Get friends and family to come. Nicely combines the ideas of “Shakespeare must be performed”, demonstrating / showing off what you’ve learned, as well as serving as a sort of informal final exam / graduation ceremony.

As for the texts themselves, why not make that undecided one something from the later plays, like Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline? It seems like The Tempest is it for the later stuff, that’s all kids ever see. I think it’s important to show that not every play met the structured definition of history / tragedy / comedy. I suppose Tempest covers that, but so often discussion of that play is all about it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, and less on questions of “It’s not really a comedy or a tragedy, what is it?”

Although the idea has been done to death, I’m sure that today’s high school kids would get a kick out anything involving new/social media mixed with Shakespeare. We have no end of Twitter/Facebook versions of the plays. You could perhaps have them come up with something in that area. We certainly didn’t have that when I was in high school! 🙂

Who else has ideas for Bill?

It took a reminder from Bardfilm, aka KJ, my friend, collaborator and sometimes conspirator ;), to remind me that six years ago today, on June 8, 2005, Shakespeare Geek was born. It’s funny (if a bit embarrassing!) to see how far we’ve come from simply reposting links and newsfeed articles, to becoming one of the most popular places on the net to come and talk about Shakespeare. We’ve got actors and directors, writers, professors and students, children and parents. I think we’ve done a pretty good job in demonstrating over the years that Shakespeare really is universal.

I never quite knew what I wanted this site to become when I started it, because every time I thought “Do I want to focus on [specific audience]?” I thought, “No, it’s more than that. I don’t want to alienate [people not in that audience].” I wanted a site for everybody. At the time, I assumed that this would imply a very non-academic slant, something geared toward the “parents working with their kids to help them with their Shakespeare homework” crowd. Why? Because I have no “cred”, academically. Who am I to talk about Shakespeare? I have no degree in this, it’s not my full time job. I’m not even a theatre geek. 🙂 I just have a love for the subject.

Turns out, so do a lot of people :). And they all eventually find a home here.

I keep saying “our” and “we” and will continue to do so because the best content on this site comes from you folks Half the time all I do is ask the question – sometimes a good one, sometimes a stupid one 🙂 – and you’re the ones that deliver the good stuff. Often the discussion will quickly get way over my head, so I just sit back and enjoy watching the conversation take place. Other times we stumble across items that cause even the experts to learn something new. I’ll always remember the post on Shakespeare Sports where Alan Farrar spotted a sports references in the sonnets that Carl Atkins, who wrote a book on the subject, had missed (“Should have been cited by at least eight editors,” said Carl at the time). Stuff like that always amazes me. All I did was pose the question.

As the site has grown I’ve often considered rebuilding it on a different platform, getting away from the blog idea and moving to more of a dedicated platform. But to do that would be incredibly disruptive to what we’ve built here, so I keep putting it off. Still, though, our little corner of the Shakespeare universe has grown….

• Not By Shakespeare where we set the record straight about who should get credit for stuff like “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew,” because boy, it ain’t Shakespeare.
• Hear My Soul Speak My book! Tired of only ever hearing “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” I took it upon myself to compile all the best wedding quotes from across all of Shakespeare’s works, complete with explanation of who said it and what it means. Whether you’re the best man looking for a toast, or an invitee looking for something to sign in the guest book, Shakespeare offers something for everybody.
• Shakespeare Geek Merchandise Be proud of your inner geek! Half the fun in wearing my “Mercutio Drew First!” t-shirt is in those rare times when somebody actually *gets* the joke, and I know I’ve met a kindred spirit. (If you want to support the site, buying something’s always greatly appreciated. This is the only blatant plug that you’ll find in this post. Thanks!)
• Shakespeare Answers   Sites like WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers may have us at a slight size disadvantage, but we’ve got something that no amount of general-content sites can ever hope to have — love for our subject. If somebody’s got a question about Shakespeare for me, I deeply and seriously want them to understand my answer. I’m not interested in just giving them enough to get a good grade on their homework. If you’ve got a question I expect you to walk away with enough knowledge about your question that you could be the one to answer it next time somebody asks *you*. Too often are the wide open sites filled with garbage, joke answers and spam. Shakespeare Answers will be full of nothing but the absolute best answers to any Shakespeare question that someone out there might have, because I know that my audience is already full of exactly the kind of Shakespeare lovers like myself who can provide those answers. Join up now and take part in the fun!
• Over 2100 Twitter followers!  Are you in on the fun? Sometimes the most hilarious stuff goes by so fast it never even makes the blog!
• Over 650 Facebook fans! If this is where you prefer to get your news, I’ve got you covered. (Although I’ll never understand the folks that comment on blog posts via Facebook comments instead of coming back to the blog! You miss most of the conversation that way!)

Who know what’s next? I’d like to do more in the ebook arena. I’d like to do more with mobile app development. Life is busy. There’s day job, there’s family commitments. I can’t always commit the kind of time and resources to the site that I’d like, but I do try, I’ll always promise that.

Thanks, everybody, for six great years, and for helping to make Shakespeare Geek quite simply the best place around to talk about you know who!

One of the books I’m working through on my Kindle (the title escapes me, I will update when I’m near Kindle again) has to do with memory. I just hit a patch that covers some fairly well-known ground — the human memory can basically handle about 7 things at once, and by “chunking” that information in order to associate it with higher level pieces of information in your memory, you can make it seem that you’re getting more out of it. In other words, those 7 things that you really remember could each be composed of 7 things, which could each be composed….
…the example in the books? Memorize the letters HEADSHOULDERSKNEESTOES. Assuming that you can read English you’re probably going to spot four words HEAD/SHOULDERS/KNEES/TOES and presto, you only have to memorize 4 words, not 22 letters. Even better, if that children’s song is now stuck in your head, it’s really like 1 big piece of information.
So my question is this. Surely most of you have some randomly sizes bits of Shakespeare memorized. Why and how? Can you pin them back to any sort of “chunking” as described above?
I’ll give you a small example of my own. Back in college, the girl I was dating was in The Tempest. Instead of flowers for opening night I got her a musical carousel with unicorns on it and an inscribed quote, “Now I will believe that there are unicorns.” It is a small example, but that quote is forever associated with that memory in my head.
Similarly, I’ve told the story a million times about having that epiphany moment over Hamlet’s joke, “Thrift, Horatio, thrift! The funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables!” (Although for some reason my memory always wants to insert “thrice-baked” and I don’t know why).
Anybody else have similar stories? My examples are small, I’m looking for examples of how somebody can get through an entire Shakespeare play that way.