Month: December 2011

I got asked one of those “What one question would you ask Shakespeare?” questions the other day.  I decided that I’d ask something along the lines of whether he was just writing one play at a time, just doing what the audience wanted, or if he really did have the idea of something bigger, writing something that would last as long as it has.

In the past I’ve pointed to Sonnet 18 as evidence that he had some clue about his own longevity, what with the fairly obvious “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this” line.  Sounds like he’s coming right out and saying “My work will last forever.”

But then I thought, is he really?  Or is the image more generic, making the simpler point that “Having written this down, it will now last forever.” See what I mean? It’s not that he’s saying “My work will last forever because it is just that great,” maybe he’s simply saying “Stuff that’s written down is basically timeless.”

Thoughts? Are there other good examples that look like Shakespeare’s hinting at knowledge of his own timelessness?

As we celebrate the best lyricists in the music business over on Modern Shakespeares, I thought it only made sense to offer up a place to post the opposite end of the spectrum.  Here’s where you can post those lyrics that are so god-awfully bad that you can’t imagine someone had the cahones to write them down in the first place, let alone put them to music and shell out good money to turn them into a consumer product.

Names left out to protect the guilty (and because I’m too lazy to format this all nice and neat), but I think that if you’ve heard any of this songs you know who you want to strangle:

And I was like…
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
I thought you’d always be mine (mine)

It’s not even the mindless repetition on that one that really puts me over the edge, it’s the casual “I was like..” at the beginning.  It’s bad enough that kids use it in casual rapidfire conversation, but to have sat down at a desk with all the time in the world and your entire vocabulary at your disposal, and to have selected that?  Brutal.

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after…wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

There are so many bad lyrics in that song it’s hard to pick the worst.  I think that “Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes after…wards” has to win some sort of award, however.

I’m talking pedicures on our toes toes
Tryin on all our clothes clothes
Boys blowin up our phones phones

Remember kids, if you don’t have enough beats in a line, just go ahead and repeat words as often as needed. I’ve heard that Ke$ha is actually a fairly intelligent student of music and knows full well that she’s writing garbage, but she’s doing so on purpose because she knows what gets radio play. I’m not sure I believe that. Or maybe I just don’t want to.

And a special reference to this one, because I know somebody’s going to bring it up:

Hip Hop Marmalade spic And span,
Met you one summer and it all began
You’re the best girl that I ever did see,
The great Larry Bird Jersey 33
When you take a sip you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

I really had to listen to the song for myself – the lyrics truly are that bad. He even manages to make that last one rhyme by calling them “sornets”.  I’m still trying to figure out what you take a sip of.

Follow any popular music artist long enough and eventually someone will call him (or her) a “modern Shakespeare.”  I use to rail against this, replying with “Contact me in 400 years and we’ll see whether or not anybody’s still listening to your guy.  Then we can talk.”

Recently I was adding music to my playlist (I only really listen to music while programming, and for that I have one very specific playlist) and running music through Pandora for suggestions.  I laughed when Pandora told me that it had suggested a song because I like “intelligent lyrics.” 

That reminded me of the modern Shakespeare argument, so I decided to lighten up and have fun with it.  Let’s hear about some modern Shakespeares of yours.  Specifically we’re talking about lyrics.  What lyrics of what song make you stop and listen and say, “Wow, that was very impressive writing.”

I’ll start off with two examples that show my very unusual taste in music.  The first comes from Eminem’s Lose Yourself:

Too much for me to wanna
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten me to the point, I’m like a snail
I’ve got to formulate a plot or I end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherf_cking option, failure’s not

Look at that rhyming structure, where he somehow manages to combine “wanna” and “spot” into “monotony”, and then rolls it right over into “gotten me.”  (I apologize from dropping in the curse word, but that’s a reality of modern music.  We don’t censor our Shakespeare when we quote him.)  Much of Eminem’s music does a pretty good job of telling whatever story he wants to tell, which granted is often a variation on “Screw everybody that doesn’t believe in me,” but I’m still impressed by the variety he gets into his lyrics.  Most songs of his that I enjoy walk that line between “I’m just talking to you, telling you a story” and “I happen to be speaking in rhyme when I do it.” And he does it without getting so gutter so fast that I’m embarrassed to listen to it. 

And now for something completely different, consider the hook from Adele’s current hit Someone Like You:

Nevermind,
I’ll find
someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best, for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remember you said:-
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”

If you’ve not heard the song, it is (in my interpretation) the story of a woman who never stopped loving her former flame, and tries to get back into his life in the hopes that he, too, never stopped loving her – but finds instead that he did indeed find someone else, got married, and is perfectly happy.

“Nevermind I’ll find” is a great hook (especially the way Adele belts it out), and for me it’s the “never mind” that makes the song.  Had it just been “I’ll find someone else” then it would be a different song, it would have a positive “I’ll get over this, I’ll be ok” vibe to it.  But instead it’s “This is the world to me, I’m betting everything on you feeling the same way….oh, you don’t feel the same way…oh, ok….never mind,” and it’s so clearly just this crushing moment for a woman who’s accepting (unwillingly) the truth that the best she’ll ever have is a shadow of who she wanted. Especially when you couple it with that “I wish nothing but the best for you.”   And that’s all just what I get out of the story of the song, that’s not even saying anything about that brilliant structure that starts out so short and memorable and then ends on those drawn out slow lines.

All right, there’s your quick glance into my musical taste.  It’s worth mentioning that Eminem is in my programming playlist but Adele is not. While I like both songs, the potential random transition from one into the other is too distracting for me when I’m working.

What else have you got?  I’m not looking for “Hey did you know that Sting wrote a bunch of literary references in his work?”  Yes, yes I did.  I want to hear about the songs that you think are impressive, not just interesting.

So, I passed in a draft of what I planned to work with the kids on.  Basically, as I think I mentioned, it’s all the Lysander/Hermia/Demetrius/Helena stuff.  Plus some intro stuff on Shakespeare’s life, sentence structure and vocabulary, and then if there’s time the Insult game.

Here’s what I got back.

* Absolutely no insult game.  Against school bullying policies. Even if the game is in fun you have to assume that kids will take it out onto the playground and hurt feelings will ensue.  Fine, I guess.

* Additionally, some bits in the script that deal with name-calling are also out.  She called out Helena’s “I am your dog, beat me, whip me, treat me as you wish” sequence as something she wouldn’t want.  I’m not sure yet if that means everything.  The scene where Helena calls Hermia short is one of the funniest in the entire play.

* She did like the Shakespeare’s life bits, and the poetry/sentence structure bits.  But I don’t want to do an hour on those.  There’s no performing in those.

I proposed a couple of things.

* First, that I’d bring with me a lengthy list of “backwards” sentences from Shakespeare and we could work with the kids on untangling them so they understand what the sentences mean.  Examples like “I love thee not, so follow me not” is Shakespeare for “I don’t love you, so stop following me.”

* Second, that the teacher and I enact some No Fear style scenes, where we as the two adults perform a bit of the original text, and then we let the kids get up and perform a very modernized version of the exact same sequence.  I am dead set against just having them perform a bunch of crap that I wrote from scratch and calling it Shakespeare.  I might as well have them act out Gnomeo and Juliet if I’m going to do that.

HELP

Want to help me?  I need examples for both games.  For the first I need individual sentences from the text (preferably Dream) that mean that “this is backwards from how we’d normally say it” criteria.  It helps if all the words are modern — the “I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth” example is wonderful, but I have to explain “wherefore” and “mirth” to these kids.

Second, help me pick some snippets for the No Fear game. I need quick little exchanges that two adults could do without getting completely confused.  So for example a Demetrius/Helena exchange. 

If possible I’ll also try to get in the initial rehearsal of Bottom and his crew, but I’m afraid that the teacher will tell me the whole Pyramus and Thisbe thing is just too complicated.

Hi Gang,

I thought folks might like an update on my upcoming teaching debut.  For those coming late to the party, I actually get to do an hour of Shakespeare with my daughter’s 7yr old class, at the request of the teacher.

With literally no experience at doing this sort of thing in any structured way, I’ve been going a bit crazy trying to figure out how much to tackle without completely blowing it.  I know that there are plenty of resources out there for this sort of thing and I’ve been doing my research (thank you to my regulars who dumped all their best links and documents on me), but at the end of the day I kind of want to find my own voice, you know?  This has been something of a dream for me for, I don’t know, forever.  I don’t want to just recite somebody else’s script.

I’ve sent off my plans to the teacher (who asked for approval, to make sure that I wasn’t going to do anything that might go so far over the kids’ heads that I embarrass them).  Here’s the highlights:

* Some material on who Shakespeare was, put in context of what the kids have been taught.  Mostly of the “After Christopher Columbus but before the Pilgrims” sort of stuff.

* A lesson on poetry and sentence structure. If I can nail this I think it goes a long way toward unlocking the dreaded “Why is Shakespeare so confusing??” question.  I simply want to point out to the kids that in pursuit of poetry, you can rearrange the words in a sentence in unexpected ways.  We’ll use some of their dictation sentences as examples, maybe play a game and let them try it out (“Make the sentence work out so that ‘game’ is the last word).

* I’ve come up with highly edited versions of three scenes (which are, really, compilations of multiple scenes). One, for example, is all of the Lysander/Hermia/Demetrius/Helena sequences.  We’ll play a version of the “Woosh!” game, where every time a character enters the role will be played by whoever was the next student in line.  This means boys playing girls, girls playing boys, and general silliness.

* My scripts are still almost entirely Shakespeare.  I’ve swapped out some “thee” and “hath” to smooth things out, but never did I just scrap a line and go “modern translation”.  That’s a big deal to me, and I wrote it in the notes to the teacher that I have faith the kids even at that age will be able to understand the text.

* For fun and depending on time filler, I’ll bring along an interaction version of the Shakespeare Insult Generator where I’ll let the kids pick words out of a hat and hurl their insults at fellow classmates.

That’s the plan I’m focusing on.  I’m trying very hard to keep the performance content high, while not starting something that we won’t even get halfway through.  If we can make it through all three of my scenes, great.  I’d like to at least do 2.  I think that with three scenes, the intro material and the insult game as filler, I can easily make it last an hour (maybe a little more) without feeling like I left too much out.

The big day is Thursday December 22.  Getting closer!