There’s never a shortage of Top 10 lists I could re-blog, so I try to limit it to the ones where I find some unique value.  Here we get to talk about 10 Shakespearean Stories in Modern Fiction.

This one caught my eye because I can see that they’re using a photo from the recent Lady Macbeth movie.  From what I understood, there’s almost no actual Shakespeare in that one?  Does anybody know one way or the other?  I thought all it really took from the original was the name.  But extra special Easter egg points if you click through the book shop link where you’ll see that the translation was handled by a Mr. McDuff.  Love it.

I’m also intrigued by The Diviners, a Canadian novel from 1974 that’s supposed to be loosely based on The Tempest?  I’ve truly never heard of that one.

For the curious, the three I knew where A Thousand Acres, The Tragedy of Arthur and of course Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I feel like it’s cheating to even include that one. 🙂

I’ve heard a lot about Shylock Is My Name but never read it.  The others on the list are complete mysteries to me.  I’ve heard the term “Withnail and I” over the years but I’m not sure I ever knew it’s supposed to be Hamlet?

If there’s some gold in this list that I’m missing, enlighten me!

 

 

 

(Extra special thanks that there’s no f$%^&*ng Lion King on it, too!)

 

 

Ok, a site called Art of Manliness offers up an article entitled, “20 Classic Poems Every Man Should Read.” Will Shakespeare be on it?

That’s an easy one, because I wouldn’t be writing about it if he didn’t show up.  But which Shakespeare makes an appearance?  Any guesses? Let’s say it’s a sonnet (it is).  Which one shall be anointed “manliest”?

Sonnet 29, “a lamentation on the loss of fame and fortune [that] ends with a meditation on the love that he has for his beloved.”  Does it, as the article suggests, conjure up similar themes with It’s A Wonderful Life?  Never really thought about that.

I’m ok with it.  I don’t have strong knowledge of the sonnets in general, other than the most popular dozen or so that we always talk about – is there a better choice?

Also – this list is good.  It’s weird to see the juxtaposition of “manly” and “poetry” but it works.  There’s some stuff on the list that I’ve never read, but now I want to, and that’s about the best praise I can give a list like this. Whitman makes the list, but not with “O Captain My Captain”.  Longfellow’s here too, but not with the “Wreck of the Hesperus” or “Hiawatha”.  Kipling, too, without “Gunga Din”.  So it’s not like they just went through and picked the easy ones.  Some actual thought went into this list.

 

 

 

 

Challenge:  Can we come up with “hooks” for Shakespeare?

Normally when somebody mentions a hook today they’re talking about music, and that short repeated musical phrase (possibly not even words) that gets stuck in your head.  Chances are when you hear the song again on the radio you don’t even recognize it the first few times until you hear the hook and you say, “Oh, yeah, this is that song, I love this song.” Know what happens, though?  You recognize more of the song each time.  You pay attention to the words. Before you know it, you can recognize it from the opening notes.

But the actual definition, at least according to Google, is

a thing designed to catch people’s attention.

So I’m wondering if we can’t come up with a hook for Shakespeare’s various plays. I saw a teacher complaining earlier that he’d given the students No Fear Shakespeare and yet still found himself having to translate that for them. I thought, “We’re doing this backwards. We hold the text up to be the Holy Grail and then we say let me make it simpler for you, let me make *that* simpler for you, let me make that simpler for you…” and all the materials are in that context of “Here’s how far removed you are from the actual good stuff.”

Let’s change the perspective.  Can you reduce Hamlet down to a single sentence?  I don’t want to summarize all the elements of the play. What I want is the students’ attention. I want them saying, “Sounds interesting, tell me more.”

I have this image like something out of a movie, the harried English teacher walking down between the desks while the kids sit on their phones, throw paper airplanes, and generally ignore him. The teacher is holding a copy of the complete works.  He gets to his desk, turns, and slams the book down on his desk to get their attention.  And he says …  what?

Sure, he could go with, “Two households!  Both alike, in dignity.  In fair Verona where we lay our scene.” And if you’re like me lightning bolts shoot up your spine because that happens every time. But he doesn’t have a classroom full of Shakespeare geeks, and he needs to hook their attention some other way.

“Girl meets boy at party. Two days later they’re both dead.”

“Hamlet’s dad is gone and he wants to kill his step dad.”

“The only person that knows Macbeth just killed his boss is Macbeth’s wife, because she told him to do it.”

“Everybody knows Beatrice and Benedick love each other, except Beatrice and Benedick.”

As I write these I realize it sounds like click bait, but I don’t want to call it that.  Clickbait implies trying to trick the user into looking under the covers for something that’s not really there. But everything I said above is true. I *want* my students to be interested in what happens next.

Anybody else got some good ones?  The goal is to have a list of great starters that any teacher of Shakespeare could use to kick off a new lesson.

 

 

If you’re a geek in the more traditional sense of the word, sometimes you look at the works of Shakespeare as one big text file and say, “Ooh, let’s look for patterns.” If you were to take a course on natural language programming, chances are very good that one of the first lessons will be in parsing Shakespeare for what are called n-grams, or “phrases of N words that always appear together.”  This is how autocorrect works, it looks at what you’ve already written and then says, “Statistically, what do I think is typically the next word?”

But being Shakespeare geeks as well, we can then work backward and look at the context for when and where and why he used them. This post is just one in what’s hopefully a series of interesting discoveries using this technique.

For my fellow programming geeks – here’s the github source I found to get started!

Disclaimer – raw text processing has lots of issues.  Special character and line breaks and headers/footers all get in your way and have to be stripped out.  In one version of this test the phrase “a midsummer nights dream” ranked very highly and I thought, wait, no it doesn’t.  That’s because one of the sample text files had used the title of the play as a header on every page.  Very hard to strip that out if there’s no real markers to identify it.  So, take these results with at least a few grains of salt.

The longer the n-gram that less data you get, which makes sense because you’re going to get fewer hits.  So typically you see 2 or 3 words (bi- and tri-grams, respectively).  But Shakespeare’s a bit wordy and you tend to get things like, “I pray you” or “I know not” which don’t give you much to work with. So I expanded to look at 4 and 5 word grams. Quads and quints?  Not sure what they’re officially called.

My quad-grams give me plenty of the usual hits: “I know not what”, “I do not know”, “I do beseech you,” … but one of them appears significantly more than the others (30% more actually), and it is where I got the title for this post.

With all my heart.

Lovely.  Now can you guess which play uses it the most?  I’ll give you a hint.  Merchant of Venice uses it 4 times, Othello 5, but this play uses it 6 times.

I’m not giving the answer here, I want to see what people guess.  It’s not one I would have expected.  I wonder if it has something to do with when the play was written relative to Shakespeare’s career. Maybe he had a tendency to repeat himself or use simpler go-to phrases earlier in his writing? Is that a hint?