Shakespeare makes life better.
I was looking at my site recently and while I noticed that the lion’s share of my traffic comes from the US, expectedly, but according to Google there’s 117 different locations where my readers have come from.
So I’m curious. Where you from? What’s the Shakespeare scene like over there?
Interesting! From the Wikipedia page:
Collier used these opportunities to effect a series of literary fabrications. Over the next several years he claimed to find a number of new documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and business. After New Facts, New Particulars and Further Particulars respecting Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), so called from a name written on the title-page. In this book were numerous manuscript emendations of Shakespeare, said by Collier to be from the hand of “an old corrector.” He published these corrections as Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare (1852) and boldly incorporated them in his next edition (1853) of Shakespeare.
More information here. Did this guy just forge his sources? If there’s such controversy over his edition why would the Moby edition, which is based on the 1864 Globe edition (thanks JM), have this line?
I would have thought the authenticity of this edition would have been seriously called into question just by looking at the first scene of Romeo and Juliet, anyway:
SAMPSON
Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.
GREGORY
No, for then we should be colliers.
SAMPSON
That would be awesome.
GREGORY
This is what I’m sayin, right? Colliers are the coolest.
SAMPSON
I hear you. Ain’t nothing wrong with being a collier. Colliers rule.
GREGORY
You know who doesn’t rule, though? Montagues.
Personally I don’t know who this gentleman is, I had to go look him up on IMDB. Seems he’s done mostly work on UK rather than US features. Fair enough. He popped up in my newsfeed this morning for a Shakespeare mention, and here’s what he had to say:
Mastermind specialist subject
Shakespeare. When I watch Pointless and there are any Shakespeare questions I nearly always get them all, and I feel like I’d probably know more about Shakespeare than I do about anything else, as a sort of general knowledge thing. So yeah, it would be Shakespeare, but I’d have to read all 36 plays again.
Anybody else notice something odd right at the end, there? 36? I hear 37 most often, and sometimes 38, but I can’t remember the last time I heard 36. When somebody says that, which play are they not counting? Henry VIII?
So I saw somebody carrying a skull as part of her Halloween costume, and of course I had to come up with some jokes about Yorick, being quite chap-fallen, could not enjoy the Reese’s Pieces he did love so very much. So of course I had to pull up Hamlet’s speech to get my quotes right. I go to the MIT (Moby) version, because it’s the easiest to search:
And I thought, “Wait… there’s a stage direction that tells him to put down the skull? That seems oddly specific for a play that rarely states stage directions beyond who enters, exits and dies.”
So I go look it up in the First Folio, as you folks have taught me to do:
As a lifelong computer geek, and a student of the history of my industry, I am disappointed in myself that I’ve never heard this story. Credit to Walter Isaacson’s Innovators for setting me straight.
Once upon a time (1989 to be precise), the inventors of the internet got together and threw a party. I’m not talking about Al Gore and the other talking heads of what the modern generation knows about the net, I’m talking about the academic, government and military minds working under the covers to build the protocols that went into allowing the net to exist in the first place.
You know what these guys did when they partied? They read poetry. Because once upon a time, the smartest people in the world thought that they were creating technology in order to help them pursue the humanities. I think I would have liked these guys.
Anyway, Vint Cerf (who went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005) got up a read a poem. What he read, was this:
ROSENCRANTZ AND ETHERNET
by
Vint Cerf
All the world's a net! And all the data in it merely packets
come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are
heard no more. 'Tis a network waiting to be switched!
To switch or not to switch? That is the question. Whether
'tis wiser in the net to suffer the store and forward of
stochastic networks or to raise up circuits against a sea
of packets and, by dedication, serve them.
To net, to switch. To switch, perchance to slip!
Aye, there's the rub. For in that choice of switch,
what loops may lurk, when we have shuffled through
this Banyan net? Puzzles the will, initiates symposia,
stirs endless debate and gives rise to uncontrolled
flights of poetry beyond recompense!
You probably have to be a computer geek to get most of that, but when I heard it come through my headphones I knew I had to post it!