This morning, before brushing his teeth, my 4yr old looked in the mirror, threw his arms up in the air and shouted ” To BE! Or….NOT, to be. THAT is the question.” No idea where that came from, there was no prompting from me at all. I loved the delivery. Many times he’s come up to me and repeated it just like a 4yr old would repeat a joke over and over again not realizing it’s not funny anymore, just knowing that it got a reaction once therefore it must get a reaction every time. “Hey daddy to be or not to be that is the question!” This was different. Of course I immediately tried to teach him the next line, but “whether ’tis nobler” is right off the bat some pretty hard words for someone that can’t even read yet.
I’ll keep working on it. I may start calling him Edwin Booth.

Here’s a quick game for a weekend day. Surely we’ve all experienced a certain amount of rationalizing that goes with our Shakespeare, whether it came from casual conversation or directly from our teachers. What am I talking about? I heard an old stand by this morning about Juliet being 13 – namely, “Oh, well you see, that was the typical age for a girl back then to get married.”
Really? Back when, exactly? The late 1500’s when Shakespeare was writing? Or something more in the 14th century, based on Porto’s original? If the latter – then why did Porto have Juliet as 16 instead? (I think I have those facts right, this is off the top of my head). If Shakespeare was talking about his own time, what’s it mean then that at 18 he married a pregnant woman nearly 10 years older than him?
Or instead is it that we read Shakespeare, we think “Well, whatever he wrote has to make sense, therefore this love story about a 13yr old has to make sense…so we’ll tell ourselves how it makes sense.”
Then there’s the “second best bed” that he left to his wife. Surely you’ve heard people tell you that “Oh, well you see, this was commonly done – the *best* bed was the guest bed, of course, and the second best bed would have been their wedding bed.” Really? Has anyone ever seen independent confirmation of that, or is that just wishful thinking?
Then of course there’s the whole gay thing. Sonnets written to a dude? Of course they were, that’s how people talked back then! It was perfectly natural for one guy to write love poetry to another guy!
I’m curious, this fine Saturday morning … can we make a list of those? More importantly, can we decide once and for all which are right and which are just wishful thinking?

These guys are in the running for $10,000 to bring Shakespeare to those who can’t physically attend the theatre.They need your votes to win. Please vote for them once per day Jan 4 – Feb 28. And if you REALLY want to help, please repost this. In your blog. Facebook. Wherever!

How To Vote

1) go to http://www.refresheverything.ca/shakespeareinhospitals

2) go to the bottom of the window and click “Join Refresh Everything”

3) Fill in the sign up info (name, age, valid email address, password, retyped password, prove you’re not a robot, click ‘done’)

4) Hit “vote for this idea”

5) Repeat each day

6)TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO DO THE SAME!

Once more unto the breach, dear Keri, once more! Keri Ellis Cahill, founder and guiding light of Rebel Shakespeare, is once again in front of a classroom bringing the good words to the children. She’s done this many, many times over her career, but this time she’s posting her experience on Facebook. With permission, I present her list of actual quotes overheard in her class:
Q: “Why did teen boys play all the roles in Shakespeare’s day?”

A: “Because the money was so good!”
Q: “Tell me something about Shakespeare’s family.”

A: “They’re all dead.”
Q: “Over the entrance to the Globe Theatre, a phrase in Latin says Totus Mondus Agit Histrionem. What does that mean?”

A: “Come on in!”
Q: (to Lysander) “When Hermia says Whither away? to Helena, what should be happening?”

A: “Ummmm….she should shrivel up. Or at least, fall down.”
Overheard: “OMG we’re getting casted today! I hope I get Hernia!”
More to come as soon as she stops laughing long enough to transcribe them :). I’ve seen the Rebels do their thing a number of times now, and plan to continue for a long time.
  

First, let me show you my Top Five Most Popular Posts of the last 6 months or so, defined as follows : When these blog titles went up on Twitter, the most people clicked on them. They are:

1. Shakespeare’s New Year’s Resolutions (Guest Post)
2. Harry Potter is Shakespeare
3. Shakespearean Collective Nouns (A Guest Post by Bardfilm)
4. The Seven Least-Controversial Disclosures on WikiLeaks
5. 10 Reasons We Love Sir Ian McKellen

(This is the order, by the way – top down. So the resolutions one is my most popular post in a long time.)

I like the “How many clicks did each tweeted link get” metric for a couple of reasons. Mostly because it tracks initial reaction – people see it, and then either they decide to click, or not. “Retweets”, where person A decides that the link is so good they want to share it with person B, would also show up in this list. However, if I tried to recycle it and post the same link under a few different headlines, it would not — the link would change and be counted separately.

This is very different from the organic/SEO world where how much Google traffic you get has less to do with what you wrote, and more to do with the particular keyword density that caused you to float up the page into the #1 spot. “How old is Romeo?” is not my #1 blog post because that’s what the most people are interested in, it’s the #1 post because I happen to have the best google spot for that, so it gets the most traffic.

So anyway, what patterns do you see in the above list?

First of all, 3 out of the 5 were written by my guest blogger Bardfilm. Thanks very much for the content, KJ! Looks like our partnership can be called a success, no?

Two of those are called out as guest posts, the third is not (the Wikileaks one is his, if you’re curious). So maybe there’s something to be said for the idea that guest posts bring traffic. Followers like to hear a fresh point of view now and then, it’s good variety.

But do you see the other, more obvious pattern? 4 out of 5 of those posts are very clearly lists. Seven of this, ten of that. Resolutions. Nouns. People like to click on lists. Lists promise a short, well organize burst of content.

The outlier is Mr. Harry Potter, and it’s probably obvious why he made the list – it’s Harry Potter. 🙂 Tweeting about celebrities will almost always get you some clicks, doubly so if you find a way to link that celebrity to your niche instead of just broadcasting generic news headlines about him. Being trendy is important – I was surprised that my Ian McKellen post did not get more traffic. But quality doesn’t really enter into it, in that particular battle – comparing a Harry Potter headline and an Ian McKellen headline is like comparing a Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones story to a Lady Gaga one. The audiences are just different.

Of course, timeliness is pretty important as well. The Resolutions one obviously wouldn’t work at any time other than maybe a week before and after the new year, when everybody’s in the mood for lists like that. Likewise with the Wikileaks one – if you tried to put out a Wikileaks story now I think you’ll find that most folks are bored of the topic. Even Harry Potter, I’m pretty sure I tried to put that post up right around the time of the last movie. I think that was one of the problems with poor Sir Ian – he’s always good. I didn’t have a current event to link him to. Maybe when The Hobbit comes out I’ll bring that post out of mothballs and try it again :).