If there’s a pet peeve I have about Shakespeare, it’s that connection between “Shakespeare is hard and useless, therefore why learn it?”  Once I heard a radio commercial for some sort of vocational school that used that exact line, presumably in reference to not wanting to get a real education at a real school:  “What can Shakespeare teach me about IT?”  (That’s “information technology”, in case anybody’s pronouncing it like the pronoun and wondering why I’m talking about the Stephen King novel.)
Well.  As a lifelong computer geek (been coding for 30 out of 40 years, thankyouverymuch) with a love a Shakespeare, I think I’d like to comment on that.  Let’s talk about what Shakespeare can teach you about IT, and about yourself.
Shakespeare appreciation is self-directed.  If all you know about Shakespeare is what the teacher makes you memorize for the test, you will fall very very short of what you can accomplish.  At best, school provides that glimmer of something that makes you say “Wow, I love this” and then it’s up to you to do whatever you can to seek out more information. 

Computer science is the same way.  If you love it, then you will go over and above what school teaches you. If all you’re doing is walking through classes in order to get the grade and the diploma, then you’re not getting much out of life. That’s true of pretty much any subject.
Shakespeare wrote in a different language, with its own tokens and syntax.  Computer software is very much a game of speaking new languages (Java, Ruby, Erlang, take your pick).  When you’re just starting out you can say “I know language A but not language B,” but as you become more senior your answer is expected to evolve into, “Because I know languages A, B and C, even though I’ve never seen D I have enough fundamentals in what to expect from a computer language that it shouldn’t be difficult for me to pick it up.” All languages have variables and loops, objects and conditionals. You have to know when you’ve seen an old idea in a new context, and be able to make the leap of understanding about what that means. 

Reading Shakespeare offers similar challenges. Most of the words he used are still in use today (as a matter of fact he invented many of them, or at least was “first recorded use”, for the sticklers in the audience).  But he often used them in different ways than we do.  There’s a certain amount of deciphering that has to go on, sure, but when you get right down to it Shakespeare’s people still spoke in sentences with subjects and verbs just like we do.  Much of what Shakespeare added could be considered “syntactic sugar,” if you like.
“Reverse engineering”, for the non-IT crowd, refers to taking an existing piece of technology and taking it apart in an effort to figure out what the creator meant when he did certain things.  Often this is done in a sitation where you no longer have (or may never have had) access to the creator to just plain ask. There’s almost so much parallel to Shakespeare there that I don’t know where to begin.  Was he Catholic or Protestant?  Did he even write the plays?  Reverse engineering Shakespeare’s works has kept scholars busy for hundreds of years.
Shakespeare is a memorization game.  I’m convinced that Google kills memory cells.  Most programmers I interview these days will say that they don’t need books anymore, they just google for the answer.  I think the better response is that they have the memory capacity to remember the answer in the first place!  No, of course not everything, but surely there are things you run into so frequently that you shouldn’t be running for your search engine every day.  Same goes for Shakespeare.  When I’m speaking to someone on the subject and trying to make a point, if I have to stop and go “Oh, shoot, what’s that thing that Antony said in Julius Caesar about when people die?  Darn, oh hang on a second let me google it….”  I’d look pretty weak and foolish.  I can make a point with a Shakespeare quote because, if it is needed in a certain context, I’ve acquired enough knowledge that I can use it to my advantage.
Shakespeare is Open Source. Do you like Shakespeare’s source material?  Take it.  Use it.  Put your own twist on it.  He did the same thing, after all.  What is “Romeo and Juliet” but a specific implementation of the “unrequited love” idea that already existed before Shakespeare got hold of it?

There are many different ways to go with this idea. As a programmer, I carry around the works of Shakespeare in XML format.  It’s the sample I use for nested content.  When I need to learn a new method for storing and accessing data, I use the raw XML to build myself a Shakespeare database. When I wanted the sonnets in XML and couldn’t find them, I made it myself. When I need to quote something and want to verify my facts, I grep (i.e., search) the text.  If I started listing out the ideas I’ve had for startups that never go anywhere (note to non geeks, all computer geeks always have a steady stream of ideas for stuff that they’d build if they just had the time …) you’d find that most of them start with Shakespeare’s content at their core.

Or maybe instead  you just run with the ideas, and not the literal source material. Maybe you write the next West Side Story or Lion King (which pay homage to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, respectively, without copying any words).  Or maybe you go more the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead way, finding the holes in Shakespeare’s stories where you could retell them from a different angle.  The possibilities are, as 400 years have shown, endless.
Shakespeare reminds me every day that I am more than just a geek.  My life is equal parts computers and Shakespeare, and I see absolutely no conflict between the two.  As a matter of fact the existence of this article is demonstration that I blend them wherever I can.   That is very different from what our Two Cultures world would like you to believe.  Will it be a liberal arts school or an engineering school for you?  Which degree will you get, so we can tell you ahead of time what jobs you’ll be eligible for?  Just put the checkboxes next to the buzzwords on the job application.

Being “well rounded” does not mean being 99% computer geek who happens to have a parasailing hobby on the weekends.  Don’t be afraid to pursue your passions, regardless of the direction they take you.  I speak of this blog right on my resume, and love it when potential employers as me about it. Why can’t you be a rocket scientist and a published poet? Why can’t you run a Jane Austen book club at your biotech company?  Perhaps the better question is, why aren’t you?

Regular reader and contributor Haley writes in with the following question:

I teach a high school survey course for grades 10-12.  We normally have around 10 in a class, but enrollment is creeping up.  With that bait, I’d like to campaign for a new textbook.  When we adopted new books as an English department, we didn’t get Shakespeares because they are always expensive and the ones we have are in good condition.

The first seven years were Nortons, and then were switched to Riverside second editions, which we now have.  They aren’t BAD.  But they are large, cumbersome, with Bible paper and teeny-text.

I just received–TODAY–the RSC Complete Works based on the Folio.  Just looking at the layout and skimming some intro material to the plays, it looks way more accessible for the high school crowd.  The Riverside intros are great in the academic sense, but overwhelming for teenagers so it’s never used.

Some have asked me why I don’t get individual copies of what I teach.  I don’t because it would actually cost more to by 7-8 sets of paperbacks that won’t last as long.  Also, I like having the complete works because I have flexibility in deciding "I feel like ’12th Night’!" over ‘As You Like It."

I’m intrigued by what sort of discussion this post can open up, on a number of levels.  A high school teacher with the freedom to decide which play to teach? Really?  I would have thought that was pretty firmly locked down by the curriculum gods, especially if Advanced Placement classes are in the picture. I’ve often wondered why, in the interests of keeping expense down, teachers don’t simply hit up the public domain versions available at Project Gutenberg and print up individual plays.  Are all the extras really that useful? Which parts, exactly?  The glossary and footnotes?  The summaries?  The questions at the end of each scene?  How much of that could we simulate and tack on to the existing public domain stuff?

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Shakespeare_27s_20Thighs#1231699873 Another idea that I like, although I don’t expect to see it anytime soon.  It sounds like something out of one of those physical-challenge based reality game shows on tv, but imagine a larger than life typewriter where you have to crawl all over the keyboard and physically press the keys down with your hands to type a letter.  Now imagine a typing test, where you’re given a selection from Shakespeare and you have to copy it.  For speed and accuracy. Go. What’s the point? Why, it’s a piece of physical fitness equipment, of course (hence the thighs reference).  I threw in the “speed and accuracy” bit for myself since I could use the cardio.  But I like how the original idea adds that your prize is, in fact, a printout of what you wrote.  I’m all about the using Shakespeare as source material wherever you can. I just realized that this is a literature geek’s version of Dance Dance Revolution! :)  You know, using some of the techniques that have been invented to map the alphabet to the 9 digits of a cell phone, you could probably come up with a dance mat very similar to DDR and make this a video game.  You wouldn’t get the same quads workout but the cardio would go through the roof. I think I may go write that.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/shakespeare_20alarm_20clock#1056301200 Now, see, this one I love.  How about an alarm clock that wakes you up by reciting Shakespeare?  Even better, though I don’t see anyone saying it in the comments, would be if it also played appropriate quote when you hit the snooze button.

5:58…5:59….6:00 “O now be gone, more light and light it grows!” *snooze* “It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.  Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.”

Yes, I deliberately switched up those quotes. The problem with the whole concept of, well, a concept alarm clock is that it has to be the best at so many things.  It has to be a good radio (these days, perhaps, an MP3 player).  It has to be a good clock (some people like well lit LED, some people like traditional analog, some people like large digits, some have it broadcast onto the ceiling…)  You can’t just take a single idea like “Have the alarm be Shakespeare” and have the rest just work itself out. A long time ago as part of a brainstorming exercise, myself and some other engineers were trying to dream up the perfect alarm clock.  The idea that I had was an alarm clock that immediately started reading the news to you, so you could stay in bed with your eyes closed for a few minutes while still being productive.  It would be voice controlled so you could say things like “Sports!” and have it jump to sports, skipping over Traffic.  If you said nothing it would just go through all its stories in a row, like the local news.  But unlike the local news, for any given story you might say “More” or “Pause” or “Repeat” to focus on something in particular. These days I know exactly how I’d build that, almost.  It’s basically a podcast receiver, sitting on your nightstand, with voice control.  You program it with some news/sports/local related RSS feeds, it refreshes them as fast as it can, and then it reads them to you.  At the time I saw two problems – true local news feeds were never up to date so you couldn’t get a good traffic or weather feed.  Second, you’d have to rely on text-to-speech since the freshness of the data would preclude having somebody actually record and post an audio file.  I think the first is pretty well solved at this point (Twitter, even?) but the second is still a bit tricky. Ok, you Shakespeare geeks don’t care about tech stuff like that.  The idea just brought back memories.   I may take this over to my other geeky blog and continue it there.

Where do I find this stuff?  I stumbled across a repository of “half baked ideas” where people post the start of something, and then others help them decide whether it’s a good idea, whether’s already been done, and so on.  So naturally, like I always do, I find the search button and type Shakespeare.  What do I find? Exploding Shakespeare

When I was in High School, I hated every minute of the school produced Shakespearean plays we were forced to sit through. Imagine, though, that instead of committing suicide, Romeo and Juliet blow up. Just like that. Damn, what a great play.

It does give you a sampling of the quality of ideas in the directory, but some of the commentary is pretty funny.

BOTTOM
There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself; which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that?

SNOUT
By’r lakin, a parlous fear!

STARVELING
I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.

BOTTOM
Not a whit: I have a device to make all well.
*BOOM*