http://www.dailytidings.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090718/LIFE/907180304/-1/NEWSMAP Ok, well, I’ve heard it debated about whether Shakespeare was gay, and whether he was Catholic, but whether he was atheist is a new one on me. Sorry, wait, got to get the terminology right:

The Bard can’t be said to be an atheist but he comes across in his plays as "skeptical to negative" about religion and gives many clues that he’s not inhospitable to the supernatural — demons, ghosts, uncanny things that can’t be explained by science, even today."

Aren’t these two things somewhat incompatible?  He’s skeptical-to-negative about religion, but not inhospitable to ghosts?  What exactly does that mean?  Wouldn’t any support of ghosts imply an inherent soul/afterlife belief as well?  Hamlet and Brutus don’t just claim to believe in ghosts, ghosts actually show up on stage.  But I suppose the argument then is “Shakespeare was just giving the audience what he knew *they* believed in, it still doesn’t show his own personal beliefs.” I think, and I’m at work so it’s always hard to fully digest these articles on a quick scan, that they’re arguing not so much a “no religion” point, but rather a “Shakespeare like other great thinkers wasn’t in such a hurry to just mindlessly offer it all up to God like he was supposed to according to popular culture.” [UPDATE : I wonder if issues like these bring the Authorship folks together?  “Ok, Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays…but he was not a gay atheist!”]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2009-07-22-roland-emmerich_N.htm I’m glad I didn’t miss the little snippet buried inside this USA Today story about disaster-filmmaker Roland Emmerich’s new summer movie 2012:

Whether his retirement from chaos is permanent, he already has his next project lined up: Anonymous, a mystery about whether William Shakespeare really authored all his plays. It’s clearly a departure, unless the Bard’s critics are destroyed by meteors or a gigantic flood.

That’s right, people.  The man who brought you “Independence Day”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, and “10,000 BC” is apparently going to do a movie about the Shakespeare Authorship question. Although I like the idea about the Bard’s critics being destroyed by flood.

On the whole plays vs poems thing, Carl just gave me the idea to search for “Shakespeare’s sonnet ##”.  Want to know which ones are the most popular? First is #1, which I suppose makes sense, gotta start somewhere. Second is #20.  That’s the, ahem, "gay one".  That is, that’s the one that’s supposedly proof that Shakespeare’s homosexual. Next comes #30.  I have no idea why that one’s so special. Then we get to some favorites: #18 (“Shall I compare thee”, perhaps the most famous of them all) #29 (“When in disgrace, with Fortune and men’s eyes”).  I wonder if the Rufus Wainwright musical version has anything to do with that. #73.   I like this one. #130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). #116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds….”) aka the Wedding Sonnet.   Although the order is questionable, I guess the only real surprise is #30.  One of my experts out there want to enlighten us on why that one deserves to be in the top 10?   D

This will sound like a homework question, but it’s been 20something years since I was in high school so you’ll have to trust me that it’s not :). It’s easy to find ways in which Shakespeare’s villains feel guilt for their actions, whether it’s Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, or Claudius’ outright “My offense is rank, it smells to heaven” prayer.  Should we count Edmund’s last minute redemption, too? What I’m interested in is bad guys who feel no guilt at all.  I was trying to explain to my boss last week why Iago is such a nasty son-of-a-gun, and I realized that when it comes to his actual crimes, there are other bad guys that did far worse.  It’s just something about him.  I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that, as far as I can tell, he never feels a shred of anything for his victim, right up until the last words we hear.  That’s what’s so scary. Who else?  I’m expecting Richard III to make an appearance, though truthfully I’m not familiar enough with the play to know if he has any moments where he stops to think about other people.

Here’s an interesting question for a Monday might.  I’m playing around with the Google Suggest API, and I noticed that if you just feed it “Shakespeare” you get some interesting results. First, “Shakespeare plays” is one of the most common queries, coming in at 2million hits.  Pretty big, given that “Shakespeare quotes” only gets 800k, and “Shakespeare sonnets” gets 600k. But something else got 5 million hits.  Know what?  “Shakespeare poems.” That’s odd to me.  [It’s not a quirk, if I switch to searching on the possessive “Shakespeare’s”, then the poems still come out ahead by almost twice as much over the plays.] I almost never think of the Works as poems in the traditional sense.  If I mean the sonnets I say the sonnets.  I’m pretty sure that the long narratives aren’t carrying that kind of traffic by themselves. Is it some cultural thing I’m unfamiliar with?  Over in Europe are they referring to the Canon in general as poems?  What’s the explanation for this odd statistic?   [By the way, the winner, with 7 million hits … is the movie Shakespeare in Love.  That doesn’t count. :)]