This weekend I was away on vacation and I read something about Macbeth being attributed to Thomas Middleton instead of Shakespeare. I know about many of the plays in questionable authorship, but I didn’t know that Macbeth was one of them. When I got home and caught up on my newsfeeds I found another article suggesting that Shakespeare stole Macbeth from a Scottish monk named Andrew de Wyntoun.  The standard article follows, some historians show examples where the original looks similar to what Shakespeare wrote, and then a Shakespeare scholar presents the standard defense:  “Yes, we know that Shakespeare borrowed things, he admitted it freely. The point is that when he rewrote it, his version was much better than the original.”

http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2556 Neat! 

http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/game/start.html Here’s a fun one. Start with the premise that you’re Shakespeare and you’re trying to build a career for yourself as a playwright.  Each screen offers a simple set of choices (normally no more than 2) for you to pick from.  Sometimes it’s “Do you write about ancient romans, or oriental warlords?” but sometimes it’s more complex, such as when the Censor tells you to cut a scene from Richard II and you get to decide whether to do it or not.  I’m not really sure if it’s keeping score or not, or how long it lasts, since I’m at work and don’t really have time to play it through.  But it is fun.

http://thesezipperblues.blogspot.com/2007/06/wherefore-art-thou-314159.html In essence, if you make each letter of the alphabet equal to an arbitrary numeric combination (for instance a=1234, b=2345, c=3456…) then in an infinite number such as Pi (3.141592654….) you would not only eventually stumble across Romeo and Juliet, but you would also stumble across a version of the play where neither of the two end up dying. Is that right?  Kind of like the parallel universes theory, I suppose, expressed in infinite numbers.  That’s already got the geek side of my brain going and I’m plotting to go see if I can dig up some open source code that will generate the digits of pi one at a time so I can write something to look for the word “Romeo”. Update  I found what I was looking for, a widget that will turn the digits of pi into letters and let you search for words.  “Romeo” does not appear in the first 31million digits.  Not saying it’s not in there, of course.  It’s just a geeky gadget to play with. http://sepang.nottingham.edu.my/~hmichael/cgi-bin/pi.pl?search=ROMEO

http://geek.shakespearezone.com/?p=2559 Play the Salman Rushdie parlor game where you turn Shakespeare titles into works by Robert Ludlum.  There’s only four to guess, and they’re pretty obvious if you think about.  Still, different.