All my life I’ve been heavily invested in two things — technology, and Shakespeare. When I first learned to program a computer, when I was blindly typing in code from a book I got from Radio Shack and trying to figure out what it did, one of the programs was “Eliza”, what we now would call a “chat bot”. The first thing I did with it was find the code that recognized the string “Hello,” so that it could respond with “Hello” back. I altered that to understand “Hi, Hey, What’s up, How’s it going?” and so on.  Then applied that same idea to all the canned responses (“yes” became “yes, yup, sure, absolutely, definitely, you know it….”  You get the idea).  I’ve known all my life that the secret to making a computer seem more intelligent than it is, is to mix up the responses.  “When you say X I say Y” is how a computer acts.  “You say one of [10 different X’s] and I say one of [10 different Y’s]” is far more interesting because now you want to play with it. You put more thought into how you interact with it, and you listen more closely to the answer because you’re not sure what it’s going to be.

Getting to college and getting into Shakespeare didn’t change anything, and
This caused me to think a lot about the idea of context, and seeing the world through different eyes. Imagine asking Romeo to describe the big fight scene, and then asking Tybalt or Mercutio to describe it. They have different knowledge of the world, so their actions and motivations are different. You can’t just code that Romeo and Juliet get married at a certain point, you have to code that only Romeo, Juliet and Friar Laurence have that knowledge. I’ve tried to code a program to do this many times, but usually get stuck on “I would have to focus on making this work for just one play” and then never being able to decide whether Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet would be the best one to do.

As I went through courses and got my CS degree and learned about the basics of artificial intelligence, I would always use Shakespeare’s works as my knowledge base.  Polonius is a father. Ophelia is a daughter. Father is a type of parent, daughter is a type of child. When a parent dies, a child is sad. Therefore when Polonius dies, Ophelia is sad.  That’s a gross oversimplification, but I hope you get the idea.  I am constantly looking at the plays in terms of action and relationships between the characters and thinking in the back of my head, “Could a computer be made to understand this such that it could have a conversation on the subject?”

I’m torn now that “bot” is the new buzzword and every website is sticking a “chat” interface on their front end. Most of them are terrible and do little more than replacing a form and a text field with a whole sentence to type.  The whole idea of a bot is that it’s supposed to gather and process information in an interesting, useful and intelligent way.  The natural language thing is really just a twist to the interface, but everybody gets excited about it because it feels closer to actually talking to another intelligence.

All that to get to this link that asked, “Want to chat with Shakespeare?” Yes please.  But then the subtitle reads, “AI bots will soon allow us to talk to the dead.”

Wait, what? No they won’t. The article even acknowledges this – you create a bot by looking at the body of *knowledge* you have about how a person thinks and communicates. We have *zero* of that for Shakespeare.  You can’t use his plays for that, any more than you can use Prince’s song lyrics to simulate him (which is covered in the article).  The article even says that the farther back you go in time, and the less first-hand knowledge you have, the harder it will be to make a bot.  No kidding, so then why did you use it for your title?  Bait and switch much?

I will never lose my fascination with the idea and hopefully, I can contribute to the knowledge on the subject one day. I don’t think most of the bot revolution is going in this direction, I think it’s more about personal assistants.  When all you ever do is ask questions or make commands, the universe of possible responses is extremely limited. It’s the same reason that they used to use chess as a measure of artificial intelligence. Even though the constraints of the system are significant, there’s still a massive amount of computation that goes on in the middle.  So today I can say, “Alexa, what’s on my calendar today?” or “Alexa, add milk to the shopping list.”  But imagine being able to say, “Alexa, my boyfriend killed my father.”  What do you think the response would be?  Probably to call the police, but that’s a different story.

 

Shakespeare would never be considered pornography using the old Kansas common-sense test.

How’d you like to wake up to that quote in your news folder on a Monday morning?  I thought that the art/porn/first amendment issue had been put to bed (ha!) decades ago during the Larry Flynt era, but I guess Kansas is still talking about whether to condemn porn as a public health hazard.

The only argument came from Rep. John Carmichael, who brought up First Amendment concerns and used Shakespeare and Michelangelo as examples. This brought up the quote above from Rep. Chuck Weber, calling the comparison “ludicrous.”

I wonder if Rep. Weber has read anything other than Romeo and Juliet? Do you think he gets the “country matters” line in Hamlet, or “her C’s, U’s and T’s, from which she makes great P’s” joke in Twelfth Night?  How over the top do you think we could get with a production before we changed his mind?

 

Perhaps you saw the headline about an episode of Antiques Roadshow where someone brought in a small notepad of handwritten notes about Shakespeare’s work. And, like many of us, you may have noted the story went around on April 1 and thought, “I’m not going to get my hopes up if this is an April Fool’s Joke.”

Well the episode has aired, and if it’s a joke it’s a very anti-climactic one because they’re playing it straight. It’s quite possible that this is indeed a new discovery, which would be fascinating indeed.  The cover sheet says “The Comedyes & Tragedyes” as if it’s a deliberate collection. So is the person reading them, and copying out notes and quotes? Or is it notes on various performances the owner attended?

My first thought was, isn’t that the modern spelling of Shakespeare’s name? Is that clue to a fake? But apparently even though that was not the most common way that Shakespeare spelled his name, it is the most commonly used variant at the time.

Then I thought, oh god why are you touching it with your fingers? Put some gloves on, man!

Then, if you’re with me, you’ll pause on every close up of the text and see if you can spot some quotes.  I found what looked like “enough to make all fellowships,” which is Vincentio in Measure for Measure:

There is scarce
truth enough alive to make societies secure; but
security enough to make fellowships accurst:

How cool is that? I could do that all day.  I’m not worried at all about them saying it’s illegible – there are scholars trained in how to read that hand.

Showing this to my coworker I spotted another one. “Doesn’t that look like it says “heap on your head a packet of sorrows?” I asked him, then flipped to my Open Source Shakespeare:

Than, by concealing it, heap on your head
A pack of sorrows which would press you down,
Being unprevented, to your timeless grave.

Yes, yes it does.  Two Gentlemen of Verona, in fact.  I love this.

What do you think? How excited are you about this new discovery? Should we get a GoFundMe page going to raise the £30,000 to buy it?

(Reading up on what people smarter than me are saying I guess it’s not all *that* rare, we do have plenty of examples of commonplace books from the time period.  So this is not a “never before seen” type of situation. But still, everybody seems in general agreement that it’s a big deal because it’s a new thing, with new information, and everybody wants to see what’s in it.  Me too!)

I know it’s going to happen. One of these days I’m going to get contacted with a press release for a new Shakespeare book that’s burning up the New York Times Best-seller list, written by Alexi Sargeant.

If you’re a long-time reader of the blog you might recognize that name, because we’ve known Alexi for at least seven years – here he is helping write some Shakespeare sequels in August, 2010.

Among his many other endeavours, he’s also designed a Shakespeare board game that we’ll all be getting each other for Christmas next year called No Holds Bard.  I thought it was still in stealth mode, but heck if he’s going to write about it on his own site, I’m going to help him get the word out:

I’ve been working on-and-off for a few years on a Shakespeare mashup fighting game called “No Holds Bard.” Players battle each other as characters like Hamlet, Macbeth, Beatrice, and Cleopatra—and even the Bear from The Winter’s Tale. It’s meant to be geeky, exciting, and educational.

I can’t wait to see the finished product, Alexi!  Remember us when you’re famous!

I am no Marlowe scholar. I had never heard of the Baines note.  I asked Bardfilm about it, as I do with all these things, and he replied, “Long written about, seldom seen.”

Until now, because the British Library is making the Baines note public.

The note is reportedly a conversation between Marlowe and police informant / part-time spy Richard Baines, compiled by Baines.  In it, “Marlowe casts doubt on the existence of God, claims that the New Testament was so “filthily written” that he himself could do a better job, and makes the eyebrow-raising assertion that the Christian communion would be more satisfying if it were smoked “in a tobacco pipe”. Not to mention the whole “gay christ” thing.

Baines then adds a personal note that, “All men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped.”

A few days later, Marlowe is stabbed to death. (“A great reckoning in a little room.”)

Apparently there’s question about the authenticity of the story, and that it was created specifically to get Marlowe is trouble with the authorities.

I love learning new things.  Have we got any Marlowe scholars in the audience?  Tell us more!

I found a link where you can read the transcript of the Baines note, too, if anybody’s interested.  I can’t make out a blessed word.