No More! The Texts Are Foolish!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps you’ve heard the story by now about the guy that is getting revenge on a scammer by texting him the complete works of Shakespeare? Seems he sent a bank transfer to this guy to buy a PS3, and never got his PS3 and can’t get his money back. So he decides to start cutting and pasting, sending monstrous texts to the guy. Whether it’s just to annoy him or because the dude still lives in a time when you have to pay to receive a text I don’t know, but the sender has unlimited sending data so he figures he’s cool.

Whole lot of problems with this plan. Most notably, the scammer has probably already blocked his number by now so continuing to text him will do no good.

Worse, if the scammer realizes that he actually has rights (whether he’s a jerk in other matters does not change legal issues), he might decide to sue the guy for harassing him.  In our modern world of cyberbullying, sending unwanted texts to a person for the malicious purposes such as these is a big deal. Whether it’s a criminal offense yet I cannot tell (and would depend on where they are) but at the very least the scammer could make his case to the phone company and cost our Shakespearean friend
his service plan.

Don’t punish people with Shakespeare.

Parsing Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare make an outstanding dataset for projects like this, which looked at how often various “couples” in Shakespeare spend talking to each other.

There’s a number of reasons, of course, why the actual “results” are only somewhat interesting. The amount of lines exchanged between two characters is not really an indicator of their compatibility or the strength of their relationship, as is demonstrated by the finding that Romeo and Juliet don’t spend all that much time together. You could alter your hypothesis, for example, and maybe look at the average number of lines per scene? Obviously characters that only have 3 scenes together are going to have less lines than those that have 5 or more.
I’m also disappointed that they didn’t do every play. Why, in such a finite dataset as this, don’t you do a complete analysis? Where is Much Ado About Nothing?  I’d like to see them release the source code. It could be fun to play with.
The project also reminds me of the Bechdel Movie Test, which measures how frequently women communicate with each other about a subject other than men. How cool would it be for scriptwriters to upload their draft into a test like this to see how they do?

New Game! The Play’s A Thing!

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

As I read The Tempest and how it starts with a tempest and how Miranda runs to her father and says, “Did you cause that tempest?” I had an idea for a game.

Start with one of Shakespeare’s plays that is a noun or noun phrase, but not a proper noun / name.  All plays named after people are too obvious. The Tempest counts, as do Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and so forth.  Get the idea? The name of the play references a thing of some sort.

Now, find me a passage in the play that refers to that thing. For instance can you find the spot where the wives of Windsor are referred to as merry? Or that a certain shrew ends up tamed?  How about a tale of winter?

For extra credit, is there actually a specific line in Two Gents that refers to them as two gents? Or noble kinsmen in Noble Kinsmen?

New “Enemy of Man” (Macbeth) Trailer

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Shortlist has a look at the trailer for the upcoming Macbeth adaptation “Enemy of Man”, starring Sean Bean in the title role (that title being “Macbeth”, not “Man” nor “Enemy”. :))

I don’t like Sean Bean with short hair. Doesn’t seem right.

I really wanted to see this trailer based on something else that Shortlist said a few months ago, when they referred to this one as “cutting back on the dialogue and cranking up the action.” Because that’s why we go to see Shakespeare, for the action.  Maybe they’ll do Hemingway next.

If you’re as curious as I was I’ll save you the trouble – the only text you get is a voiceover of the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech.  That’s nothing.  They could work that into a high school musical if they wanted. Doesn’t tell us anything about how far they stray from the plot or anything. Heck even Fellowes’ Romeo and Juliet gave us a better indication of why we wouldn’t want to see it.

Oh, and it’s got Ron “Rupert Grint” Weasley in it, swimming in his armor.  No idea what role he plays.  Wait, I can look that up….from the Kickstarter page, he plays Ross.

ROSS? That’s funny. Look at how much screen time he gets in the trailer.  I hope nobody is coming to this one just to see their Harry Potter crush.

I also learned on IMDB that people have been talking about this one since 2003 (at least!) and that Courtney Love was supposed to be in it at one point?  I may have to see it just to see what took them so long.

Short, Sharp, Shakespeare (A Continuing Shakespeare Dreams Series)

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

This will mark the fifth time that I’m documenting a dream that has Shakespeare in it:

Blogging Shakespeare Dreams (November 2005)
Shakespeare Dreams (July 2010)
Bad Shakespeare Dreams (June 2012)
Dreaming in Shakespeare

I wish I could remember more of this one. I was on some sort of sports team, can’t tell/remember whether it was an adult thing or I was a kid again. But the coach was actually using a Shakespeare speech for motivation!  Like so many of my dreams I kind of sort of recognized it, and desperately wanted to head for my search engine to double check my sources.  It had a vague Coriolanus-like “make you a sword of me” type of feel to it.

Anyway, here’s the kicker, the coach asks everybody (sitting crosslegged on the grass, listening intently) whether they know where that speech comes from. I do not raise my hand because I am unable to verify the source.  But sure enough just about every other kid(?) does! It was mortifying.

That’s about it. Nobody pointed and mocked. Nobody even really noticed. It was entirely in my head, thinking “Wow an actual opportunity to be asked an actual spontaneous Shakespeare question and I have to choose between not answering at all, or possibly getting the answer wrong?”

It’s always funny when insecurities show their little ugly heads. That looks like a pretty clearcut case of “Impostor Syndrome”, this feeling that one day I’m going to walk into a situation where everybody not only knows Shakespeare, they know it far better than I do and look at me like an idiot for thinking I knew something.