I love this story about the difference between memorizing things “by rote” versus “by heart”.  Although I don’t see much reference to Shakespeare in the text, it’s not hard to extrapolate.  How often do we use the tired old example of your high school English teacher who forced you to memorize, just for the sake of memorization, the balcony scene?  And the generation of students that can recite it but still hate it, or worse, hate it all the more because of that?

So there’s a thought that if you learn by heart it means you take the poem right into yourself, it becomes part of you. And it remains with you, probably for the rest of your life. I think a lot of us can remember bits of poetry that we learned when we were very young. So it’s something that lives with you forever.

What bits of Shakespeare have you memorized “by heart”?  I can do some rote bits of Dream or Macbeth or even the dreaded balcony scene, but other than as a “go to” bit of text when I need it, there’s no love for those passages.  I know Sonnet 18 by heart because for years I sang it to my children at bedtime.  I know Sonnet 17 by heart because I recited it to my wife during our first wedding dance.  I’ll admit that I don’t know “by heart” many longer passages, just some turns of phrase here and there that truly resonate just right where you need them.

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/19/169731110/u-k-asks-students-to-learn-poetry-by-heart-not-by-rote

Honestly I never thought I’d ask this question.  Part of the life of this blog has been spotting every random tv commercial and sitcom that decides to mix in a Shakespeare storyline (hello, Cosby show…) and, in general, we come away with a “Hey, any exposure to Shakespeare is a good thing” feeling.

But lately I wonder.  I’ve been reading the Giver series with my daughter lately. There’s a scene in one of the later books where two children, both poor children in impoverished communities who were never given the chance to read, grow up in different villages.  Both learn to read independently.  When they meet up again after several years, the boy shouts, “I can read Shakespeare!” and the girl shouts back, “Me too!’

Come on, the author’s not even trying there.  I think I’d like to see Shakespeare’s name invoked for a reason beyond just some generic “I’m smart now” measuring stick.

“Hey, see that 6 year old over there, he’s really smart.”
  “Really, how smart?”
“Oh, he reads Shakespeare.”
  “Wow, that is smart!”

It’s not really all that different from an episode of Cosby where Theo and his buddy don’t want to do their homework, so they try to skip out on Julius Caesar by getting the Cliff Notes.  The difference comes in the fact that the episode in question was full of the text, as well as Christopher freakin Plummer doing a guest spot pretty much solely so he could do some Shakespeare.

In The Giver books I see no use of Shakespeare other than the aforementioned “Look how smart I am” checkbox.  Yes there’s a quote about Macbeth, but it’s thrown in so randomly that I can barely tell you which quote (something from Lady M, I believe) or even where it came up.

In a thread today on Reddit someone asked about your “Forever Project.”  That idea you have that on the one hand seems impossible, like the kind of thing that you wish existed but know never will…but, at the same time, it’s the idea that won’t go away, and you’re always (at least, as an engineer/programmer/hacker) thinking, “Hmm….could I build that?”

It was only then that I thought of how to describe mine.  I call it The Shakespeare Matrix.

We’ve all seen the movie The Matrix, right?  All of humanity have been enslaved by aliens, hooked up to a giant virtual reality world so perfect that most of them spend their entire lives never realizing that they’re inside a computer simulation.  That is, except for Keanu Reeves and his band of … pirates?  Rebels?  Who have discovered how to hack the system and program it to do the things they want it to do.  Need to know martial arts?  No need to spend years training – just alter the program so that your character simulation knows kung fu.  I bring up this example as an excuse to link one of the best movie fight scenes ever filmed.   (Everybody knows that this is the best movie fight scene ever filmed.  WHO’S DA MASTER?)  Once Keanu masters his talent he begins to see the world around him *as actual source code*.

Anyway, I get off topic.  What I want is a Shakespeare Matrix.  I want a virtual reality world where you can walk around and watch the plays in any number of ways – maybe as the audience, maybe as a character, maybe you interact directly with the characters.  At any time you can summon Shakespeare himself and have a conversation with him as well.  You can also pull up the  original text, much like pulling up the source code to the matrix.  And when I say original text I mean all of it – easy access to Folio and Quarto versions alike, along with all the glossary and reference materials that you might need.

There’s been a whole bunch of people talking about this over the years.  I notice that “Hamlet on the Holodeck” was published back in the late 90’s.  I’m not a big believer in the holodeck idea, I don’t think that will ever meaningfully happen.  But I do know that the Second Life universe had a Shakespeare group.  And then there was the abandoned massive multiplayer universe “Arden” that I had high hopes for, but gives you an idea about the realities of a project of this scope.

Anyway, not really a question in this one, I just wanted to brain dump a little about the Matrix idea, because I just thought of it and I really like the comparison.  As I think of the different kinds of software that could be used for browsing Shakespeare I always teeter back and forth between “Make something light and easy for the everyday user, like students doing their homework…make a game!” and “Make the ultimate reference guide so that the experts who need access to boatloads of very specific Shakespeare information have a single place where they can get it.”  Technically the latter is easier because manipulating pure information like that is easier than the visual work that needs to be done to make even the most basic game.