English Teachers Wanted

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

This past spring I launched a new effort, ShakespeareAnswers.com. My honest hope for this Q&A style site is to corner the market on *correct* and *useful* answers to legitimate Shakespeare questions.  I’d been hanging out on Yahoo! Answers, Mahalo, WikiAnswers and others, and quite frankly the quality of both the questions and answers was often so poor (and at times downright incorrect) it made me sad.

My first big mistake was launching it in June, right at the end of the school year.  It peaked for a week or two, and then promptly fell off the face of the earth as everybody took off for summer and stopped asking Shakespeare questions.  Well, it’s fall now, school’s back, and I’d like to breathe some life into the project.

Here’s the thing, though. Every time I bring it up, people think that it is a “Do your homework for you so you don’t have to” site.  I try to explain to the nay-sayers that “Oh no, dear friends, you misunderstand – any kid who comes by looking for a short and sweet answer to his question is far more likely to get a lengthier earful than if he’d just listened to his teacher in the first place.”  I was even accused of insulting teachers at one point by apparently suggesting that I was having to clean up their messes because they’re not good at their jobs.

Still, I can deal with that.  Yesterday, though, I got into a conversation with a teacher who brought up something I hadn’t considered – lazy student plagiarize.  They cut and they paste.  So here I am thinking that my essay-length answers to their questions (rather than providing overly simplified answers like, “Yes, Mercutio is the Prince’s relative”) is a good service, but what’s going to happen is that kids will come by and simply copy and paste our answers into their homework. That’s not cool.

I can think of a few ways around that, by mucking with the ability to cut and paste text from the site.  But that’s on me, as the technical guy behind it. I’ll work on that.

This gets me to my subject line, though. I want to build a resource that English teachers don’t roll their eyes at.  On the contrary I want to build something that they’d actually recommend, if a student has questions that they can’t (or don’t have the time/energy/resources to) answer. So, I’m asking.  If you are a teacher of Shakespeare (even if you only do one unit amid a variety of other subjects), please take a moment to browse through ShakespeareAnswers and give me your honest opinion. If you knew your students were going to hit the google and end up there, what would you like to see that might make you think “Oh, ok, that’s not just another one of those do-your-homework-for-you sites?”  I’ll do my best to oblige.

My mission isn’t to help kids pass tests. My mission is to always present Shakespeare in a way that makes it entertaining and accessible, in the hopes that even the lazy ones who come by looking to cut and paste some homework leave with a better understanding of what it’s all about.  And, who knows, maybe even a little appreciation.

Ralph Fiennes, on, Ralph Fiennes

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Ever since I was old enough to understand what a movie director does, I’ve been curious about those situations where someone both stars in and directs his own movie.  So, basically, he’s the boss of whether he did a good job? How can you do that?

Ralph Fiennes, star of the upcoming Coriolanus (coming December 2012, by the way), gives me some insight into this problem.  He says that, as director, he thought that his own performance at times was horrible.

“‘Oh, that’s horrible,'” was how he recalled his initial reaction to
his performance. Fortunately, he said his editor “managed to stick it
together” into something he’s proud of.

Fiennes said he had to be ruthless on his work as an actor to keep
the film moving, and he came close to regretting his decision to star in
the film.


“I’ve been indulged by directors who allowed me an extra take but I
had to deny myself,” he says during interviews at the Toronto
International Film Festival. “It was hard.”

I honestly don’t know much about Ralph Fiennes – other than the English Patient and Lord Voldemort, I had to go visit IMDB to see what else I might know him from. This article, though, makes me like him.  He’s not shy about being a first time director, giving plenty of credit to the editor above for managing to stick everything together.  Later in the article, on the subject of Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia, he says simply that he knew to “shoot her well, and get out of the way.”

I am very curious to see how this movie does. Coriolanus always struck me as a more political, and therefore boring, play.  Wait, hear me out!  You may love the political stuff, and can make a strong argument that those are the best plays. I’m just looking out at the world at large and wondering what your average audience is looking for.  Love, romance, tragedy, sword fights, comedy?  You have to admit, hardly anybody experiences Coriolanus unless they go out and hunt it down – and even rabid Shakespeare geeks rarely put it in their top 10.

But! We live in some serious politically-charged times. People love their war movies. So, who knows? Maybe I’m not giving people enough credit?  Only the box office knows for sure …

Directing Your Mind’s Eye

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

The message remains loud and clear, as I work my way through Richard III for the first time, that I should see a performance.  Shakespeare was meant to be seen, not read, as the old saying goes.

Let me ask the directors in the audience a question. You’re given a play to direct that you’ve never seen, read, or experienced before. What do you do? Do you immediately go off and find somebody else’s directorial vision of the play, watch that, and then say “Oh, ok, that’s how that’s supposed to go?”

Or would that completely mess with your ability to develop your own vision for the story? Sure, there’s research that can be done – but if you’re a completely empty vessel, isn’t there a very real danger of filling yourself up too much with other people’s ideas and not leaving enough room for your own?

See where I’m going with this?

If all you want to do with a Shakespeare play is to say, “Well, I’ve seen it, I know what it’s about. Check that one off the old bucket list,” then sure, go do that.

Thing is, I wouldn’t really be here doing stuff like this web site if that’s all I wanted.  I want to be so intimately familiar with the plays that I have my own movie running in my head. I want my own opinions, that I can answer by quoting the text – not by saying “I like how Richard Burton did it.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – when you see Shakespeare, you’re seeing one interpretation of what it could be.  When you read it, you’re opening up the possibility of all of them.

How Should We Deal With Anonymous?

~ duane ~ 39 Comments

We all know that it’s coming – Anonymous, the “Shakespeare didn’t write his plays” movie. I’m getting inundated by articles and events both pro and con, on a daily basis.

I’m torn about what to do.  On the one hand, as one of the bigger places where we talk about events in the Shakespeare-related community, I feel somewhat obliged to do something more than ignore it.

However, I also think that we’re making it a bigger deal than it needs to be.  I saw somebody the other day saying that this movie is poised to significantly alter people’s perceptions of Shakespeare’s authorship for generations to come.  Are you kidding me? It’s just a movie by a guy known primarily for disaster flicks.  I am expecting people to care as much about the authorship question after this movie as they do before it – some people will have an opinion that will not change, and some people will continue not to care.  I feel pretty safe in thinking that if somebody was actually convinced to believe the Oxford theory based solely on this movie? Any Stratfordian would not find that a difficult debate to win.  Shakespeare in Love came out, what, 10+ years ago? And I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks that Shakespeare’s life was anything like that.

So, I’m putting it open to discussion. Do you want to hear about every (well, most) bit of goings-on regarding this event? Do you think we should be making a more active effort to shoot it down before it catches on like the folks at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust are doing with their “60 Minutes” project?  I fear that if we actually take up the trolls on this one, we’ll have to spend all of our time dealing with questions of whether Shakespeare was a gay atheist, too.

Best of “Shakespearean First Drafts”

~ duane ~ 1 Comment
I got into work this morning to a note from Bardfilm that he’d started a new game on Twitter that he called, “Shakespearean First Drafts”.  As has become our new policy, here’s a best-of post for posterity:
  • “We are all made of dream stuff.”
  •  “Hey look, it’s Juliet up in the balcony. Hi, Juliet!”
  •  “Brutus is a cool dude.  All these dudes, are cool dudes.”
  • “For aught that ever I could read, / The course of true love never was a walk i’ th’ park.”
  • “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. Crummy clown, bad material.”
  • “Wanted: 1 horse. 10 bucks. Willing to negotiate. Call Rick ASAP.”
  • “Anyone got a horse? Cause I really need one, like right now.”
  • Claudius: How is’t the clouds still hang on you? Hamlet: You suck! You’re not my real dad!
  • “Holy crap, it’s Yorick! Yorick died? When the frick did that happen?”
  • “And you, also, are among these conspirators? Oh, Brutus. Really?”
  • “My mistress’ eyes are almost like the sun. Something like? Nearly like? Partly?”
  • “By the tickling of my nose, something evil this way blows.”
  • “To be or not – I’m kinda leaning one way, but I’m a bit on the fence, you know?”
  • “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, / And darned if I know what to do with either one.”
  • “The game’s a toe!”
  • “Darn it, Goneril just said what I was gonna say.”
  • “There’s something a bit off in the state of Denmark.”