[ Context : Messing With Geeklet. ]
Although I’m sure she didn’t do this on purpose, I can’t help but note the timing given that I was messing with her head at dinner last night.
It’s time to run off to school, which among other things means the mad scramble to make sure that we’ve signed her homework. She never says “Checked my homework and seen that I did it”, she just always says “Sign.” So I inevitably say, “I haven’t seen that you did it, go get it.” I’m supposed sign in this organizer book that they call a “reminder binder”. Cute.
Anyway, while I’m waiting for her to get it I notice that in the tip of the day cartoon there’s a man looking through binoculars made up of two big overlapping circles, and is a Venn Diagram reference. As geeklet comes back in the room I say, “Wait, you’re doing Venn Diagrams already? Really?”
“What?” she says, pulling down the book to look. “Oh, yeah. Last year. But Daddy, look what it says? ‘To Venn or Not To Venn, That Is The Question.’ Shakespeare.”
So now they’re pointing out Shakespeare references to me???

Well, now that I realize my post had no body, Alexi’s comment makes much more sense. Let’s try that again, shall we?
Over dinner, the 8yr old is telling me about her day. “Daddy, guess what? We read a book at school today called The Woman With A Dead Bird On Her Head. And guess what genre it was?” Apparently they’ve just learned about genres, and she’s digging this idea.
“Historical?” I ask.
“Nope,” she says.
“Pastoral comical?” I try.
“No.”
“Tragical historical comical pastoral?”
“No!”
“I give up.”
🙂 I’d like to think that somewhere around high school when she finally gets around to reading Hamlet in the original, she’s going to get to Polonius’ introduction of the players and finally get that. 😉

For those who don’t follow the comments, I figure I’d promote this interesting question because it’s a real head scratcher:
There were certainly guns in Shakespeare’s time. But in any of the plays, did Shakespeare ever write a stage direction requiring that one be fired? We can’t find one. Why would that be? If it’s a simple matter of safety – they didn’t have prop guns and you didn’t want to fire a gun in a closed theatre – then the next logical question would be, Did any of his contemporaries write in shooting stage directions?
(*) Chekhov’s Gun is the literary rule that says, “If you hung a pistol over the fireplace in act 1, you need to fire it in act 2.” Shakespeare apparently never fired them, so did he bring them on stage at least?

So if you saw a list called The 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History, and you knew it was tagged Shakespeare, who would you expect to find?
I suppose we could debate what exactly hate means, and for that matter what exactly literary history means, for that matter – but for the purposes of this list lets just call it “characters that audiences love to hate.”
Did you guess Iago? That was easy.
Well Shakespeare shows up in 3 spots, so what are the other two? I have to admit, I wouldn’t have guessed. I don’t think I’m particularly surprised, but those aren’t the ones I would have picked.