http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2009/08/05/21stcenturyshakespeare_ap.html?tkn=LVLFUMLGNs87P5dvBsphoTcZGapD8SYik0S1 I link this article on “Shakespeare and Texting” not because it is a new or useful idea (it is neither), but because of this quote:

"The language is terrible," said RayLene Dysert, who teaches freshmen composition at West Texas A&M University and led a recent workshop on teaching Shakespeare for high school teachers.

That pains me in so many ways I can’t begin to tell you, but I’ll give it a shot. If you think that the language of Shakespeare is terrible you probably shouldn’t be teaching it, don’t ya think?  Much less teaching other teachers how to teach it?  Really?? Listen.  It’s really not that hard to understand.  Shakespeare is neither play nor poetry – it is both, simultaneously.  Yes, it is complex, but that is precisely why you can’t separate them.  Anybody could have written the plot of Romeo and Juliet (as we all know, Shakespeare didn’t invent most of his plots).  It’s *how* he wrote it that makes it genius.  I think that’s the word you were going for when your word processor swapped it out for “terrible”. If you want to keep just the play, fine, rewrite it.  But it’s no longer poetry, and it’s no longer Shakespeare, so don’t call it that and don’t claim that you made it easier.  I can make math easier by getting rid of all numbers greater than 10, too, but that’s not doing my students any favors. And if you do insist on doing that?  You know, because it’s too hard?  Please do me and your students a favor and get rid of all studying of all poetry in all forms.  Who cares whether Robert Frost was writing about thoughts of suicide in Stopping By Woods?  Forget Edgar Allen Poe, let’s have Stephen King.  Truth is beauty and beauty truth, and that is all I know on Earth and all I need to know? W TF does that even mean?  Poetry has no purpose, after all.  It’s hard.  Why do they insist on using strange words that I myself don’t use on a daily basis, and why do they order them in unusual ways that I myself would not order them?  That’s stupid.  Everybody should talk like everybody else, that’s the only thing that makes sense.  People who don’t talk like me are stupid, after all.  That’s the only lesson to learn, is that the world revolves around me, and if something is different from how I do it?  Then it is broken until somebody else fixes it for me.

http://dctheatrescene.com/2009/08/03/living-dead-in-denmark-2/ I’ve seen much talk of Undead Shakespeare, but this I believe is different:

There’s something rotten in the State of Denmark, boys and girls, and it isn’t the cheese. Rather, it’s the putrefying bodies of the undead, rising up to take control of Denmark away from King Fortinbras (Ben Cunis). But Fortinbras, clever lad that he is, has his own scheme, which involves reanimating the corpse of the Lady Ophelia (Amy Quiggins), to join reanimated corpses from other plays – specifically, Juliet (Megan Reichelt) and Lady Macbeth (Katie Atikinson) – as a trio of zombie-butt-kicking heroines allied with monster-slayer Horatio (Andres Tolero).

Just sounds fun, doesn’t it?  The review itself is quite the piece of work as well:

Under the direction of the fine fight choreographer Casey Kaleba, they fight each other, bite each other, throw each other around the room, poke each other, smoke each other, and send each other to their doom.

Sounds like something Macbeth’s wyrd sisters (who are also in the cast, by the way)  might say, about so fair and foul a play.

http://www.acorndreaming.com/2009/08/04/i-love-you-will-shakespeare/ Spotted this testament of love for Mr. Shakespeare over on Twitter.  Recommended reading for those of us that know what she’s talking about. Bonus, something I’d never heard before:

In an essay about Othello from A New Mimesis, A.D. Nuttal quotes A.C. Bradley who said that if you swap Othello and Hamlet into each other’s plays, both plays end rather quickly.  Hamlet would see through Iago in 5 minutes and then start making fun of him in the next 5.  The ghost would have said, “Kill that usurper” to Othello and the next sounds would be the ring of Action Man drawing his sword and then the thud of Claudius hitting the floor after Othello cleaves him in twain.

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations?q=shakespeare Have we talked about this visualization tool from IBM in the past?  I don’t see it when searching my own archives, so many not. The programmer side of my brain has always seen the complete works of Shakespeare as a vast set of data.  Word frequency and variety, character interactions, timelines…you name it.  Well IBM’s made us a nice tool for looking at all that stuff visually, and playing with it.  Some of it’s fairly well known, like a number of “Wordle” images (which I know we have talked about).  But then you get to look at something like pie charts showing "kills" in each play.  Needs to be normalized, though – you’ve got Macbeth taking up almost his entire pie with 5, while Titus has more kills (6) but only gets half the pie.  So it’s a good visual indicator of who did the most killing per play, but it doesn’t tell you enough about which plays were bloodbaths.  Maybe something where the pie itself gets bigger, the higher the body count? (* The title expression, if you don’t recognize it, is a twist on the open source programmer’s mantra “many eyes make all bugs shallow.”  It means that if you can get enough people to look at a problem, eventually the solution will be spotted by someone.  Given that this toy is from IBM’s Alphaworks group, I’m relatively sure that they had this in mind when naming it.)

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/08/04/a_tale_told_by_an_idiot/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed1 This story has been beaten to death so I’m a little disappointed that this came out so late, but still it’s a must read for us Shakespeare geeks. You probably already know the story, what with our illustrious President getting involved, but in case you don’t – black professor Henry Gates can’t get into his house after returning home from China, neighbor thinks he’s breaking in, calls cops.  Cops show up, everybody starts yelling at each other (I am NOT going to get into who started it :)), Gates ends up arrested and then charges quickly dropped.  Fast forward a week later to beers with Obama and Biden.  By the way, I love the way the news reported that Biden “unexpectedly” showed up.  Anyway, now do it all Shakespeare style.  I love it.  Biden even shows up as Fool! …although truthfully I’m pretty sure that if Shakespeare ever used the word “beastmistress” it would have meant something different and quite likely been the most filthy thing he ever wrote.