Here’s an interesting question for a Monday might.  I’m playing around with the Google Suggest API, and I noticed that if you just feed it “Shakespeare” you get some interesting results. First, “Shakespeare plays” is one of the most common queries, coming in at 2million hits.  Pretty big, given that “Shakespeare quotes” only gets 800k, and “Shakespeare sonnets” gets 600k. But something else got 5 million hits.  Know what?  “Shakespeare poems.” That’s odd to me.  [It’s not a quirk, if I switch to searching on the possessive “Shakespeare’s”, then the poems still come out ahead by almost twice as much over the plays.] I almost never think of the Works as poems in the traditional sense.  If I mean the sonnets I say the sonnets.  I’m pretty sure that the long narratives aren’t carrying that kind of traffic by themselves. Is it some cultural thing I’m unfamiliar with?  Over in Europe are they referring to the Canon in general as poems?  What’s the explanation for this odd statistic?   [By the way, the winner, with 7 million hits … is the movie Shakespeare in Love.  That doesn’t count. :)]

Been a while since I posted one of these stories.  The other night I’m putting my son (now 3) to bed. “You want me to sing you a song?”

“Yes!”

“Which one?”

“Shakespeare!”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What a piece of work is man, how…”

“No, Daddy, Shakespeare!”

“Why, what was I singing?”

“Hamlet.”

“Oh!  You know, you’re right.  Shall I compare, thee…”

“You tried to sing Hamlet instead of Shakespeare!”

“I did.”

“That’s silly!’

People following me on Twitter watched this play out, but I thought it’d make a blog post as well.  Wandering through town today I stopped into a used book store. High up on the top shelf I saw a stack of small books that read “Temple Shakespeare", $15/volume.” I googled around a bit to see if there was anything special about the collection, then decided to go check it out anyway.  What volumes did he have, I asked? Merry Wives Richard II Troilus and Cressida King John All’s Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Two Gentlemen of Verona Titus Andronicus Rape of Lucrece Venus and Adonis … That certainly says something about the popularity of the works.  If you’re gonna pick over a collection volume by volume, you can see the Hamlet and the Dream and such going first…these are the leftovers.   I went with the Venus and Adonis.  Fourth edition, 1899.  I’ll let you know more about it once I have time.

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081004075252AAL4yQM I wasn’t surprised by the question (how come Shakespeare wrote in 5 acts, not 3) but by the answers, which are surprisingly detailed regarding the history of dramatic structure. But I’m confused, because I thought that Shakespeare himself made no Act/Scene divisions at all, that came later with publication of the Folio. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong?  Or are they talking strictly about structural elements, i.e. there’s 5 segments to the progression of the story whether Shakespeare labelled them that way or not?

Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor. Instead of a typical author interview with press blurbs and bio questions we decided to do something different – Carl’s going to guest blog a series for us based on *your* questions. Question from Lee :  I’m of the turn-the-volume-down school on the sonnets, meaning I think the more layers of modern psychology we put over them, the further we get away from the obvious.  Take sonnet 66 (please).  If I were on a desert isle, and knew only the basics of history, and had never heard of Harold Bloom, and that sonnet washed ashore, well I’d pick it up and quickly conclude the author was lamenting the loss of the Catholic faith (purest faith unhappily forsworn), complaining about censorship (art made tongue tied by authority) and mocking the Queen’s much ballyhooed virginity (maiden virtue rudely strumpeted).  Honestly, what other "pure faith" had to be forsworn under Elizabeth besides Catholicism?  Was there really another "strumpeted" virgin in England other than Elizabeth?  Aren’t we getting away from the obvious in our approach to the sonnets with all this Freudian who-ha about dark women and fair boytoys when instead we should be looking at history and the Essex Rebellion?  Shouldn’t we be looking at Shakespeare as a political creature?  Thanks.  I look forward to your reply.  It’s a very sad sonnet, isn’t it? It is a sad sonnet, Lee, but I see it from a different angle. Rather than complaining about political specifics, I see a generalized list of the world’s ills that have been around for a long time. From my book:
Shakespeare now toys with an old French form, the Provençal enueg. Wilkins (1915, 496) explains its three regular characteristics: ³the list, the initial repetition, and the emphatic presence of a word denoting Œannoyance.¹² I think too much has been made of parallels between this sonnet and other works of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet 3.1.70-76 [TLN 1724-30], The Rape of Lucrece 904-7, and The Merchant of Venice 2.9.41-45
[TLN 1153-57] (see Rollins). Cruttwell (1960, 8-9), for example, finds that ³the long piling Hamlet-like list of the world¹s iniquities utterly overwhelms the protesting little line at the end.² I find nothing so serious here, just a new way to compliment the beloved. ³You are more important than all the ills of the world,² the speaker says. It may be that the conclusion is somewhat weak (we might expect some stronger expression of love), but the effectiveness of this poem lies in its form more than its content. The list, the repetition, the annoyance, and the protest work together to make the speaker¹s point: ³I love you. I don¹t want to leave you.² About the Author This book brings together the scholarship of dozens of the most brilliant commentators who have written about Shakespeare’s Sonnets over the past three hundred years. This edition adds the significant work done by modern editors to the most important commentary culled from the two variorum editions of the last century. Atkins presents a straightforward edition without jargon with the simple goal of finding out how the poems work and how they may be interpreted. He is the first to collate the modern texts so that differences among them can be fully appreciated and compared. His discussion of meter and verse is more substantial than that of any other edition, adding particular dimension to this text. Those coming to "The Sonnets" for the first time and those seeking a fresh look at an old friend will equally find this edition scholastically rigorous and a pleasure to read. Carl D. Atkins is a practicing medical oncologist in New York. Got a question for the author? Send it in and we’ll see if we can get it in the queue!