More from this morning’s conversation:  (it helps to know that my daughters are Katherine, 6, and Elizabeth, soon to be 4.  Elizabeth is doing the questioning.) “The star of that one (AYLI) is a girl named Rosalind.  I hear it’s very good.”

“Daddy, did Shakespeare write any more stories with girls?”

“Oh, sure, lots and lots, Shakespeare wrote some very good stories with girls.  There’s Juliet, and Miranda, and Cordelia…

“I like Cordelia!”

“I know you do!  There’s also a couple of Katherines!” 

(Elizabeth looks very impressed.)

“I’m afraid Shakespeare didn’t write any Elizabeth stories, though.” 

(Bummer.) 

“But there’s a reason for that.  You want to know why?”

“Why?”

“Because back when Shakespeare was writing all these stories?  Elizabeth was actually the *queen*.” 

(I swear, my daughter sat up straighter in her chair at that, it was the funniest thing.  Oh, well, I’m the queen?  Well then, that’s ok!)  

“He couldn’t really make up any stories with Elizabeth in them, you see, because if the Queen didn’t like it?  Bam, right in the dungeon.” 

(Elizabeth contemplates this and seems to decide that yes, that would be the appropriate thing for a queen to do.  If you don’t like the story, then the teller of the story goes to the dungeon.)  “And who is the queen now?”

“Actually, it’s kinda funny that you ask, but believe it or not it’s still Elizabeth!” I didn’t bother explaining that it’s a different Elizabeth, because she wouldn’t have gotten it or cared.  She’s still got the sense of time where “last week” means a long time ago, and “tomorrow” means “soon.”

“Don’t forget the As You Like It is playing from July 18 – Aug 3, we have to pick a date we want to go.”

“We have the babysitter already for July 26, we were gonna go to a movie with Sara and Brian but I can see if they want to go see Shakespeare instead.  Would you want to go with them?”

“That’s fine.  Can we do like we did last year, and one night during the week I’ll just go by myself, and then on the weekend we can go with people?”

“Why do you need to see it by yourself?”

“You have to remember, I’m going to be walking past this show for weeks.  Every day I’ll see it built up, I’ll see them rehearse.  I will hear it in the wind as I walk by.  It is very important to me as a Shakespeare geek to enjoy that feeling of simply walking into the middle of the park, sitting down, and being surrounded by that stuff.  Plus, remember that time we went to Taming of the Shrew with Liz and Joe and at intermission she told me she thought it was better than Hamlet?  I had to spent the second half of the show trying not to kill her.”

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/science-channel/4972-what-are-the-odds-shakespeare-monkey-video.htm# We all know the whole “infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare” thing, it’s been done to death.  But on How Stuff Works they use a video presentation for a discussion of statistics.  Hey, whatever works.

Ok, ok, ok.  I saw Wordle come across my radar, but chose not to post about it, because it seemed more art than tech.  Wordle takes tag clouds and allows you to manipulate them graphically by altering shape, color, font and so on, to produce word art.  It’s cool, no doubt, but personally I’m more interested in what the cloud shows about the text, rather than why the artist chose to lay the words out in the shape of a fish.  There’s no Shakespeare in your color choice.  Know what I mean?
But it seems I’m in the minority, as at least one person’s done Sonnet 18 already, and Rebecca over on Shaksper_Random is doing t-shirts, including the uncommon choice of Richard II. I may not play with it myself, but who knows, maybe I’d buy a t-shirt.

This morning while I’m brushing my teeth I hear my wife greet our now 6yr old daughter, who has just woken up and come into the room like this:  “Good morning!  What were you doing, reading in bed?” My daughter seeks me out and I see that she is holding her Shakespeare book.  This is one of those where the stories have been rewritten for kids to understand (not the Lamb, this is from a publisher called Usborne.  Same idea.)  Anyway, she is holding her finger over a page.  She comes over to me, opens up the book and says, “Daddy, this is the play we’re going to see in a few weeks.”  Sure enough, she is pointing to As You Like It.    Absolutely right. Tonight I’ll make sure we read that whole story.  Unlike some others where I had to make it up off the top of my head, she’s getting old enough now where she’ll be able to follow along with me.  I can’t wait! [On a related note, I may have royally screwed up my timing this summer and caused a Shakespeare clash.  Boston’s Shakespeare Day is on Saturday, August 2.  I was going to take the kids to that, since they would never stay up for an evening show during the week.  However, we’ve also booked a one-day only trip down to Cape Cod to see a special children’s version of The Tempest!  So we will indeed be driving back up through Boston on the Saturday, but whether they are too exhausted to sit through a second play, I guess I won’t know until we’re there.]