Shakespeare Math Lessons [ A Geeklet Story ]

Who says there’s no room for liberal arts in STEM education?

My family of course knows that today is Shakespeare Day.  It actually causes some funny moments, like when my wife had to write out a check for some school function and said, “What’s today’s date?”

Children:  “Seriously, Mommy?  Daddy is standing *right there*.”

Or this impromptu math lesson with my middle child:

SG: “So, how old would Shakespeare have been today?”

E: “Well he died in 1616.  So, 400 years would be 2016, and it’s 2018. Four hundred and eighteen!”

SG: “You want to check that math?”

E: “…2016…plus 2….yeah, 418.” *beat* “WAIT! NO!  402!”

SG: “Right!”

E: *beam*

SG: “Also wrong!”

E: “???”

I then explained to her that she was calculating how long he’d been dead, but I asked how old he would be.  Eventually we figured it out.

The Great Shakespeare Egg Hunt

With Easter approaching, what do you say we go hunting for eggs in Shakespeare’s work?  I’m not going to list them all here (since it’s easy to hunt them down with a search engine where’s the fun in that?) but I’ll hit the most famous ones.  Add more in the comments!

“Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.”

Why, after I have cut the egg i’ th’ middle and eat up the
meat, the two crowns of the egg.

When I first tried to read King Lear I couldn’t understand Fool at all.  After many readings and watchings, I think the scenes with Lear, Fool and Kent are my favorite (even if I don’t always understand what he’s saying). He’s one of the few people (perhaps the only one?) who can say to the king, “Hey genius, how smart was it to split your kingdom down the middle and then give away both parts?”

Falstaff 

Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of
sack finely.

Bardolph 

With eggs, sir?

Falstaff 

Simple of itself; I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.

Ok Falstaff, eww.  How am I supposed to look at my kids’ Easter eggs the same way ever again?  (Courtesy Merry Wives of Windsor, for those that don’t remember this charming lesson in animal husbandry showing up in the Henry plays.)  I actually googled this to see if I was missing something and saw it turn up in a list entitled “Why Aren’t These Shakespeare Quotes Famous Too?”

 

 

What, you egg!
[Stabbing him]
Young fry of treachery!

Students love this quote, I regularly see it posted when people reading Macbeth for the first time stumble across it. There are web pages and apps and even books dedicated to Shakespearean Insults, but calling somebody an egg just has a special sort of “What did he just call me?” flare to it.

My favorite part is the second line, where he calls him a young fry of treachery.  You know why, don’t you?

Because now he’s a fried egg.

 

On that note, I’m out of here before anybody gets the pitchforks.  What other egg references have you found?

 

How To Get A Complete Stranger Fired With Shakespeare

Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I’ve often spoken of how, once people meet and get to know me, Shakespeare is in their lives forever.  Months or years later, regardless of how often I might see them, I’ve now got that connection. So I’ll get Facebook messages or texts with links to something Shakespeare and a note, “Saw this and thought of you!”

So there’s this friend of mine who I worked with for five years, who actually went off to pursue his dream project and started a school (you don’t hear that too often).  He texts me yesterday to let me know that one of his humanities professors has a Shakespeare book (well, chapters in a collection) coming out.

Given the guy’s name I went googling.  I saw his bio for the school, but I also saw an Amazon author page.  Click.  Blah blah blah, thirty year veteran of stage and screen, award winning script writer … seems like this could be the guy.

He’s also got a couple dozen ebooks, the first of which is described as “an erotic fantasy, two souls in one body.”

Well that’s different, I think. But hey, it’s not my business.  What people do on their own time doesn’t bother me. I figure they did their due diligence, they know what their employees are up to, they made the same call.

“I think I found his author page on Amazon,” I text my friend.  “Little surprised to see the erotic fantasy pop up, I have to say.”

“HOLY SH*T!” comes the response.

Apparently not 🙂

“Maybe I have the wrong guy,” I reply.  “Australian fellow?”

My friend confirms, with great relief, that I’ve got the wrong guy.   But for a minute there I thought Shakespeare was about to get some dude fired who I never even met!

 

Know Your Audience? I Thought I Did!

So this weekend we’re at Shakespeare on Boston Common and I’m waiting in line for the port-a-potties with my kids.  It’s intermission, it’s dark, there’s 20 people in line ahead of us, so you know the condition those things are going to be in.

My son goes in first.  Comes out, tells me, “Daddy, somebody left a wine bottle in there.” The lady in the line next to us laughs.

“Well,” I tell him, “Drink is a great provoker of three things.”

Now, I knew he wasn’t going to get the reference. But I’m surrounded by people who are at outdoor Shakespeare, I expected somebody to get it. I even turned and made eye contact with the woman who laughed in the first place.  I should have gone up for a high five.  She would have left me hanging, but still.

I got nuthin.   I was disappointed.  Who says Shakespeare isn’t relevant today?

 

What Kind Of Performances Are You Seeing?!

Funny story time.

I was hanging out on a forum that has nothing to do with Shakespeare (more of an entrepreneurial, side-hustle kind of thing).  Since it was definitely not a Shakespeare crowd I decided to ask, “What do you think of when I say the name Shakespeare?”

I got the usual results – “boring”, “old”, “classic”, “exciting”, “men in tights”, “Shakespeare in the park” and so on.  I engaged a few people in conversation, and like these things often do, everything just kind of tapered off.

But then a few days later somebody posted and wrote, “Exhausting.”

So I responded, “Watching it, or performing it?”


And she replied, “All of it. I’ve tried the videos.I can’t believe the poses they expect you to get into. And then when you actually go, somebody’s always coming around and touching you, and that makes me really uncomfortable.”

Wait, what?

Turns out she was talking about yoga.  She’d responded to the wrong thread.

Too bad, for a minute there I was fascinated by what kind of productions she’d been seeing!