[Thanks to reader Angela for the link!]

When each of my children was born, people would ask me whether I was going to name them something from Shakespeare.  I did, in my own way.  Katherine, my oldest, knows well the story of her shrew-ish namesake (and her little sister loves the story about the beautiful younger daughter who all the boys want, who can’t get married until the mean older sister finds a boy who likes her).  She gets double points because her middle name, Delia, reminds me of Cordelia, the best of daughters.

My second child, Elizabeth, is not so much a Shakespeare name as a Shakespearean one – and I’ve even had conversations with her about that.  Her middle name, Anne, also happens to be the name of Shakespeare’s wife.  So there ya go.

The boy was tricky.  It was easy to pick “classic” girls’ names that have been around long enough that they meant something to Shakespeare.  But for boys we get a whole lot of Italian / Spanish sounding -o names (Banquo, Romeo, Petruchio etc…) while the more English sounding names (Richard, Henry, Edgar, Edmund…) just didn’t do anything for us.  So the boy didn’t get a Shakespeare name.  He’s Brendan.  One day Brendan Fraser will do some Shakespeare and then we’ll have a connection.

But!  I’m deep into the story and haven’t served up the link to Shakespeare Baby Names that Angela sent me.  It’s funny that the author clearly tries to suggest that only realistic names were included (so no Iago), but then Cymbeline is in the list.  Really?

Lots of minor characters listed, obviously because they had a modern connection already (like Celia, Audrey, Marina, etc…) but does that mean I could have called my son Christopher and argued that he was named after Christopher Sly from the induction of Shrew?

I still don’t see many names on the boys’ list that would have made it in my house.  Caliban? Horatio?  Interestingly the list includes Richard, but no Henry.  What’s wrong with Henry?  My son is in class with a Henry right now.

If there’s something I’ve learned over the years I’ve been doing this, it’s that there’s two sure fire ways for a post to pull crazy traffic.  The first is to hit the SEO (search engine optimization) just right so that you show up on the first page of Google results (see “How old was Romeo?” for an example) (( Oh, thank you Google for letting me know that Li’l Romeo is 29 years old.  Wow. ))

The second way?  The second way is to get Bardfilm to write you a guest post.  Every time he drops a new list on my virtual doorstep, I know it’s going to be a good day.

If you’ve not had a chance to read them all, you’re missing out.  Let’s fix that problem.  Gathered together here, right now, for the very first time on stage simultaneously, I present Bardfilm’s Lists:

• When Shakespeare Does His Taxes  (April 2012)
• Shakespearean Light Bulb Jokes (January 2012)
• Bob Dylan’s Shakespeare Songs (May 2011)
• Shakespearean Pick-up Lines (January 2011)
• Shakespearean Collective Nouns (December 2010)
• Top Twenty Shakespearean Faux-Pas (October 2010)
• Twenty Bits of Shakespeare Trivia You Probably Haven’t Heard Before (October 2010)
• Shakespearean Movie Quotes (October 2011)

If you’re not subscribed to Bardfilm’s own site, what are you thinking?  Go do it.  Right now.

A couple weeks ago I stumble across a mention of The Romeo and Juliet Effect in a book about motivation and will power.

Today among the various Shakespeare feeds I scan I spotted this 2008 Psychology Today article entitled, “Romeo and Juliet’s Death Trip: Addictive Love and Teen Suicide.”  

There are no great insights to be found.  The author pretty much skims the story for various death references and ties them all back to suicide, including the claim that Romeo is suicidal over Rosaline at the opening of the play.  I think that’s a bit much.  That’s not suicidal, that’s emo.  Not the same thing.

The article’s at least entertaining, though, and I appreciate that.  I wonder how far his tongue was in his cheek while writing it?

Father Laurence tries cognitive behavior therapy:

I’ll give thee armour to keep off that word:
Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy (read “psychology”),
To comfort thee, though thou art banished. . . .
rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array.

But then (oy!!!) the good Father resorts to pharmacology: he gives Juliet a potion to make her appear dead.

So on my way to work this morning I’m listening to an audiobook in my car all about motivation, will power and stuff like that – how the brain works kind of stuff.  And in a chapter about how you can’t tell your brain “Stop thinking about X” I get to this:

This might explain what psychologists know as the well-known “Romeo and Juliet” effect, where love for another person only becomes stronger when it is forbidden.(*)

Ummm……huh?  I’m trying to decide if that’s psychobabble for “We are saying this *about* the characters of Romeo and Juliet”, in other words they fell that deeply in love precisely because they could not be together … or else if this is just a modern acknowledgment of a modern idea, and they’ve simply slapped a cliche onto it.

What do you think?  Am I reading too much into it, in the hopes of pulling a blog post out of it?  Or do you think that Romeo liked that girl at the party, and when he learned that she was a Capulet, only then did he think “I can’t live without her!”

Somehow I don’t think the text supports that.  Granted, I think that every 13yr old who thinks she is in love with the gangsta down the street and whose parents say she can’t see him anymore?  So she climbs out her bedroom window to go hang out with him?  That, I think, is the Romeo and Juliet effect.  And that’s not at all what Shakespeare was talking about.

(*) From memory, of course, so nobody pick on the book for any lapses in grammar – that’s my fault.