So, my brother’s decided to take up calligraphy / penmanship as a new hobby. Every morning he posts to Facebook in new fonts, inks, etc.. practicing his skills. Today he posted a “typewriter font,” which I thought interesting because I just imagined him manually adding in the little serifs on each letter. I went looking into the history of the word “serif” (and by extension its partner “sans serif”, literally “without serifs”) and discovered that it’s apparently as recent as 1813?
I quickly fired up my First Folio (because who doesn’t have that on hot key?) to look at the font used 190 years earlier (attached). Look at that! Serifs everywhere.
Of course this is simply a case that “they didn’t call them serifs back then,” I get that. What I’m wondering is, circa Shakespeare’s time, did the printing presses even have a concept of “choice of font”? When would serif versus sans serif have even entered the picture?
…I just had a horrible thought. Can you imagine if they’d printed the original First Folio in … <shudder> Arial?
SCENE : The “Will” writer’s room. BILL sit lazily about, staring at the ceiling, drumming fingers, periodically crumbling paper and tossing into a wastebasket. DAVE sits in a corner, reading.
DAVE: (looking up) Hey, do you know what swive means?
BILL: Swive? Nope. Why?
DAVE: (showing book) Because it says in this Shakespeare glossary that it’s another word for the F-bomb.
BILL: So?
DAVE: (devious smile appearing) Don’t you get it? If we didn’t know about it, neither will the censors! So we can fill this week’s script with stuff like “Shut up and swive me now” and “They can go swive themselves for all I care.”
BILL: That’s genius.
Last week was all about how many naked buttocks they could show, this week is apparently archaic swear words. I can’t make this stuff up. (For the record, my searches indicate that Shakespeare himself never used the word.)
“But what about the torture?” I hear you asking. “I’m not here for the language and the nudity, I want to see blood spattering for no reason!”
Well then fear not, I have good news! There’s actually what I thought a funny scene where our resident psychopath (Topcliffe, is it?) is fishing. “Ha!” I thought. “Fishing. Shakespeare. That’s funny.” (“Shakespeare” is actually a very popular manufacturing line of fishing poles.)
Hahaha, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets a fish hook embedded in his chest. Topcliffe then picks up the fishing rod (still attached, mind you) and starts walking away. I think, nay hope, that he’s going to now lead the poor soul away like a leash. Nope. Just goes ahead and rips it right out of him.
Grossed out yet? Later we’ll see him actually hung from the ceiling by giant hooks in his back.
Sometimes I wonder why I watch this stuff. Seriously.
There’s almost no actual Shakespeare in this one. He’s riding on the popularity of Two Gents, but everybody keeps calling it a “tragicomedy” and saying how much they like the dog, and Will wants to be taken seriously.
He’s got some good lines about why he wants to write – to explore why we love and why we fight and what it means to be human. That’s the good stuff, that’s what I want to hear about. But it’s pretty brief.
Of course we drop a few random lines, Marlowe talks about how it’s not his fault that his life’s not going so great, the fault lies in his astrology. This of course is wide open for “The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves,” or maybe ” Additionally we meet Sir Walter Raleigh, who has been to America, and describes it as “Brave new world with such stuff in it.” You get the idea.
Once again, Bardfilm offers a guest post for our edification—or, at least, for our amusement.
The English language offers a host of interesting collective nouns. You can describe a lot of geese as a gaggle of geese. More than a few whales make up a pod of whales. When you see tons of crows around, it’s natural (and fun) to say, “A murder of crows was on the neighbor’s back tree this morning.”
But what if you have a lot of Hamlets running around? How do you refer to the twenty-three Lady Macbeths you saw auditioning last night?
Here’s a list for exactly those instances. Think how useful (and fun) it will be to say, “I’m not looking forward to auditions. There’s a whole scrub of Lady Macbeths out there!” Without much more ado, here they are:
Shakespearean Collective Nouns
An innocence of Desdemonas.
A sack of Falstaffs.
An assignation of Bottoms.
An ide of Caesars.
A jealousy of Iagos.
A wherefore of Romeos.
A vengeance of Hamlets.
A fahrenfoul of witches.
An obscurity of Pericleses.
A gurgle of Ophelias.
A torrent of Lears.
An equivocation of Porters.
An infinite variety of Cleopatras.
A platitude of Poloniuses.
A poke of Gloucesters.
A scrub of Lady Macbeths.
A discontent of Richard IIIs.
Feel free to add your own options in the comments below. I know you’ve seen one too many Juliets—how would you describe them as a group?
Our thanks to kj, the author of Bardfilm. Bardfilm is a blog that comments on films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare in a relatively-informal manner.
This “Best Of” article originally appeared December 2010.
I call it our mission statement: “Dedicated to proving that Shakespeare makes life better.”
I know what I mean by that. But I can’t always articulate it (mostly because I have so many different ways to answer that). Want to play a game? Complete the following sentence:
Shakespeare makes my life better because …
… it makes me feel connected to more people than I would ever know otherwise. Guy takes a picture of my “Mercutio Drew First” t-shirt last week. Made my day. Why? Because I know that he knows enough Shakespeare to get the reference, and knows that his daughter will get the reference, and found it important enough to share with her. Awesome. Something I did just touched two strangers.
…you learn and you teach at the same time. My friends, family and coworkers think of me as the Shakespeare guy, deferring all Shakespeare related topics and questions to me, and assuming I have all the answers. And I enjoy that, because to the extent that I have the answers, I love to talk about it – if people around me learn more about Shakespeare through me? Super. The world’s a better place. But my online friends for the most part know more about Shakespeare than I do, so the roles are reversed. I spend more of my time listening and learning from them. I’m totally ok with it being both. I’m always open to learning what I don’t know, and sharing what I do.
…knowing Shakespeare is like adding salt to food when you cook. It doesn’t make things taste salty, it makes thing taste more like they were supposed to taste in the first place. It intensifies the flavor that was already there. Shakespeare intensifies the way I feel about things, because I know that somebody else has already managed to put those feelings into words, and I can use those words to communicate what I’m feeling with other humans who are also feeling the same thing.
Early indications are, though some of us may be more optimistic (read: clinging to hope) than others, nobody really thinks the new “Will” show is all that great. And we can forget completely about Still Star-Cross’d, which ran out of Shakespeare material in the first episode.
What would you want in a Shakespearean television show? What could they have done, that would have made the show “must see tv” in your universe?
For my part, I think I wear it on my sleeve – give me the text. Start with people saying Shakespeare’s words, and I’m already about 70% there. It doesn’t have to be the actual character of William Shakespeare. It could just as easily be high school students. The important part would be in the delivery. The words have to come from a place of sincerity. It would be too easy (especially in the high school case) to go more for cliche and mockery. I don’t want that. I want lightning bolts to shoot up my spine every time somebody drops a line I recognize.
Beyond that, I love it when the meta story echoes the text. Go ahead and tell a Romeo and Juliet story while actually reading/studying/performing Romeo and Juliet, I’m ok with it. Granted it’s a little overdone. So do it with King Lear instead. But don’t abandon the text for the story.
I think that Slings & Arrows is as close to ideal as I’ve yet seen.
I don’t really need the historical accuracy stuff. Elizabethan England was not a glamorous era, based on what I’m learning. The prettier you make the show look, the more people will tell you it looks like a Renaissance Faire. The better looking your actors, the more discussion we can have about the lack of dentistry and personal hygiene, not to mention plague. But who wants to look at sick ugly people every week?
What about you? What’s your must have ingredient for a Shakespeare show? Do you want the biographical stuff? Or the more fanciful Dark Lady theories? Historical accuracy? You prefer Shakespeare as a character or would you rather see a story about Falstaff?
