Category: Shakespeare Geek

Review : Interred With Their Bones

~ duane ~ 9 Comments

When I heard about “The DaVinci Code, only with Shakespeare” I was intrigued and told myself I’d hunt down this Interred With Their Bones novel and see for myself if it was any good.  So I was pleased when the folks at Dutton sent me a copy for review.

There’s a couple of things that worry me about a description like “The DaVinci Code, only with Shakespeare.”  The DaVinci Code, in my opinion, was only popular because of its attack on the Catholic Church.  It wasn’t necessarily a good thriller on its own.  If you’re a publisher, you’re cool with that kind of buzz.  Whatever gets your audience reading, right?  But if you’re a writer, you might be aiming a little higher than that.

I didn’t love DaVinci Code, honestly.  Maybe I’m not that big a fan of the thriller genre.  They all seem to have a certain pattern to them, namely the race between the narrator and the killer to uncover the secret first.  Along the way the narrator runs into puzzles, solves them through some seeming act of brilliance, and then walks straight into some new character who says “It’s about time, I’ve been waiting for you for days.”

Secondly is the problem of Shakespeare, which really applies to any book that tries to have a central theme like that.  Namely, are you writing for existing fans of that subject, or trying to entice new ones?  The answer dictates how your book goes.  I fancy myself a Shakespeare geek, although who are we kidding, I am no academic.  Anybody who is in the business of studying Shakespeare (such as the author, or the main character) should know more about the subject than me, I’m thinking.  But a casual reader who is looking for the next DaVinci Code and knows nothing about Shakespeare?  Would naturally need some clues.

On this point, I’m torn, because I don’t really know what the answer is.  I’ll offer some examples, and let you decide.  It’s a thriller, so we know there’s a killer on the loose.  There’s always a killer on the loose.  And you know what?  If your killer has a thing for Shakespeare, and you’re female, and he calls you Lavinia?  If you’ve read Titus, then you’ll be quaking in your boots because you know exactly what that implies.  But if you haven’t read Titus, you have no idea.  So the author (via the killer) lays it out for you, leaving a piece of the Titus script at the scene, with the important stage direction underlined (I won’t spoil it).  I’m cool with that.  Titus isn’t the most well known play, and it’s not like she spends pages explaining who Hamlet is.

But later the narrator needs some knowledge of Cardenio, the holy grail of Shakespeare’s lost plays.  And it’s disappointing how little she has.  She does not make the connection when she spots Cervantes among her clues.  She knows of the existence of The Double Falsehood, but then makes herself a note to look it up on the net because she’s unfamiliar with it.  I mean, come on, I’ve read the silly thing.  And she’s completely surprised at a reference to Theobald’s three copies of the original, even though it’s the sort of thing that makes it to the first paragraph of any story on the subject.  So here’s an instance where the casual reader certainly needs a bit of a boost in the facts department, but I found it a little unbelievable that the narrator did not have that sort of knowledge about such an important subject. <shrug>

Having said that, I’m still enough of a Shakespeare geek that I’ll take all the references I can get.  When one character turns to the narrator and says “Sleep now,” or something like that, my brain immediately jumped to both “Sleep no more, Macbeth hath murdered sleep!” and “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub” and I was wondering which quote the narrator would come back with.  And I get these cool shivers down my spine early in the book when they are actually acting out a bit of the play.  I just love it when somebody delivers that first quote, it’s like the start of something beautiful every time.

So, to sum up, I’m tolerating the thriller bits to get to the Shakespeare bits, and hoping that she doesn’t dumb down those parts so much that I can’t take it anymore.   This is where DaVinci Code had the advantage, because I did not have the same knowledge of the background material that I do here, and I could spend more time saying “Oh, that’s interesting, didn’t know that.”  With this book I’m sure to spend much more time saying things like “Yes yes, we knew that, get on with it!” Sorry if that was a lame review, but I’m not one to shove my opinions on other people.  I say what I like and why I like it.  Right now I’m not reading it to figure out the mystery, I’m reading it for the Shakespeare bits.  And enjoying it very much.

What Can Shakespeare Teach Me About IT?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

If there’s a pet peeve I have about Shakespeare, it’s that connection between “Shakespeare is hard and useless, therefore why learn it?”  This morning out on a coffee run for the wife I heard a radio commercial for some sort of vocational school that used that exact line, presumably in reference to not wanting to get a real education at a real school:  “What can Shakespeare teach me about IT?”  (IT, for those not familiar, is information technology.  In other words, computer stuff.)

Well.  As a lifelong computer geek (been coding for 28 out of 38 years, thankyouverymuch) with a love a Shakespeare, I think I’d like to comment on that.  Let’s talk about what Shakespeare can teach you about IT.

  1. Shakespeare appreciation is self-directed.  If all you know about Shakespeare is what the teacher makes you memorize for the test, you will fall very very short of what you can accomplish.  At best, school provides that glimmer of something that makes you say “Wow, I love this” and then do whatever you can to seek out more information.
    Computer science is the same way.  If you love it, then you will go over and above what school teaches you.  If all you’re doing is walking through classes in order to get the grade and the diploma, then you’re not getting much out of life.
  2. Shakespeare wrote in a different language, with its own tokens and syntax.  Computer software is very much a game of speaking new languages (Java, Ruby, Erlang, take your pick).  You have to understand the context.  You have to know when you’ve seen an old word in a new context, and be able to make the leap of understanding about what that means.  Reading Shakespeare offers similar challenges. Most of the words he used as still in use today (as a matter of fact he invented many of them).  But he often used them in different ways than we do.  There’s a certain amount of deciphering that has to go on.
  3. “Reverse engineering”, for the non-IT crowd, refers to taking an existing piece of technology and taking it apart in an effort to figure out what the creator meant when he did certain things.  There’s almost so much parallel to Shakespeare there that it’s not worth mentioning.  Was he Catholic or Protestant?  Did he even write the plays?  Reverse engineering Shakespeare’s works has kept scholars busy for hundreds of years.
  4. Shakespeare is a memorization game.  I’m convinced that Google kills memory cells.  Most programmers I interview these days will say that they don’t need books anymore, they just google for the answer.  I think the better response is that they have the memory capacity to remember the answer in the first place!  No, of course not everything, but surely there are things you run into so frequently that you shouldn’t be running for your search engine every day.  Same goes for Shakespeare.  When I’m speaking to someone on the subject and trying to make a point, if I have to stop and go “Oh, hell, what’s that thing that Antony said in Julius Caesar about when people die?  Damnit, oh hang on a second let me google it….”  I’d look pretty weak and foolish.
  5. Shakespeare is Open Source.  Like the source material?  Take it.  Use it.  Put your own twist on it.  He did the same thing, after all.  What is Romeo and Juliet but a specific implementation of the “unrequited love” idea that already existed before Shakespeare got hold of it?

I’m tempted to do more, but I’ve got some code to write.

Shakespeare Biography : Meet Bill

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Update Feb 18, 2010 – Sorry to the sudden surge of traffic hitting this page, but it looks like the “Meet Bill” link has died. No further information available. Oh, well. Stay, hang out, look around. Questions we can answer?
[Ok, there’s a story that goes along with this that I’ll share shortly…]Meet Bill is a bit different from the typical Shakespeare biography.  Example?When Will was eighteen he fell in love with Anne Hathaway. After the requisite amount of headbanging they were married.Oh.  I’m not sure whether to debate the bit about how much he really loved his wife (who was, what, ten years his senior?) or to laugh over the “requisite headbanging” that came before the marriage (she was knocked up when he married her, right?).The Bard’s group was bad. They kicked ass so bad his competitors used to send out speed writers, shorthand artists and bribe other actors in his plays to try to make their own bootlegged copies of his plays. The unauthorized “boots” were known as “The Bad Quartos.” (Weird but true.) I like the style.  It obviously addresses an audience not usually coming to look for Shakespeare biographies.Ok, you want to hear the story too?  This is one of those stories that I like to call “The universe is small” stories.  This weekend I was playing around at GoDaddy looking to see just how many variations of Shakespeare domains were out there, how many were being cybersquatted, and so on.  One of the first I stumbled across was the fact that romeoandjuliet.com was actually registered 10 years ago, for the Luhrman movie.  I’d never known that.  Never been to that site.  Saw it for the first time this weekend.  My browsing led me to the Wikipedia page for the movie (not the play), where I found some errors and corrected them.Now go look and see where this Meet Bill site is hosted?  romeoandjuliet.com.  But I found it strictly in my morning’s headlines, I did not ever actually browse through that site.  Weird.

How Old Is Romeo in Romeo and Juliet?

~ duane ~ 85 Comments

How old is Romeo? There’s a simple question. Sure, we all know Juliet is 13, because the nurse immediately tells us. And often, I think we then make the leap and assume that Romeo is also 13.

R & J Lovers Merchandise Romeo and Juliet

But that’s hardly true. Would that imply that Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris are also all about 13? Surely it was the case that men simply chose younger wives (Capulet is much older than his wife, is he not?), and actually, we can assume that Romeo and the others are in what, maybe in late teens or early 20s?

It wouldn’t be a good idea to point out that age difference these days, of course. I can just imagine Romeo & Juliet being closed down because it promotes pedophilia or something. But honestly, I’m cool with it (the age difference, not the pedophilia!)  The more I read the play, the more I appreciate that Juliet is the most mature person in it. That she’s 13, surrounded by people a generation older than her, is quite impressive. I don’t need to make her older to justify anything, and I don’t need to make Romeo younger to balance it out.

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Romeo can be older and still be rash and impetuous. Juliet can be young and smart. It’s better than trying to imagine 13-year-old Tybalt saying, “I hate the word as I hate Hell….”

But How Old Is Romeo?

The short answer is that Romeo’s age is never mentioned in the play’s text. Romeo is old enough to be running around in the streets of Verona with his friends. His father, Lord Montague, doesn’t even know where he is. That’s all we get to work with.

Did You Know?

I learned something interesting while looking at the trivia for Baz Luhrmann’s movie. Natalie Portman auditioned for the role of Juliet. But because of her small frame, in her words, “Leonardo looked like he was molesting me.”  The director said the same thing I said above, only backward — “Leonardo was 21, but could look 18 – and she made him look 21.” In other words, he looked too old, not that she looked too young.  So that certainly backs up the idea that you have to cast R&J of roughly equivalent ages to avoid squicking out your audience.

Shakespeare, by Pink Floyd

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

Excuse me while my head explodes, in the good way. When I saw this blog’s headline, “David Gilmour – Sonnet 18”, I first skipped past it. Then said “Wait a minute…the Pink Floyd guy?” I got excited. Everybody hopes to hear the sonnets put to music, could it be that there’s audio of Pink Floyd doing it? Talk about your head exploding in the good way.

I won’t lie — the iambic pentameter model does not lend itself well to music — but who cares! It’s got that Pink Floyd sound, there’s nothing bad about that.