Spotted this link today on Twitter, courtesy of Folger Research.  “When you ask a powerful woman to be your child’s godmother & the queen intervenes: a 1607 letter”.

What’s most fascinating to me is the very real example of spelling.  Sure, we have plenty of examples from Shakespeare’s work, but it would be easy to put him on a separate shelf and say, sure, that’s how *he* wrote.  For the stage.  That’s not how normal people wrote.

Want to bet?

I only wish that I could read more of it.  There are several spots where odd abbreviations are used (something that looks like La with a ps, an m with a tie above it, etc…) and plenty of places where I just can’t read the writing — there’s a word that looks like it could be “sefte” but given the giant descenders they used for S I thought maybe it was a”juste” when I first saw it, so who knows.

Anyway, neat stuff indeed.  I wonder if there’s anybody reading who does indeed study this stuff and can tell us what it says?  I get the general idea, mostly from the title — the person writing the letter had asked the recipient to be the godmother to his child, but the queen stepped in.  Whether she stepped in because she doesn’t like her countesses to do such things, I didn’t quite get.  It does seem to end along the lines of “If something happens to make the queen change her mind, we’ll let you know.”

Anybody got a better reading than that?

For those folks that aren’t with us on Twitter, you may not have heard that I’m taking the family to Washington D.C. next week for April vacation.  For some that would mean the White House, the Washington Monument, and all that semi-cool, 200year old stuff.

You know what I’m going for.  I want to see me some 400 year old books.  Specifically of course I’m talking about the Folger Shakespeare Library, what I describe to people who ask as “The Shakespeare Smithsonian.  The Center of the American Shakespeare World.”  (Come on, I need to give the Stratford Birthplace people at least a little acknowledgement :)).  I don’t know if it’s the common way or not, but I just call it “The Folger” in the same way I’d say “The White House” or “The Smithsonian.”

Want to hear something funny?  In my house I have a bust of Shakespeare (a small one), from the Folger. The thing is, I don’t remember getting it.  It had to have been during college when we went to DC for a conference.  I do remember going into town with friends.  But whatever period that was in my life, it wasn’t the same as it is now, and I obviously wandered in picked up Mr. Shakespeare, and brought him home in a very unmemorable event.

I expect next week, with wife and geeklets in tow, to be just a wee bit different.  🙂  I’m actually hoping/planning to meet people that I know.  The funny thing is that the following week is my birthday, and my wife asked me what I wanted.  “We’re going to be at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  I’m pretty sure I can find a few things.”

So, watch this space because one of a number of possible things might happen:

* I am so busy running around to all the sites that I have no time to post.
* I am so impatient about my trip to the Folger (Thursday) that I post every day between now and then to talk about it.
* I post a small (or possibly not so small) novel of my experiences starting Thursday night.
* I show up on the national news after I am arrested for attempting to eat a First Folio.

Anybody need anything while I’m out?  Bardfilm asked me to grab him a quarto, he said they’ve got them just lying around and you’re supposed to help yourself.

Normally I  would have skimmed over this story as only having relevance to a wider international community (that this site doesn’t necessarily attract), but numerous people have sent me links so let’s talk about Thailand banning ‘Shakespeare Must Die’, a film adaptation of Macbeth.

This morning a reader sent me this link about what happens when you tell search engine Wolfram Alpha about Shakespeare’s plays:

Entering a play into Wolfram|Alpha, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brings up basic information, such as number of acts, scenes, and characters. It also provides more in-depth info like longest word, most frequent words, number of words and sentences, and more. It’s also easy to find more specific information about a particular act or scene with queries like “What is the longest word in King Lear?”, “What is the average sentence length of Macbeth?”, and “How many unique words are there in Twelfth Night?”.

I suppose this has value at some level.  But if anything it goes to show how limited a pure textual analysis is, don’t you think?  Great, it can determine the longest word in a play.  But who gets to decide what that means, and why it is (or is not) important?

Reminds me of an age-old quote, attributed to Picasso:  “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

I’ve always been far more intrigued with stories of AI in computer science where they attempt to make sure leaps about things that are important, and why they are important.  Pioneers Doug Lenat and Roger Schank did a great deal of work in this area — Lenat’s “Cyc” project can easily be seen as a precursor to what Wolfram Alpha has become.

Something that I’ve always dreamed about, and who knows maybe one day I’ll build it, is a sort of search engine where you ask questions of the characters from within the context of the play, like one of those murder mystery tv shows where you’re the detective coming in to question the suspects.  “Hamlet, why did you kill Polonius?”  “I thought he was my uncle.”  “When did you do it?”  “When I went to see my mother in her bedchamber, after we saw the play.”  That sort of thing.  And you could switch around your context to ask different characters their take on the same situation.

That wouldn’t have any academic value per se, as the programmer would have to pick a specific interpretation of events and then state it as if it were fact.  But as far as entertaining the user while also teaching her something?  I think it could be a big hit.  “Chat bots” have always been amusing, to a degree.  This would just take it to the next level.

Here’s a conversation I’ve always wanted to start.  When it comes to a great unknown, be it religion or the the lottery or Mr. Shakespeare, I’ve found that I can never truly straddle that line between what I *wish* to be true, and what my logical brain causes me to *believe* is true.  I may wish to hit the lottery when I buy a ticket, but I believe that I almost certainly will not.

I’ve always wanted to do that with Shakespeare.  We don’t know a lot about the man, and pretty safely never will.  So I open it up — what do you *believe* is true about Shakespeare?  And what do you *wish* was true?  This conversation may drive the historians (who presumably would like to know what *is* true) nuts, but the romantics can have a field day. 🙂

I wish that Shakespeare was indeed attempting to write this cookbook for what it means to be a human that he managed to create for us.  I wish that everything we choose to read into his works is in fact really there because he deliberately put it there.  A message for all time, from the master.

I wish that he had a happy home life, and that his writings on romance stemmed directly back from his own feelings for his wife.

I wish that someday we’d know the answer, definitively, to all the great questions we have.  What’s the deal with his education and life experience? How’d he learn so much about so many topics? What was he doing for his lost years?

I believe that we’ll never know those things for sure.  I believe that in another century we may pick up a few clues along the way but it will all still just be peace-meal guesses at what the clues mean.

I believe that his home life was about as difficult as any man’s during his day.  I don’t believe there was anything magical about it.

I believe that while William Shakespeare was *better* at his craft than the next guy, that this is most likely all he ever strived to be.  He was a shrewd businessman and a bit of a penny-pincher from all we can tell, so I don’t have any difficulty believing that he saw his plays as a way to make a lot of money.  His craft (his gift?) came from putting something different on the stage, from changing the audience’s expectations about what they were about to see.

Know what the major difference is between what you believe and what you wish?  What you believe should constantly be subject to scrutiny.  New information should make you welcome a change in what you believe.  Bring me new evidence to clearly dispute any of the beliefs that I listed, and assuming that I believe your evidence :), I’ll change my beliefs.  But what we wish?  We can cling to that as long as we like.  That’s ours.