So, a funny thing happened last week.  Five days ago, on the little used Reddit forum for Shakespeare, I first spotted this post about “Things We Owe Shakespeare”.  It is a picture of someone’s notebook scribblings of a bunch of now-cliches that originally came from Shakespeare.

At the time (you can see my comment on the post), I wrote that it was neat primarily for the artistic value, but I would have liked it if the font was different for each quote, instead of looking obviously like one person wrote it all.

I didn’t give it another thought.  We see these “Stuff Shakespeare said first” lists multiple times a day.

But then the funny thing happened – it “went viral”, as the marketers like to say.  I started seeing links to it a dozen times a day, including from such mega-traffic generators as NPR.  The original poster even said that she (I think?) was getting over 10k hits a day on the thing, and was surprised at it.  She even acknowledges that some of the sayings aren’t original to Shakespeare (dating back to the Bible), and that she spelled some things wrong.

So, then, why did it “go viral”?  That’s the mystery about this stuff.  Here you’ve got the Shakespeare bloggers who do this stuff on a regular basis and hope beyond hope to score such a win.  And then a random writer with no particular connection to Shakespeare (her tumblr appears to be a wide variety of found and created images) happens upon a gold mine.

Here’s my thoughts, and believe me if I knew anything about this stuff I’d be a rich man:

• Artwork.  This post was not a bullet list of things Shakespeare wrote, it was a hand sketch.  It has a certain artistic quality to it (as I noted way back when I first saw it) in the way that they’re all jammed in at odd angles.  People like pictures.
• Originality.  This is not a picture of a poster that somebody saw.  This is the original artist saying, “I made this.”  People appreciate that, and are more likely to share/like it. 
• Needle in a haystack syndrome.  If somebody posts a funny Shakespeare list every day, then the people that frequent that site will implicitly alter their standard of expectation about the content on that site, and no individual list will jump to the top.  Make sense?  I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels right.  Think about it like this (what with the Emmy’s having just been on television last night) : the television show Modern Family is, by current standards, very good.  Every time.  I’ve never had somebody forward me a clip of any individual episode with a note “OMG U have to see this soo funny!!11!”  But in any water cooler conversation somebody can say, “Hey have you seen that show Modern Family?” and most of the people in the conversation will say, “OMG I love that show!”

  In this case we have the opposite. Go look at the original poster’s account, and see how many entries there are that did *not* go viral.

• Audience.  Some audiences, I think, are more attuned to the sharing concept.  I don’t know for certain but I expect that the audience for the site in question is more of a younger, possibly teen audience.  I think that stuff can spread like wildfire through that crowd. It’s not that us older folks (ahem) are less likely to share the good stuff – it’s that we just have fundamentally different networks.  The average teenager’s social network is some substantial multiplier larger than mine.  Plus, the people on that network are more actively online, and therefore more likely to see stuff.  If I post or share something, half of my relatively small social network may not even log in for a couple of days.  Compare that to the younger crowd who are online almost constantly and the minute it gets shared, they see it and forward it along as well.

Like I said, I don’t have any secrets to this, otherwise I’d have a following 100x the size I do :).  I do think that this was an interesting event in the world of viral Shakespeare, and I hope that I’ve been able to learn something from it that I can use in my strategy going forward.

Beware, this is more a philosophical question than a Shakespeare one, but the subjects overlap.

I’ve worked for two educational startups, both that deal with getting kids into college.

One boss had the vision that *every* kid should potentially go to college, and the fact that they don’t is attributable to a failed system (on many fronts – the student’s as well as the system’s).

The other boss, disagrees, and makes the case that for some people, college is simply not the right path, and sometimes even seen as a negative.  It’s been mentioned more than once that up here in Massachusetts, “We don’t ask if you went to college, we ask where you went to college.” But it’s a big world, and there are plenty of places in the US where “went to college” is a bad thing in the “you think you better than me?” sort of way.

I’m not really sure where I fall on that spectrum, and that’s not really what I want to argue.

What I want to do is apply that same spectrum to the question of Shakespeare.  Is Shakespeare for everybody?  If someone doesn’t “get” Shakespeare, is that just the result of a system that failed to properly explain it?  Or should we just accept the fact that some folks are not meant for Shakespeare, and nothing we can do will change that?

Note that I am not talking about those who spend significant effort researching the topic and then come up with a stance on why they don’t *like* it.  That’s like someone who goes to college, finds nothing there, and quits.  I’m talking about the ones that never even get that far – the ones who are unable (unwilling?) to see any value in the subject for themselves, and thus put no effort into pursuing it.

Discuss.

This past spring I launched a new effort, ShakespeareAnswers.com. My honest hope for this Q&A style site is to corner the market on *correct* and *useful* answers to legitimate Shakespeare questions.  I’d been hanging out on Yahoo! Answers, Mahalo, WikiAnswers and others, and quite frankly the quality of both the questions and answers was often so poor (and at times downright incorrect) it made me sad.

My first big mistake was launching it in June, right at the end of the school year.  It peaked for a week or two, and then promptly fell off the face of the earth as everybody took off for summer and stopped asking Shakespeare questions.  Well, it’s fall now, school’s back, and I’d like to breathe some life into the project.

Here’s the thing, though. Every time I bring it up, people think that it is a “Do your homework for you so you don’t have to” site.  I try to explain to the nay-sayers that “Oh no, dear friends, you misunderstand – any kid who comes by looking for a short and sweet answer to his question is far more likely to get a lengthier earful than if he’d just listened to his teacher in the first place.”  I was even accused of insulting teachers at one point by apparently suggesting that I was having to clean up their messes because they’re not good at their jobs.

Still, I can deal with that.  Yesterday, though, I got into a conversation with a teacher who brought up something I hadn’t considered – lazy student plagiarize.  They cut and they paste.  So here I am thinking that my essay-length answers to their questions (rather than providing overly simplified answers like, “Yes, Mercutio is the Prince’s relative”) is a good service, but what’s going to happen is that kids will come by and simply copy and paste our answers into their homework. That’s not cool.

I can think of a few ways around that, by mucking with the ability to cut and paste text from the site.  But that’s on me, as the technical guy behind it. I’ll work on that.

This gets me to my subject line, though. I want to build a resource that English teachers don’t roll their eyes at.  On the contrary I want to build something that they’d actually recommend, if a student has questions that they can’t (or don’t have the time/energy/resources to) answer. So, I’m asking.  If you are a teacher of Shakespeare (even if you only do one unit amid a variety of other subjects), please take a moment to browse through ShakespeareAnswers and give me your honest opinion. If you knew your students were going to hit the google and end up there, what would you like to see that might make you think “Oh, ok, that’s not just another one of those do-your-homework-for-you sites?”  I’ll do my best to oblige.

My mission isn’t to help kids pass tests. My mission is to always present Shakespeare in a way that makes it entertaining and accessible, in the hopes that even the lazy ones who come by looking to cut and paste some homework leave with a better understanding of what it’s all about.  And, who knows, maybe even a little appreciation.

The message remains loud and clear, as I work my way through Richard III for the first time, that I should see a performance.  Shakespeare was meant to be seen, not read, as the old saying goes.

Let me ask the directors in the audience a question. You’re given a play to direct that you’ve never seen, read, or experienced before. What do you do? Do you immediately go off and find somebody else’s directorial vision of the play, watch that, and then say “Oh, ok, that’s how that’s supposed to go?”

Or would that completely mess with your ability to develop your own vision for the story? Sure, there’s research that can be done – but if you’re a completely empty vessel, isn’t there a very real danger of filling yourself up too much with other people’s ideas and not leaving enough room for your own?

See where I’m going with this?

If all you want to do with a Shakespeare play is to say, “Well, I’ve seen it, I know what it’s about. Check that one off the old bucket list,” then sure, go do that.

Thing is, I wouldn’t really be here doing stuff like this web site if that’s all I wanted.  I want to be so intimately familiar with the plays that I have my own movie running in my head. I want my own opinions, that I can answer by quoting the text – not by saying “I like how Richard Burton did it.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – when you see Shakespeare, you’re seeing one interpretation of what it could be.  When you read it, you’re opening up the possibility of all of them.