Caliban's Island

You, too, can invent English

2007-12-16T10:23:00.000-08:00

'Tis commonly proclaimed that Shakespeare invented about 1,500 English words. Michael LoMonico's The Shakespeare Book of Lists enumerates some of the most contemporarily prominent of these words, including

advertising
bandit
critic
hush
investment
kissing
numb
shooting star
undress
yelping
zany

(Find more here.) Some of these words are difficult to accept as possibly coined by Will Shakespeare. While words like "zany" or expressions like "shooting star" seem quite inventable, words that are simple, grammatical variants of preexisting words like "kissing" and "undress" (from bases "to kiss" and "to dress," respectively) seem more like they must have been circulating orally before Will wrote them down. Thus, if you were to revise common wisdom to be more accurate, you'd say that Shakespeare's works contain the oldest written instances of about 1,500 English words... the difference being that the latter allows for the likely possibility that Will didn't invent a good number of those words but rather borrowed them from Elizabethan England's spoken vernacular. If you had been the first person to use the word metrosexual in a novel, 500 years from now it might have looked like you invented it—when, in fact, you heard it from your college friends while discussing why your male roommate owns 24 pairs of shoes.

Yet what's the likelihood that Will Shakespeare happened to be the first person to write down so many common English words? Weren't people writing in English for a long time before that? Aside from the obvious possibility that prior usages have simply been lost to the ravages of time, The 'Pedia notes that prior to the sixteenth century "legal matters in England were conducted in French, Latin had been used to write history, philosophy, and theology, and for the most part [English] writers did not write in their native tongue [of English]." Apparently, Latin, not English, had been the language of choice for writers and poets until Shakespeare's time, so it's really not that surprising that he might've been the first person to pen them.

And yet... perhaps it's not so unlikely after all that Shakespeare might truly have invented a good number of the 1,500 terms accredited to his imagination. From the same Wikipedia article linked to above, we learn:

From nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin and Greek and other modern Romance languages, it is estimated that between the years of 1500 and 1659 30,000 new words were added to the English language.

Wow, that's 189 words a year or one new word every two days! So perhaps Shakespeare could've been making up all those words; everybody seemed to be doing it.

Such a rapid pace of linguistic creation seems strange for a time like the sixteenth century, when travel was arduous and communities were much smaller. Things tended change at a slower pace. But something special had appeared in the 1430's that changed the pace of the spread of information in Europe: Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Suddenly more people could afford books, more people could read, and more text started being written in English. With so much new material and worldly attention giving it bigger shoes to fill, the English language was forced to grow. The language lacked a decent vocabulary and simply needed more words. From this perspective, it becomes more believable that Will could've invented a fair number of the words attributed to him... especially words like "puke" (which Shakespeare may have borrowed from German).

And let me tell you, 189 new English terms a year is nothing compared to the number of words invented annually in the face of the most modern technological marvel: the World Wide Web, which has had the effect of Gutenberg's printing press times a thousand in terms of making information more widely available and connecting people. Think about how often you see unfamiliar terms in the vernaculars of techies, gamers, marketers, bloggers, and every other community nowadays. For instance, read the example for usage of the word "wi-five," a gamer term, as defined by The Urban Dictionary:

wi-five December 11
It's a high five that doesn't involve actually contact, normally over a long distance where a real high-five isn't possible. Mix of "wireless" and "high-five", hence "wi-five" (wireless high-five).

Iain (yelling across the room): Dude, that mess was teh pwnz. Wi-five, brosef
Eric (in response): You need to chill with that nano shit, son

Forget the word "wi-five;" would you be as clueless as me if someone said to you, "You need to chill with that nano shit?" New English is constantly being forged by everyday authors, thinkers, and casual users of the Internet. And it's being recognized by very legitimate authorities of language: Merriam-Webster just announced that its 2007 Word of the Year is "w00t." Just check out some of these great sites that are entirely devoted to rooting out and defining new words on the fringes of English:

Each one of these posts multiple entries per day and still can't keep up with the actual pace of linguistic creation. (Try subscribing to some of these by RSS or email... they're fun!) My point is, if we invent dozens of words a day in the face of the technological and cultural revolution that is the Internet, then it's not so hard to imagine that Will might have been inventing words like crazy in the face of the English language's growth-spurt, spawned by a different but no less significant technological achievement.

Whether he really made them or not, Will Shakespeare gets popular credit for those 1,500 words. While you'll probably never rack up so many yourself, if you stay on the cutting-edge of the English language you may, one day, get your own citation in the Double-Tongued Dictionary and live on forever in our lexicon... just like The Bard himself. Only slightly less famous.

Art contribution by MuLaN™.

Star Trek and The Infinite Monkey Theorem

2008-07-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

Last night my roommate Jake and I watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Hide and Q, in which Captain Picard quotes Hamlet to illustrate his faith in the promise of mankind:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in
faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an
angel! in apprehension how like a god!
(Ham.II.2.312-315)

While Picard acknowledged that Hamlet may have used the words with cynicism, he, himself, used them with reverence. It was a very good Patrick Stewart moment.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with infinite monkeys.

A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite
amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the
complete works of William Shakespeare.

Heard this before? It's Wikipedia's restatement of the classic Infinite Monkey Theorem. Last night Jake recited it to me, using Hamlet as the "chosen text." He said he'd been thinking about it and had had a revelation:

"Apparently," he said, "that theory is true. Because if you think about it, someone (God; evolution) did put a bunch of monkeys together (on Earth) and one of them (William Shakespeare) did eventually write Hamlet."

Ha. I think that's absolutely brilliant. Although the Theorem is really supposed to illustrate a statistical concept that random keystrokes will eventually re-create Hamlet, the allegory itself has become so independent of its original point that Jake's observation gives it new meaning:

If you leave a bunch of intelligent creatures together for long enough, at least one of them will produce something wonderful.

Looking at it that way, I get a good feeling about the future of mankind. Don't you? I guess Picard wasn't the only one.

Photo by law_keven.

John Dowland, Shakespeare, and Courtly Love

2008-01-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Classic FM, a fantastic UK radio station, and I heard someone being interviewed compare the lyrical qualities of the music of John Dowland (1563-1626) to the writings of Will Shakespeare. From what I can tell, Dowland was all about longing, heartbreak, desire unfulfilled, and other elements of courtly love that are depressing but have nonetheless entertained us for centuries. (If you think about it, many modern pop songs are about pining for love unattainable or as yet unattained. We're addicted to this stuff!)

Wikipedia reproduces a snippet from one of Dowland's songs, Flow my Tears:

Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,

Exiled for ever, let mee mourn

Where night's black bird hir sad infamy sings,

There let mee live forlorn.

Without citing examples, I'm going to take a chance and say Shakespeare didn't take courtly love very seriously in his plays. Most of the examples of courtly love I can remember happened in Shakespeare's comedies like Merry Wives of Windsor where the practice was rather mocked. But when it comes to his sonnets, my goodness! They're all positively packed with melodramatic, bittersweet yearning and restrained desire. Here, I'll flip to a random page in my book o' sonnets and you'll see...

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

...it makes me want to gag myself. I seriously just randomly flipped to that sonnet and the last two lines of it happen to more or less define courtly love.

I think the sonnets were like Shakespeare's little diary that he kept hidden in his top drawer. You know, the one bound in pink with the little space for you to write your name ("This is the secret diary of _______... keep OUT!") and the little lock on the side that your younger brother breaks open to get at your private thoughts. And there are little hearts doodled on the page margins.

Yeah.

I, for one, am glad that Will didn't often make courtly love a dominant element of his major works (besides the obvious like Romeo and Juliet or Love's Labour's Lost, but I hesitate to call that love courtly, either, per se).

When I shop for music CD's* at Newbury Comics I make my purchase based on 3 things:

Personal recommendations or previous listens. Or, in the absence of either of those...
Cool cover art, and most importantly
Non-love-themed track titles.

I always, always check to make sure the songs aren't all called Hey baby or I want you, baby or Be my baby, baby, etc., because I want something more creative than your typical love song. I want music that's got a few good ideas, and while love songs can have amazing ideas the bulk of them are just chanting the same mantras of desire, lust, and heartbreak that you can find in 100 other places.

Yes, Will Shakespeare included a love story in almost every single one of his plays. But when you think of Titus Andronichus or Richard III or Macbeth or even The Winter's Tale, do you think of a love story? I don't. Each has its own emotions and motivations and messages that use love as a tool but don't exist solely for the telling of the love story. And I think that's good. People who live their whole lives for love miss out on some of the most exciting thoughts, endeavors, and personal journeys that exist outside of romance. There's more to life than wooing and procreation. Those drive us, but other things steer us. Don't be content with going in a straight line, focusing all your energy on the game of love.

That being said, try not to go entirely without love, either. I'm okay if the CD I buy at Newbury Comics has one or two love songs on it.

My point is, Shakespeare seemed to treat love in two distinct ways when he wrote, depending on whether he was writing a play or writing a sonnet. Sonnet Will is definitely Dowlandesque. And even though I seem to have an unhealthy aversion to love songs, I'll give John Dowland a listen anyhow.

____________________

*I intentionally put that apostrophe in "CD's." Writing "CDs" looks weird to me. It's like writing "I got all As on my report card" or "I grew up in the 1950s." It just seems wrong without the apostrophe, even though you're writing plurals and not possessives. "I got A's." "I'm from the 90's." Much better.

Don't Rationalize Shakespeare

2008-04-29T11:59:00.001-07:00

Last night I helped to spike the set for 11:11 Theatre Company's new play, Syllabus of Errors. The time came for me to choose which books in my library would appear on the desk of my character, David, a respected physics professor at Amherst College. Naturally I kept trying to fit Shakespeare into his collection. It was disappointing, in the end, to realize that David probably doesn't read Shakespeare. Not because he's a "math guy" as opposed to an "English guy"—there's probably a converse relationship between teaching physics and loving literature—but simply because I don't think he'd be into theatrical fiction. Or even fiction in general. He's too practical. Too convinced that things like Shakespeare aren't grounded enough in the real world to be worth becoming intimate with. Theatre, as a very critiquable, subjective, and publically vulnerable method of expression would probably scare someone who needs to have all his ideas sorted and rationalized prior to having conversations. Tossing convictions frivolously around a stage in front of hundreds of people probably seems childish to him. Irrational. Too emotional.

The issue of what it means to be a "rational" person as opposed to an "emotional" person has come up a lot for me recently, in both my personal life and on the stage. I think that, in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare, or even most theatre in general, you have to be a little bit susceptible to your emotions. David isn't. He doesn't think his emotions will get him anywhere. He puts too much weight on thinking things through at a desk.

It's exactly that point of view that thousands of very intelligent academic folks make when they address Shakespeare. They focus far too much on the intellectual nature of the works. The parallels. The allegories. The lessons. The history. The hidden messages. Overthinking the words will kill their meaning (not to mention their wit and freshness); sometimes you have to feel them to learn from them. Sometimes that gets you farther than dismissing emotional impact as a side-effect of great literature. Maybe emotions are great literature. Indeed, much of the action in Will's greatest plays (Hamlet, for one) doesn't make sense if it's rationalized. How can Hamlet be so bloodthirsty and eager for revenge at one moment as to kill Polonius, thinking him to be the Claudius, without even checking to see who it was, when at other times he's seemingly able to hold relatively civil discourse with Claudius? It feels inconsistent. ...Until you put yourself in Hamlet's shoes. Then it feels real. Nobody makes rational decisions in a situation like Hamlet's. They make emotional ones. And you have to be an emotional audience member to be able to understand that properly.

So I left Shakespeare off of David's desk. Instead, he's got nonfiction. Nice, rational explorations of fact followed by clearly marked paragraphs of opinion. You might think that choosing these sorts of books makes David more of a grownup. But I think, instead, it makes him less of one. He's failed to recognize the importance of feeling those scary emotions that Shakespeare and other playwrights explore so often.

I tend to do the same thing. So maybe it's time I stopped. Thanks, David, for a wonderful lesson.

(P.S. If you're around Boston this week, come see the show.)

The Bard Says: This Is the World's Smallest Violin

2008-02-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

When someone exits a room in a melodramatic fashion, most specifically when they are overacting the part of "the poor victim" or making a tragedy of something trivial, you might quote Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing:

Alas, poor hurt fowl, now will he creep into
sedges.
(II.1.192-193)

Depending on your company, you may want to limit the size of the quote to "Alas, poor hurt fowl!" because then you won't have to explain what sedges are.

Wherefore Art Thou Misused?

2008-02-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

I almost included this in my previous post, but decided it needed its own entry. The lovely desdemona commented on one of my previous posts about difficult Shakespearean words:

My favorite misunderstood phrase:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

I was at the Globe and saw T-shirts that said this on one side, and then on the other: "Seriously, has anyone seen him?"

Of all places...

For shame, The Globe! "Wherefore" actually means "why," not "where."

One of the good things about No Fear Shakespeare (as opposed to the many bad things) is that it helps to clear up vocab issues like this. Watch these two entries here and here in the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest and you'll see that "wherefore art thou Romeo?" actually means "why are you Romeo?" or some similar interpretation, not "where are you, Romeo?" as most people believe. The word wherefore is cleared up again in Julius Caesar by No Fear Shakespeare, as Shaksper.net points out:

"Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it."- Act 5, Scene
1.

"I know how they think, and I understand why they're doing this."- Same
scene, No Fear Shakespeare translation.

The Best of Amateur Shakespeare

2008-02-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

No Fear Shakespeare, the SparkNotes spinoff that I have trouble labeling as either a healthy or unhealthy way of approaching Shakespeare, has hosted a little contest called Show Us Your Shakespeare. People send videos of themselves reciting Shakespeare.

I wrote a post decrying people's habit of reciting monologues and snippets of Shakespeare; my reasoning followed that because snippets aren't presented in the context of the play, people don't understand or appreciate their full meaning, which helps to cement the popular notion that Shakespeare is dry and boring. While that may be true, I should probably just lighten up and embrace Shakespearean recitations as fun for those who do know the plays.

That said, have a look at some of the entries to the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest.

My favorite entry is a college-age girl reciting a Juliet monologue. What's interesting is that she also recorded herself reciting the same monologue in modern English, which is No Fear Shakespeare's shtick. It's rare to find a competent actor performing modernized Shakespeare, so this is a great opportunity to compare and contrast. Amazing how Will's writing seems to possess a tenth of the depth it once held, isn't it? While some ideas and talking points are much easier to understand, which is No Fear Shakespeare's goal, all of the beauty and emotion conveyed by the nuance's of Will's language is gone, leaving a recitation that feels extremely academic in nature.

I'm currently rehearsing for a production of Anton Checkhov's The Seagull by 11:11 Theatre Company in Boston. Checkhov wrote the play in Russian, and it has since been translated into English countless times. We're using the free translation from Project Gutenberg. As I learn my lines, I often wish that we were going to be performing the play in its original Russian. I can tell that the very matter-of-fact presentation of thoughts and ideas, while translated word-for-word, have been stripped of the kernels of emotion and meaning that won Checkhov acclaim in the first place. It is left to the director and us actors to squeeze as much truth out of these castrated pages as possible.

Similarly, No Fear Shakespeare's translations of Will's original words may be technically correct, but, just as foriegn languages can never be translated exactly into English, the translated Shakespeare text will never be able to contain all its original subtexts. I was, however, impressed with how well the girl who submitted the Juliet entries was able to bring truth to the modernized lines. She reminded me that, perhaps, for a frustrated middle-school student, reading No Fear Shakespeare has the same value as performing an English translation of The Seagull; in other words, it has some real value. Just don't think it's a perfect translation. It's just a translation; there is only one truly perfect representation of Shakespeare's thoughts, and that's written in archaic English.

Photo by Looking Glass.

Shakespeare Geek

2008-01-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

If you like Caliban's Island then you should most certainly subscribe to Shakespeare Geek if you haven't already. It's fantastic.

Love's Labour's Lost

2008-01-06T16:27:00.000-08:00

The ending of Love's Labour's Lost is kind of a downer. It's this carefree romantic comedy in the spirit of Much Ado About Nothing, only in the end the guys don't get the girls. The ladies bugger off to France at the last moment, leaving the disappointed men with a task ahead: go to a remote location and study and remain celibate for one year. After that, the ladies will be theirs.

At first glance this ending seems to exist solely for the purpose of throwing off the cliche romantic comedy ending. Oops, not everything turns out the way you think it will. Oh, well. That's life.

But really there's a deeper message in this not-so-Hollywood ending. It sends an important message to all of us who've ever proclaimed ourselves free of love, even temporarily. The danger is that, like the four kinsmen starring in Love's Labour's Lost or Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, we suddenly find ourselves enamored the man or woman of our dreams with or without the mind's consent. It's the shock of this sudden love that makes us forget, absolutely, the reasons we enjoyed being single only moments before.

So what does Love's Labour's Lost's non-Hollywood ending teach us? Answer: to wait a moment.

Or a week. Or a month. Or a year.

When you think you've found the one, don't obsess over it. Don't fuel your hopes with dreams of new beginnings. You don't have to be skeptical--in fact, I encourage you to be optimistic--but you should always remember that life is hardly ever so simple that you and this other person can suddenly and absolutely accommodate each other's lives and love without having to overcome some major hurdles. To be more specific, they're from France and you're from Nevarre; it just can't work.

The inspiration for this post came when I realized that, after enduring a heartbreak, just like the characters from LLL I find myself becoming a scholar. I lose myself in thought. I turn on the classical radio station and read Shakespeare and take notes. I read political journals. I start debates with my friends. I take long walks. I read more books.

After his big breakup with his girlfriend of five years, my best friend started playing the guitar. We started having better conversations, too. It was like he woke up a little bit. What is it that makes us undertake a personal renaissance after a romantic disappointment? Is it all about reinvention and improvement of ourselves since we've lost confidence in our ability to interest another human being? Or is it simply a distraction?

Perhaps, if used correctly, this tendency to grow our minds in times of sadness can be used not to help us get past relationships, but rather to ensure their longevity. Perhaps it doesn't have to be about improving or distracting ourselves. Rather, perhaps we should use the urge to lose ourselves in thought as a device to slow ourselves down. Why rush into things? If you feel that you've found someone very special, someone you could spend the rest of your life with, and if you think that feeling may be requited, then why push? Before you get too carried away with the idea of love, marriage, and baby carriages, take a step back. Look at your life in context. Are you both living in Nevarre? Maybe not. And if not, then find a way to make yourself understand that things just won't work out right now. Not the way they are.

It's a disappointing thought.

But use that disappointment. Mash it up into coal and throw it in the fire; let it drive the engine that makes you think, read, write, take walks, and play the guitar. Let it distract you. Let it improve you. Then, after a week, a month, a year...

...come back and visit that love you felt. And you may be surprised at how much you've changed. Even more surprising may be how little you need that love now, contrasted with the memory of how much you needed it a year ago. And you can move on, free and happy, to find true happiness.

But.

If you still want what you were after a year ago... Now you know what you need to do. Now you know what you want. And isn't that half of living well? If Ferdinand, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine still want the French girls after their year of celibate study, then they can have it with the knowledge that it's truly right. Just imagine.

Photo by aussiegal

We All Quote Shakespeare

2007-12-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

This post on The Chronicles of Ridicule (ho ho, get the pun? I don't think the author looks all that much like Diesel, if that's what he's suggesting, though he does have cool shades) illustrates how often we all quote Will in our daily lives.

http://chronicridicule.blogspot.com/2005/02/dude-youre-quoting-shakespeare.html

(I try to link to all blog posts that use "dude" in the title. That's what kind of Shakespeare blog I'm running, here.)

Below are all the phrases Crash talks about in his post, each hyperlinked to the instance where they're used in the plays.

"It's all Greek to me."
"She is more sinned against than sinning."
"I recall my salad days."
"He acted more in sorrow than in anger."
"His wish was father to that thought." (from one of my favorite scenes!)
"They vanished into thin air." (two possible sources)
"I won't budge an inch."
"...green-eyed jealousy." (two possible sources)
"He plays fast and loose."
"She's tongue-tied!" (a bunch of instances)
"I am a tower of strength."
"I've been hoodwinked!"
"We're in a pickle."
"He angrily knit his brow." (strange: all but one instance of this expression appear in Henry VI, the other in The Rape of Lucrece)
"We make a virtue of necessity." (and a variant here)
"It was fair play."
"I didn't sleep a wink."
"We stood on ceremony." (what does this mean?)
"I laughed myself into stitches."
"Make short shrift." (what does this mean?)
"I received cold comfort."
"That was too much of a good thing."
"I've seen better days."
"You're living in a fool's paradise."
"I hate being a foregone conclusion."
"...as good luck would have it."
"It's high time that I read Antony and Cleopatra."
"These are the early days."
"Out, with bag and baggage!"
"That's the long and short of it."
"The truth will out." (and a variant here)
"You are my own flesh and blood."
"...until the crack of doom."
"I suspect foul play."
"...with neither rhyme nor reason."
"Give the devil his due."
"If the truth were known."
"Keep a good tongue in your head."
"Good riddance."
"She sent me packing." (I use this one a lot)
"He's dead as a doornail."
"Your hat is an eyesore."
"I'm the laughing stock of the neighborhood."
"My boss is the devil incarnate."
"You stony-hearted villain!"
"That child is rather bloody-minded."
"What a blinking idiot."
"What the dickens?!"
And lastly: "But me no buts" ...does not come from Shakespeare. It comes from Henry Fielding. This expression is just one of myriad things that get attributed to The Bard just because he's so famous and thus naturally serves as a catch-all for everything of suspect or unclear origin.

Enjoy poking around that list! As a final note, let me just say that, like the 1,500 words Shakespeare supposedly invented, all of the phrases above probably can't be credited to The Bard's imagination. Even if he didn't coin them, however, he may have been the first to write them down.

A List of Shakespeare's Difficult Words, Translated

2007-12-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

Once again I bring you material from The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico. It's a great book. This time I've compiled his list of "Troublesome Words Used in the Plays" into a BYKI list for your learning convenience (words and definitions are his).

You may have seen my other Shakespeare BYKI lists covering Falstaff's vocabulary. What is BYKI? BYKI is an online tool you can use to learn pretty much anything, even though the company that develops the software, Transparent Language, is focused on using it to teach foreign languages. I think that BYKI is perfectly suited for learning Shakespearean vocabulary, so I make wordlists on occasion and offer them on this site. To use the widget, simply click "Start Learning" and choose a mode (try Recognize It to start).

Why use my BYKI widgets? Because if you know Shakespearean vocabulary before you read the plays, you'll know the meanings of difficult words as you encounter them, which will allow you to enjoy the flow of the story uninterrupted. This will increase your enjoyment of the plays dramatically (no pun intended). It's critical to know the meanings of words like

Dispatch
Office
Troth
Verily

or you'll miss out on some great literature.

The list below covers all of Will's plays, and while many of the definitions given are for specific instances of the word (for instance, "power" will not always mean "army," but it does in Antony and Cleopatra, Act III Scene 7) it will still be useful to know how the words can be used in different contexts. If you ever want to find occurrences of a given word in Shakespeare's plays, I suggest you try the advanced search feature at Open Source Shakespeare. It's very thorough.

Without further ado, here's the list...

NOTE: Some words may look like they're supposed to be verbs, like "mew," which means "confine," but if I didn't write "to" in front of the word then it's not intended to be a verb. A mew is actually a thing: a confine or a cage.

Much Ado About Zombies

2007-12-15T07:52:00.000-08:00

You know I work hard to bring you the most intellectually stimulating material on Shakespeare that I can find... or make:

When Elizabethan Humor Falls Flat

2007-12-01T09:20:00.000-08:00

I had a lot of fun last night: the world premier of Panoply, an original play by 11:11 Theatre, opened on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, MA, and I was part of it. Magnificent fun, acting. But surprising as well. Not only does one learn a lot about themselves when they act, but they also learn quite a bit about audiences.

Audiences are just people, but they're a particular mix of people, living in a particular time and place. Their reactions to the story being told to them may vary depending not only on the day of the week and hour of the performance, but also the much larger social and historical contexts of their lives. Also, their reactions depend heavily on the quality of the story's authorship and its storytellers.

You already know all this. But it provides a context for the observation that Shakespeare's humorous moments aren't necessarily funny to a modern audience. "Yes, duh," you mutter as your mouse drifts to the Close button on your browser. But wait! This is important: it's not just that we read a Shakespearean joke and judge it to be either 1) funny or 2) not funny. Rather, there are several layers of humor that, as they go deeper, become more and more invisible to us but, if understood, could lead you to a much deeper understanding of Will's world and his plays (mind you, I'm not implying here that I have anything beyond a shallow understanding of these things--I am also a student, not an expert, of Shakespeare's works, so let's learn together!).

Before I list the layers, I feel it's appropriate to quote Donald Rumsfeld:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are "known knowns"; there are things we know we know. We also know there are "known unknowns"; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also "unknown unknowns" — the ones we don't know we don't know."
(Thanks, 'Pedia.)

People laughed at this quote because the word "know" is repeated 14 times in some form or another, but they shouldn't have laughed. Its message is important and relevant to understanding almost anything. To illustrate, I will now (finally) make up, I mean explain the four layers of humor in Will's plays:

Humor we get
Humor we know we don't get (for instance, when you don't know what "maidenhead" means, you can't quite get the pun @ Rom.I.1.39, even though it's probably obvious to you that a pun takes place at that spot)
Humor we know is probably humor but is going over our heads (for instance, you naturally assume that everything Falstaff says in Henry IV is supposed to be funny but you're not quite able to tell why)
Humor we didn't even know was supposed to be humor

It's layer #4 that I came across while reading The Merry Wives of Windsor, inspiring me to write this post. An insult, delivered by Pistol, labels Falstaff as a "Base Phrygian Turk" (Wiv.I.3.86). If I hadn't glanced at the Pelican's footnotes, I never, ever would have recognized this as a funny thing to say. In fact, I had to go back to the 'Pedia and do research to figure out why this is funny. It turns out that although Phrygia does, in fact, exist in Turkey, it would have been remembered by Elizabethans as a mostly mythological region in ancient Turkey that acted as an ally to Troy in the fabled Trojan War. So calling Falstaff a "Base (low) Turk" would have been one thing, but calling him a "Base Phrygian Turk" makes no sense, crisscrossing times and places, and demonstrates the ill-educated nature of Pistol's wit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I know. It's not all that funny. And I didn't even know it was supposed to be funny to begin with! But that illustrates my point: Pistol says a lot of things similar to this, and in order to fully appreciate his character you have to educate yourself to recognize jokes an Elizabethan would get but a modern reader/observer would miss. Otherwise, you'll think Pistol's a complete waste of space, and he's not; he's a strong comic presence.

Try a handful of simple things:

Look up words you don't know. Sometimes this will lead you recognize humor you didn't know was there.
Pay attention to the presence of misspellings and homophones.
When a line seems to come from nowhere, investigate. There's probably a reason for its existence, and it may be humorous. To your inner-Elizabethan.
Read annotated versions of the plays (it's actually hard to find non-annotated versions of the plays) and pay attention to the notes. After a while you'll start to pick up on patterns yourself.
Go watch good Shakespearean actors perform the plays. If they really are doing their job, they'll somehow let you know when humor is afoot. Then you can investigate afterwards if you like. (Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado comes to mind: when Benedick is talking about "hanging his bugle in an invisible baldrick" (Ado.I.1.230) Ken delivers the line whimsically even though most of us have no freaking idea what he's talking about.)

The world premiere of Panoply went smashingly well, I think, and both the actors and the audience were pleased with the way it turned out. But I was still shocked by the points at which the audience responded with laughter versus the points at which they responded with silence. I suppose audiences are all unique, just like the stories that are told to them, and we can't always see all the layers of humor, emotion, and social context at play before them.

Caliban's Island: The Play

2007-11-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

It's funny: no matter how hard you try, it's difficult to come up with Shakespeare-related terms that haven't been used yet. The world is Shakespeare-saturated. (Strange, then, that I somehow managed to snag www.will-shakespeare.com).

Today I discovered that a small theater group out of San Diego named Talent to aMuse produced a play in October 2007 called Caliban's Island that merged The Tempest with the cast of Gilligan's Island. I kid thee not. An online news source covers it here.

As bizarre as this may seem, I admit that I've often thought about what it would be like to create Shakespeare "what if" crossover plays (I do this while the rest of you are reading up on the 2008 presidential elections... you time-wasters). For instance, just yesterday I imagined how it would play out if Macbeth usurped the throne of Denmark and was revenged upon by Hamlet. The two stories could fit surprisingly well in many ways. You could weave other characters from the two plays into the story as well (for instance, you could have the Weird Sisters channel Hamlet's father's spirit instead of him appearing directly to Hamlet). Like my blog title, I'm sure that kind of idea is far from original. In fact, I'm sure of it.

The Bard Says: Bridge the Gap... Just Barely

2007-11-13T16:30:00.000-08:00

You'd probably have ample opportunity to use this phrase, though the person you'd quote it to might not get the analogy at first. You'd have to use clear intonation to verbally convey the illustration with any success:

PEDRO
What need the bridge be much broader than the flood?
(Ado.I.1.300)

(It's followed by "The fairest grant is the necessity. | Look, what will serve is fit." Pelican tells us this means "The best gift is whatever is needed." I would add the word only--"...only what is needed.")

Pedro says this to Claudio meaning that one need not say more than is necessary to properly convey one's meaning (and readers of this blog may wish that I take Pedro's advice). The expression, however, can be used to illustrate any situation in which a minimum requirement of something--anything--will suffice. For instance, you could say this to someone who comments on how small your beer fridge is... if you only need a small beer fridge to accommodate your drinking habits ("the flood"). Why get a bigger fridge?

I need a bigger fridge.

Photo by peter pearson.

If Shakespeare Had Written T.S. Eliot

2007-11-10T12:51:00.000-08:00

I'm reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and I came across a section in East Coker that feels exactly like what Shakespeare would have said if you'd asked him why he wrote The Tempest.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

The Tempest was one of the last plays Will wrote. It's the story of a deposed king and his daughter, isolated on an island upon which the king's usurpers become shipwrecked one day. Rather than taking his revenge on those who betrayed him, he leads them through a magical ordeal on the strange island and then forgives them all. (That's a very simplified summary.) The story's themes of isolation, forgiveness for things past, the triviality of human conspiracy, as well as the main character being a learned man who works magic with words and has straightened out his priorities in life remind me very much of Eliot's poem. I can easily imagine Will writing it in his personal journal.

Heroes Remade

2007-11-10T17:53:00.000-08:00

I started reading comic books recently. Every time I would walk into a Newbury Comics I'd wish that I was part of the comic-reading culture. So now I am. What's it going to cost me, $3-$6 a month? Plus my habit of buying Pelican Shakespeares... that's $5-$6 a month...

They're both much cheaper than a drug habit.

Anyway, I picked Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as my continuing series of choice. A writer of the series discusses it on CBR.com here. (This is where you're saying to yourself, Uh, I thought this was a blog about Shakespeare. I'm getting to that.) I remember Iron Man from my youth, and the Iron Man I'm finding in this series is very different. He's an executive, emotionally distraught, hard-nosed-politician Iron Man who makes tough leadership calls, manages budgets, investigates internal affairs, and negotiates national security policy. The Iron Man I remember as a kid used to blow stuff up with lasers. But I love this new Tony Stark.

Why is Iron Man doing this now? What is it that makes putting a well-known character in a brand new position that delights us so much? And what makes it work? If you created a television series about James Bond's new position as a hot-shot lawyer in Los Angeles after he retires from MI6... would it fly? Or would we rather keep seeing Bond doing traditional Bond things?

Turns out this practice of reinventing recurring characters in the media is pretty old. (Here we go: the Shakespeare part of the post is upon us!) Queen Elizabeth asked Will to bring Falstaff back to the stage after Henry IV parts 1 and 2 were produced. So Will wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. How did it turn out...? Rather than give my own personal opinion, I'll let Wikipedia tell us how stodgy Shakespeare critics the world over have received the work:

Most critics consider Merry Wives to be one of Shakespeare's weaker plays, and the Falstaff of Merry Wives to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays. That Shakespeare would so stumble with one of his greatest creations is puzzling, and a satisfactory reason for this remains to be found. The likeliest explanation, if the Garter Feast theory is accepted, is that the play was written hastily, to order for a special occasion, within severe time restraints.

That's too bad. If I were to speculate (and may I point out that speculations compose a good 97% of what I write in this blog), I'd say the problem isn't that Falstaff isn't a reinventable character. Rather, his application to a romantic comedy simply didn't fit his character.

Any well-written character should be at least two-dimensional. Sometimes we can hope for three. Let's take the idea of dimensions literally for a moment, and not just as an analogy for how filled-out an idea can be. Let's imagine for a moment that well-forged characters actually have two or three identifiable qualities, or dimensions, that justify their behaviors in the context of a story. Apparently Iron Man possessed not only an I-heroically-destroy-evil-with-lasers dimension, but also a confident-leadership dimension and, as Christos Gage mentions in the CBR.com article, an emotionally-troubled dimension. While the first, heroic dimension was prominent in the comics of my youth, those other sub-characteristics of Tony Stark allowed him to be placed in this new role of a troubled executive and have it work. Falstaff, however, probably didn't have the right sub-dimensions to fit into The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Henry IV, his dimensions seemed to be:

Primary: Coward.
Secondary: Carefree lover-of-life.

But he was never really clever or ambitious enough to hatch the plan he hatched in Merry Wives, nor could he ever be capable of wooing well-to-do ladies of society. Perhaps his cowardice came into play in Merry Wives, but since cowardice was his primary dimension in Henry IV we're left with a modification of an existing Falstaff rather than a reinvention of his role in the universe. Had Shakespeare chosen to take advantage of Falstaff's carefree dimension and make him into a wanderer-thief running from the law, that might have worked.

Who knows.

What other role might you be able to play? Which of your three dimensions are you using most of the time now, and which of the other two could you put to use if you decided to reinvent your role in this world? What other things could you be doing with your life right now?

Photo by InfoMofo.

You Might Be Powerful, You Rogue

2007-11-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

I joined a theater troupe recently. We're putting on a show, called Panoply, that stars lots of characters who all come from different backgrounds, each trying to survive some sort of international ordeal. In the end, all their stories tie together. So there's a lot going on.

The writer/director, Brian Tuttle, did some exercises with the actors last week to try and unify our understanding of the world in which the play takes place. One of those exercises was to rank the "power" of each character, based on their actions in the story, from "most powerful" to "least powerful" on a sheet of paper.

When each character in a story has a totally unique objective from all the others, it becomes difficult to define what "power" means. Is power success in completing a personal objective? Is power a derivative of wealth? Does it depend on your job title? Is it how powerful each character perceives themselves? Can you be powerful even if you've died in the story?

As our group debated the order of the list, I realized we were defining "power" as "most able to manipulate the world of the story to achieve an end." At the top of the list were characters whose deliberate actions drove the story forward and characters who fully achieved their personal goals.

By doing this exercise with the group, I learned a lot about everybody's character and the world they live in. Now I'm going to try this exercise with The Winter's Tale. Let's stick to talking about these characters (appearing here in the play's given order):

LEONTES, somewhat bipolar and mistrustful King of Sicilia
MAMILLIUS, disturbingly delicate Prince of Sicilia, who dies of a broken heart
CAMILLO, a lord of Sicilia
ANTIGONUS, a lord of Sicilia who gets EATEN BY A BEAR
POLIXENES, King of Bohemia
FLORIZEL, Prince of Bohemia
AUTOLYCUS, a rogue (with +3d6 sneak attack)
HERMIONE, Queen to Leontes and smartest kid in Hogwarts
PERDITA, daughter to Leontes and Hermione
PAULINA, unforgiving woman in desperate need of a chill pill, wife to Antigonus, and friend to Hermione

Let's start with the obvious candidates for "most powerful:" the kings and queens of the story, Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione. Let's ask ourselves, which of them makes a play and gets what they want? Or deliberately steers the events of the story?

Leontes grows suspicious of his wife and Polixenes and asks Camillo to kill Polixenes. If Camillo had done this, it would have demonstrated great power on the part of Leontes for commanding such loyalty from the other characters. But... no. Camillo does more or less the opposite and warns Polixenes. What else? He does imprison Hermione and then banish her (and his) child from Sicily, though he immediately regrets doing all of this after Hermione and Mamillius die of heart attacks. I would feel pretty rotten, too. In my book, Leontes gets maybe 1 power point. Pretty lame for a king.
Polixenes is so weak-willed that he can't even make himself go back to his own nation after nine months of being absent. He doesn't find out about the plot to murder him but rather is told by Camillo, who also comes up with the escape plan for leaving Sicily. Sixteen years later, Polixenes can't stop his own son from marrying a shepherd girl and fleeing the nation with her.
Hermione gets scorned and imprisoned before she faints and makes Leontes think she's dead--but not by design. Then Hermione may or may not have come up with the plan to hide herself in Paulina's house for sixteen years, waiting for the off-chance that her banished daughter will reappear in Sicily. But I'm pretty sure that was Paulina's idea, since she was the one who was so spiteful toward Leontes. And if I had been Hermione, I would have spent those sixteen years LOOKING FOR MY DAUGHTER.

Strange, isn't it, to think that the characters with the most apparent power in the world of The Winter's Tale have almost no control over what happens in the story?

Here's my personal power list, ordered from most to least powerful:

Camillo. He makes the decision to flee with Polixenes, then makes the decision to help Florizel and Perdita elope. He's making decisions left and right--plus, he always seems to end up in everyone's good graces. Without Camillo, this story would not happen.
Autolycus. While more or less inconsequential to the overall story, Autolycus always seems to get what he wants: he steals money from a shepherd, lies his way out of getting in trouble, then aids Florizel and Perdita with Camillo. Autolycus has a lot of personal power; he thrives in his element.
Paulina. She acts as the conscience of Leontes both before and after his repentance for apparently killing his family. She spends SIXTEEN YEARS HOUNDING HIM ABOUT THE ONE TIME HE GOT JEALOUS. She keeps Hermione safe, hidden in her house. She's a very potent presence in the play, even if her functional role is minimal.
Antigonus. He persuades Leontes not to kill the baby Perdita but rather to banish her instead. Then he successfully delivers her to safety in Bohemia. If it hadn't been for that bear, he might have kept on doing stuff. But alas.
Leontes. At least he banished somebody.
Polixenes.
Perdita. She makes for a pretty good shepherd, plus it's her reappearance in Bohemia that saves the soul of Leontes. Her power is circumstantial at best.
Hermione.
Florizel.
Mamillius. Nobody ever seemed to care.

So there you have it. A rogue got second place and a prince got last place. In the story of The Winter's Tale, it's not royalty making the decisions. We assume that Leontes is doing other powerful things in Sicily, like maintaining national security and averting state budget crises, but as far as this story of love, loss, and heartbreak is concerned, he's a mediocre player because he didn't--or couldn't, or didn't know how to--change his fortune.

This is the part where I tell you that you can apply this lesson to your life. And you can. Try thinking of a certain aspect of your life, like your job. Rank your power among your coworkers. Ignore salaries and corner offices. How much power do you really have? More than your boss, maybe? Are you really the one that knows the customers and the employees and can make them come through in times of need? What about if you're part of a team or other organization, like a sports team or a board of trustees in your hometown. How much power do you have there? What about that time in high school when there was all the drama and feuding between your friends after so-and-so cheated on so-and-so? Were you a player or a bystander? How did you handle it? Did you have power over the situation? Did you wish you had? Who did? Who didn't?

And why?

Triple Your Vocabulary

2007-10-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

If you've got a moment, take the Shakespeare by the Numbers Quiz on About.com. It's fun.

The $250,000 question asks how many unique words Shakespeare used in his complete works. The answer is about 30,000. The average high school student, it turns out, uses about 10,000.

Lots of readily available written sources use a vocabulary that extends beyond a layman's knowledge. There are lots of ways to improve your personal lexicon if you work at it a little, and that's always rewarding for language-lovers. But what if you don't want to sit down with a workbook or a self-help course?

The best option is probably to read. Yet, I find that when reading I'll just infer the meaning of a word from its surrounding context or skip over it and move on. The meaning will become clear enough as I go. So I don't really have to learn the words.

What's great about Shakespeare is, it's theater--it's meant to be spoken aloud. If you read some passages aloud to yourself, you'll realize quickly that you sound silly and awkward when you don't know what a word means. You can't create the proper inflection; the sentence doesn't make sense without the meaning behind it, especially to the modern ear. So you go look up the word... and it's so satisfying.

Try reading just one full play aloud to yourself, and really look up the words. I guarantee it'll add several hundred good words to your vocabulary AND heighten your appreciation for the story you just read.

(I fell in love with Shakespeare after I read Twelfth Night aloud with my little brother and the girl I was dating. It changed the way I heard words forever.)

The Second Globe In Second Life

2007-10-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

The New Globe is a project happening on Governors Island in New York, NY. An old fort, Castle Williams, will be converted into a modern theater modeled after Shakespeare's Globe Theater (which has already been reconstructed in London).

What's crazy is that I also found links to a picture of New York's Globe reconstruction... in Second Life!

Governors Island, New York, NY

View Larger Map

Honorable Men

2007-10-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

It is a hard and fast rule in sales and politics:

The more you repeat a phrase or idea, the less attached to reality it becomes.

This doesn't mean that the phrase or idea can't be true, only that a clever salesman or politician can coin it to their advantage by associating it with whatever "truth" they wish to create. When you repeat something over and over again, all you do is remove that something from reality and prompt people's brains to associate it with something else. Then you can either

Let them decide for themselves what it means, which can be dangerous (e.g. "No strings attached!" "No strings attached!" "No strings attached!" ...Are you starting to wonder where the strings are? Nobody has explained how or why no strings are attached.)
Associate your phrase with an idea, which can be powerful (e.g. "Coke is refreshing because it's cold and it tastes good. Don't you want to feel refreshed? Here's a Coke can. Looks refreshing, doesn't it?")

In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony uses a single description, "honorable men," to turn the minds of the Plebeians (all five of them!) against Julius' conspiring murderers--to whom the phrase is applied--simply by repeating it over and over. In between his repetitions, he outlines all of the curious contradictions that seem to punch holes in the conspirators' cause against Julius, but he never directly disagrees with that cause. Rather, he allows the association between wrongful action and the phrase "honorable men" to congeal in the Plebeians' minds, resulting in the natural conclusion, those conspirators were not honorable men. In Act III Scene 2, Antony uses the word "honorable" a total of ten times. After the eigth time, a Plebeian uses the term when he speaks out against the conspirators. Seems he caught the mind virus that Antony planted. Clever, clever Antony.

This tactic is employed by marketers and politicians around the world, skilled and unskilled alike. You can tell whether the author of the message was skilled or unskilled by your own reaction: do you question his motives because he is repeating himself too much, or do you grab a hold of his fabricated mantra, catch the mind virus, and let a new idea crawl into your brain?

The Bard Says: Toast!

2007-10-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

Closely following the death of his wife, Brutus shares a drink with Caius Cassius, fellow conspirator, with whom he has just had a heated argument. Because everything is falling apart for his cause and in his personal life, Brutus is feeling a bit repentant (though he may not know it yet).

BRUTUS
Speak no more of her. (To Lucius) Give me a bowl of wine.
To Cassius
In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius.
Brutus drinks.
(JC.IV.2.211)

I like this toast.

Photo by iTopher.

The Bard Says: Hey, That Wasn't Nice

2007-10-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ah, Shakespearean insults. Is there any topic more adored by bored scholars and ren-faire geeks across the English-speaking world?

I find that I can't single out any of Will's insults as particularly applicable in real-world conversation. Usually when you insult someone you want them to feel insulted, not to laugh at you for angrily spouting Elizabethan poetry. So you may want to save your Shakespearean insults for more jocular occasions with friends. The following quote would be an amusing quip for after someone's told you something bad they've done:

And thou unfit for any place but hell.

(R3.I.2.287)

Or you could vary it to "Thou art unfit for any place but hell," as No Sweat Shakespeare does on their insults page. (Note that many of the insults are from Richard III, because Richard wasn't generally in good standing with his peers. Except Clarence, but that didn't last long.)

The most creative presentation of Will's insults that I've found leaves a bit to be desired in the design department but offers an entertaining experience nonetheless; it compares Shakespeare's insults to insults by Mark E. Smith of The Fall.

Photo by Yogi.

Shakespeare Play Summaries

2007-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

Remember, you don't have to be totally lost when reading my comments about Will's plays. I assume you have some previous knowledge about the plays, but if you don't, or if you're a bit rusty on a particular story, then you should read a short summary to refresh your mind. I like the ones at No Sweat Shakespeare because they're the perfect reading length (nice and short).

For instance, before you read my post below about Antony and the conspirators against Julius Caesar, read the No Sweat summary here.

Shatner Raps Julius Caesar

2007-10-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

I can't... not... post this...