(It’s time once again for a story of Shakespeare and my kids. If that bores you, now’s the time to bail out.) This morning it was my son’s turn to get into my Shakespeare stuff. He’s 18months old, running around with my King Lear comic. My 3yr old promptly wrestles it from him and says, “Daddy, I think we should see this movie.” Now, the vision of a 3yr old sitting to watch King Lear is enough to make me laugh out loud, but the two of them are the only ones in the room with me so no one will appreciate the joke. “Oh that’s not really a movie story, sweetie,” I tell her, “That’s more a story for telling.” “Ok,” she tells me. So, while making the bed, I began to tell my daughter the story of King Lear in a way that would make sense to her: Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters, whose names were Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril. Cordelia was the nicest of them all, and she loved her father very very much. Regan and Goneril said that they loved him, too, but they didn’t really love him as much as Cordelia did. But the king became very angry with Cordelia, and he sent her to live far away. The king wanted to go live with his daughter Goneril, who would take care of him as he grew old and tired. But Goneril was very mean to her father. She told him that he could not bring any of his toys with him, and that he had to be very quiet and to do everything that she said. Well, the king her father did not think that this was how he should be treated at all, so he said “Fine, I will go and live with my other daughter, Regan.” Before he could get to Regan’s house, however, Goneril had sent a message to her sister telling her side of the story. So when their father arrived at Regan’s house, she too said, “I think that Goneril had a good idea, and if you want to live at my house then you will have to be very quiet and not have so many toys and you will have to do everything that I say.” The king was very sad. He realized that his daughters did not love him as much as they’d told him. With no place to live he told them both that he would go and live in the dark and scary forest. His friends, who were named Kent and Edgar, went with him and took care of him. And that’s when Cordelia came back, because she loved her father so much that she could not bear to be away from him. She brought an army with her to defeat her evil sisters, and rescue her father from the forest. And they all lived happily ever after. Pretty condensed, huh? 🙂 I don’t mind paraphrasing, I’d rather have them familiar with the guts of the story than not at all. I’ve tried very hard, though, not to just flat out change the story. That’s why I like The Tempest so much, it’s safe for kids. But with Lear I had a choice, either tweak the ending or else not show it to them until they’re much much older. I went with the fairy tale. I hope I didn’t screw up any of the names, it was from memory and I’ve not studied Lear as much as I could. I’ll be very curious in the coming days if I hear her working elements of that story into her playing. Sometimes she does that.
Year: 2007
Megan Fox Tattoo
I’m not sure I’ve seen any of Megan Fox’s movies, but I can appreciate a hot girl with a King Lear tattoo! Apparently she’s most recently seen in The Transformers, which I haven’t seen yet. Her tattoo (the link above is totally SFW, by the way) says “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies,” and comes from King Lear, Act V, scene 3. Nice.
Technorati tags: Shakespeare, Megan Fox, tattoo
What Can Shakespeare Teach Me About IT?
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.
- 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. - 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.
- “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.
- 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.
- 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.
HR Shakespeare
Had an interesting conversation with the HR lady at work today, who was surprised to discover that I am a self-professed Shakespeare Geek. That’s a fun conversation: “Me? A Shakespeare geek? I’m a huge Shakespeare Geek. I run a site called ShakespeareGeek.com.” She then, and this is where it gets interesting, starts firing Shakespeare questions at me, one after another, in such a methodical way it made me wonder if it was some sort of exercise HR people do. “What’s your favorite play?” she asked. “Don’t have one,” I said, “They’re all good and offer something different.” “You’ve been asked all these questions before, haven’t you?” “I don’t know yet. That one, yes.” “You’re on a desert island with only one Shakespeare play to read for the rest of your life, which do you take?” “King Lear, because it’s so much more complex than any of the others that I could read it for the longest time and continually discover new things.” “If you could act one Shakespeare role, which would it be?” “Iago. Who wouldn’t want to play Iago?” “Which villain causes you the most despise?” This one got me to pause, and I’m not sure I’m stating the question the way she did. I think she was asking me which villain gives me the most visceral reaction, someone who I really personally hate. “Tough call,” I answer, “Most of the best villains are so well crafted that I’m too busy being fascinated with them on that level to actually hate them.” We then have some conversation about “which villain would kick which other villain’s butt”, and how for instance Iago versus Tybalt would be no contest. Tybalt talks a good game but is a coward at heart. “What about Grendel?” *pause* “Ummm….what? Which play is he in?” “Isn’t he the monster on the island?” “Oh, you mean Caliban?” “Yeah, that was his name, Caliban.” “In my house, Caliban is comic relief. ” (I then recount the story of my 5yr old being worried that Caliban had no friends to play with.) That was at the end of the day and I had to catch a train, but I’ve been thinking about the question. As I’ve said a million times before, once somebody opens up the door to talk about Shakespeare they’re gonna have to shut me up because I won’t ever stop myself :). I’m thinking my answer will be Claudius, because he’s such a damned weasel. Kills his brother, marries his brother’s wife. He’s a drunk. Enlists Hamlet’s friends to spy on him, supports Polonius’s manipulation of his daughter as bait. Tries to get England to do the dirty job of killing Hamlet, and when that doesn’t work, manipulates Laertes into trying to same thing. Lets his wife drink poison. And then, when mortally wounded, still cries out “Defend me, friends” as if there’s anybody left that cares if he lives or dies.
I Am A Geek, And True
http://www.telerama.fr/techno/20743-shakespeare_geek.php Over the last few days I’ve gotten quite a little traffic from a site that turns out to be completely in French. I see my name quite clearly, so I run it through Google Translate and here’s what I got: Duane Morin is a geek, a true: not only is that American computer programmer, but he spends much of his spare time to update its various blogs. Including the one he takes on William Shakespeare. Nothing that relates to the author of Richard III escapes Duane: As this video of a young girl who recited a passage from Romeo and Juliet in helium; This site reflects La Nuit des rois in sign language ; this anecdote or an actor who would accidentally stabbed while playing Julius Caesar. So you can be a fan of Shakespeare as it is a great fan of Star Wars. I guess that describes me and my little site here pretty well :). But I’m curious about the overall context. Can someone who speaks French tell me what the point of the page was? There are several other sites listed. Is it just a sort of “Sites of the week” sort of thing, or is there a theme? Are there other Shakespeare references on the page? Thanks :). I tried to write a comment on the original post, but you have to register to do that and I couldn’t get through the French to do it.