Here’s a subject I’ve often given thought to here and there, and it clicked with me today that it would make an interesting topic of discussion. Sometimes Shakespeare tells us exactly how old a character is – Juliet being 13 coming immediately to mind. But what about when he doesn’t? “How old is Romeo?” and “How old is Hamlet?” are two of the most popular queries on the site.
So, here’s the game. Pick a character whose age is undetermined, and discuss how a change in age would effect the play. Macbeth, for instance. Is he a 20-something up and comer who is immediately thrust into the King’s good graces, and cracks under the pressure? It’s apparent that the Macbeth’s have had and lost a child, after all – something that coul be indicative of a new, young marriage. Or is he a 40 or 50 something who’s been toiling away for the decades, who finally worked his way so close to the top that it takes only a little nudge from the witches to make him think he can have it all? (I know, if we assume Macbeth is supposed to be a real person we can figure out what age he’s supposed to be. But I don’t recall any specific evidence from Shakespeare where he tells us how old the man is?)
Once upon a time I asked this question about King Lear’s Kent, because I thought that an age difference there would be fascinating — is Kent a young man standing up to the king, or is he the king’s lifelong faithful servant who can’t stand by and let such an injustice pass? Unfortunately, as show in the original post, Shakespeare does tell us how old he wants Kent to be. So we’re not allowed to muck too much with that one.
Any takers?

Cracked is always, always good for the laughs. Especially when they do Shakespeare.
So naturally when their story about The 5 Most Mind-Blowing Coincidences Of All Time leads off with Edwin Booth, I had to post it ;).
For more on Edwin Booth do not miss Prince of Players, an entire movie about the man with Richard Burton in the starring role.

Ok, who remembers M*A*S*H? What’s David Ogden Stiers been up to since it went off the air?

Turns out he’s a rather accomplished Shakespearean. Right now he and some other celebrities are working a production of Much Ado About Nothing to support the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles.

Check it out. Always nice to visit with names from our nostalgic past.

Trivia time! Remember any good Shakespeare references from MASH? I remember one episode, I believe it was the one where a wounded Hawkeye (Alan Alda) has been taken in by a Korean family who speaks no English, and is awaiting rescue. He of course entertains himself (and us) for the entire episode with one large monologue, which includes him limping around the hut and busting out the opening speech from Richard III.

Surely Charles Winchester had some Shakespeare references during his time. I know he made many classical music references, and “Sonnets from the Portuguese” played a crucial role during several episodes toward the end of the series, but I can’t specifically remember any Shakespeare.

Every now and then I find a question in my travels that makes me think, “You know, I never really thought about it.” Such is the above question.
We know about Shakespeare as upstart crow in 1592, so presumably he was known in playwriting circles at that point. But that’s about it, and that tells us nothing about how exactly he honed his craft. When did Shakespeare begin writing? Did he get married, have kids, move to London, and *then* decide “Hey, I’ll try this playwriting thing”? Or was it always a lifelong ambition, and somewhere lost in time there are notebooks full of the scribblings of an 8yr old William, trying to out ideas? At what point does the greatest writer in the English language realize that he wants to be a writer?
Discuss.

SEO, for those not in the business, stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is shorthand for “the bag of tricks you use to get your site listed high in Google search results.” If you’re in the web business, you live and die by your SEO. And many of the people that hang out here have their own web sites. So I thought it might be fun to open up a thread on people’s own SEO experience and tricks.
Some questions:
* Do you follow your search engine statistics, so that you know how your traffic is finding you?
* What key words do you score well on?
* What key words do you score lousy on, and wish you did better?
* What efforts are you making to improve your positioning?
For my part, I score very well (#1 Google spot) for “How old is Romeo” and assorted variations (how old was romeo, how old are romeo and juliet …). This is a very specific question, yes – but it’s also a very popular question, and #1 spot always gets you a nice bit of traffic. How’d I get that spot? I think it has a great deal to do with the amount of comments on that page, causing the keywords to show up over and over again. So it’s more than just the post title, although a good match on the title also has a lot to do with it.
I pretty much own the “Shakespeare geek” search results, but that’s to be expected. It’s a pretty unique phrase, and I’m all over the net with it. It’s not perfectly unique, though, and there are other generic “geek” sites that will periodically do Shakespeare content (“Gifts for the Shakespeare Geek”, “Shakespeare for tech geeks” and so on). But in general I’m happy with being clearly identified in that top spot. I’d like to think that if somebody’s searching that, they’re looking for me. Or if they didn’t know I existed, then they’ll be glad they found me.
But what about the big traffic? Shakespeare as a keyword by itself is too big to tackle with just a little ol’ blog like this. The subject’s been around too long, and too many large-scale sites have had too much time with too much content. That search will be forever filled with the likes of Wikipedia, MIT and others.
I’d love to get some second level traffic, though. I score pretty well on “Shakespeare blogs” but not as well as I’d like, primarily because while people might search for “blogs”, that’s not a word you typically use to describe yourself. Want a quick lesson in SEO? Search Shakespeare blogs and then search Shakespeare blog. Note the differences.
One of the frustrating side effects of SEO, particularly with respect to our chosen topic, is that time is not a major factor. Many of the results you’ll find are updated infrequently, and some have stopped altogether (i see sites that have not been updated in over a year). For people like me who try very hard to get up content every day, it’s annoying. I understand it, I just don’t like it. 🙂
Ok, that’s enough from me for now. How is everybody else faring in the google wars?