Shakespeare makes life better.
Here we go, it’s that time of year again! Happy Shakespeare Day!
This year the party’s online! The Town and District Councils have collaborated with many key stakeholders in the town to enable this virtual Birthday Celebrations to be staged. The tribute will be aired on Friday 23 April at 11:00am and can be accessed via the link www.shakespeares-birthday.uk
It’s been a while since I got to tell a geeklet story! My son kind of got ripped off for his last year of middle school, where they’d normally have done some Shakespeare in the second half of the year. The start of the pandemic basically threw everything into chaos and that never happened.
But here we are a year later and he let me know this week that they’re studying Shakespeare in his class. The teacher, who had his two older sisters before him, knows our family and already mentioned our special context :). I said, “You realize you’re going to be expected to knock it out of the park, right?” and he kind of sighed and said, “Yeah, I suppose.” He’s not one for showing off how smart he is. He did also say, “I know we’ve got those pictures of when we went to England and saw Shakespeare’s marriage bond, but I didn’t know if I’m allowed to show those.”
What the..? I told him, “Of course you can show those! If you remember, I actually told you guys that while we were taking the pictures, that any kid can come back from vacation with pictures of Aruba or Disney World, but you’re guaranteed to be the only kid coming back with pictures of Shakespeare’s marriage bond.” Of course, the moment has already passed now, they’re done with the “Shakespeare’s bio” stuff and he’ll never get the chance to share that picture, dang it. I would have killed to hear that he told the Anne Whateley story.
Cut to the next day when I ask him about school and he said they’re into reciting stuff out loud. I said, “Which one are you reciting?” and he told me, “Something about a mutiny.” That took me longer than I should admit. Mutiny? I went to ships immediately – Twelfth Night? Tempest? Hamlet? But I knew there was no mutiny in any of those. Then it hit me, duh, the obvious answer. “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. That’s the prologue to Romeo and Juliet.”
“I figured you’d know,” he said. “Anyway, we were all taking turns reciting, and we got to a section where the teacher said that nobody ever gets this part right on the first try. And it was that mutiny part. It was my turn, so I read it fine, first try, and then her head pops up because she was reading something at her desk and only half-listening to us, and she saw it was me and she said, ‘I should have known you’d get it on the first try.”
“What did you say to that?” I asked.
“I told her, ‘We read this stuff as bedtime stories when I was little.'” That’s my boy!
I look forward to a whole new set of geeklet stories coming soon!
Sometimes I dream in Shakespeare. I think this is fascinating, and I blog about it every time. Happened again last night.
I’m at this party. It’s a surprise party, I think for my brother in law, which makes sense because we actually did have his 50th birthday party this weekend. So we’re in a strange house and I’m surrounded by lots of people, some I know, some I do not. There’s some sort of weird occurrence that I only half remember, where one of the small children wanders by singing a song that very definitely contains a very adult swear word. Again this actually makes sense in context because lately I’ve been engaged in several “why do people have issues with Dr. Seuss when the WAP song is ok to play on the radio?” arguments.
Anyway, here’s where it gets Shakespeare-ish and a bit weird. I find myself talking to this older couple with a heavy English accent. The wife is aghast that language like that could come out of such a small child. The husband then proceeds to declare that you don’t need to be using words like that when there are perfectly good euphemisms where everybody’s going to know what you mean. The euphemism he has in mind? Bubbleton. I told you it was weird. What bothers me most about that is that it’s clearly a noun and very difficult to use as a verb :). However, it also appears to be my brain messing with “Bridgerton,” a Netflix series known for the amount of sex it had, recently in the news because the start of season one isn’t coming back for season two.
At this point I decide to drop some Shakespeare into the conversation, because apparently I had recently made a blog post about exactly this topic and how Shakespeare used very common words with exactly such double entendre. I wish I knew in real life what I was referring to, because I’ve made no such post. Upon waking I’m guessing that maybe the Beatrice / Benedick “didn’t I dance with you?” exchange is close to what I was thinking of.
But here’s the thing, the older gentleman cuts me off and says, “I’m sorry, but could we leave Shakespeare out of it?” He then goes on to explain how the only example anybody ever wants to use in any argument is “Here’s what Shakespeare said,” and he’s not interested in having that discussion, and wanders off.
Left speechless, I wander back into the party where I complain to some other random stranger, “How was he supposed to know that Shakespeare’s my thing? It’s not like anybody ever wants to talk about computers.”
The stranger then tells me that he recently won the Turing Award, basically the highest honor in computer science. I ask him what for, he starts explaining it, and I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
I like that in my dreams I’m still basically myself. See opportunity to talk Shakespeare? Go for it. Of course that also shows my insecurities plain as day – people who don’t care to listen to me ramble about Shakespeare, or not being able to keep up my end of the conversation. I’ve come a long way over the years, realizing that neither of these things is the end of the world, and can in fact make for an amusing story :). At least, I hope.
If somebody made “deep fake technology” available to you quickly and easily, what’s the first thing you’d do? Swap out the celebrity you thought should have been cast in a particular movie? Get a politician to say something they shouldn’t? Porn?
Who we kidding, we all know what I did.
This technology comes from a tool called “Deep Nostalgia” by MyHeritage. It’s being marketed as a way to animate old vintage photos, and I admit that I did flip through a few family photos first for fun, but newer pictures of people who I could just as easily already have on video wasn’t very fun, and older pictures of people no longer with us was just too creepy to consider. So technically Shakespeare was my third choice 😉
I wonder how long before they do something where you can upload an audio clip and they’ll animate the mouth to match? That’d be pretty cool, I can already picture an animated Chandos reciting sonnet 18.
Ok, I realize this movie is ten years old, but I’d never seen it. I have the book around here someplace, but never really sat down to read it. I’ve known about the movie, it just never filtered up in my priorities high enough for me to sit and pay attention.
So I’m thankful that my wife has lately been in a “what movie can we watch with our teenagers” mood. Since they’ve grown out of generic animated things, we end up in situations where we immediately see anything Marvel or Pixar anyway, but then the boy only wants slasher gore (or anything generally R rated that he knows we won’t let him watch), while the girls want teen drama stuff that’s got a little too much “content you don’t watch with your parents,” if you know what I mean. So movies that look fun and safe and interesting to everybody, that nobody’s seen yet, have been a new quest. This week they found Letters to Juliet, entirely on their own!
The book and the movie are two different things. The book tells the story of the “Secretaries of Juliet”, a bunch of volunteers who take down the love notes left at Juliet’s balcony in Verona and answer them. The fictional story of the movie has our heroine (Amanda Seyfried, who specializes in playing characters named Sophie it seems) going to Verona on a “pre-honeymoon” with her husband who is so busy opening up his new restaurant that they haven’t had time to plan a wedding. He’s so busy, in fact, even in Verona, that she spends all of her time alone, site-seeing. She runs into the secretaries, they let her answer a letter of her own that turns out to be fifty years old, which results in the woman (and her grandson) coming back to Verona to hunt down her lost love, taking Sophie with them.
As far as romantic comedies go it’s as predictable as you’ve ever seen. As the movie was still in the opening credits I said to my family, “Is it just a rom com rule that whatever guy the girl is with in the beginning is not the guy she ends up with?” I’m still wondering if that is 100% true. It’s hardly a spoiler. A new guy enters the picture, they do the “we hate each other, we tolerate each other, we’re friends, we’re more than friends, will we end up together?” thing just fine. It’s all by the numbers.
How’s the Shakespeare content? Other than being set in and around Juliet’s balcony, there’s not much. There’s several tourist scenes of the crowd, including a line of people taking pictures while feeling up the statue. In the trivia I learned that they actually had to mock up the entire alley where this all takes place because the real one was far too small for the camera equipment. Fun.
The only Shakespeare content I spotted, oddly enough, came from Hamlet — “Doubt that the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move…” Strangely out place, but I guess I’ll take it.
All in all happy to check this one off my list. Nothing especially bad about it. In fact it was exactly the kind of movie we were looking for at the time. Sometimes that’s all you need.