My son is 13 and recently got in trouble when I discovered that he’d watched the entire first season of a show called Sex Education on Netflix. I haven’t watched it yet myself, so I have no comment on the show or its content. But he’d asked, and I’d reserved judgment and told him not to watch it yet until I could look more into it, and he watched the whole thing on his own. So, he’s busted.

Well, season 2 came out recently. He even made his case that he wasn’t watching it for “that stuff”, but that the story was actually really good and he wanted to see what happened with the characters. Father and son came to a general agreement that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he watched it, but he wasn’t to go shoving it in our faces. As parents, we know that we can’t control what our kids are exposed to, but that doesn’t mean we need to be reminded of it. So he’s been stuck on the fence of whether it’s ok for him to watch it, and whether it’s ok for me to know whether he watched it.

Well, it just so happens that season 2 has some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing going on. I haven’t looked into it yet but may have to, for research. So I decided to try something this morning at breakfast.

Me: “Hey, I heard there’s a whole Romeo and Juliet thing in Sex Education season two.”

Him: (without looking up from his phone) “There is. And it so isn’t at all like the actual Romeo and …. I mean, I’ve never seen it and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I love the straddled universe in that response. Yeah he’s a 13yr old boy who of course made a beeline to a show called “Sex Education” but he’s also a 13yr old boy so grounded in Shakespeare that he has a strong opinion about the quality of the Romeo and Juliet references. I think I’m ok with that. 🙂

I recently learned that there’s a database of over 200k actual Jeopardy questions floating around the internet, just waiting for a geek like me to download it and search it for Shakespeare.

And guess what! I found the Bardfilm category! No, not a “Bard on Film” category (though I’m sure that’s in there). I’m talking about bad Shakespeare puns.

I was going to do a post on Shakespearean questions that didn’t really have anything to do with Shakespeare, but then I saw this category and thought, this reminds me of someone.

I HAVEN’T READ SHAKESPEARE, BUT…

For $200, ‘This tragedy has got to be set in a small village, hence the title‘.

For $400, ‘Obviously, it’s a funny play about bad baseball players‘.

For $600? ‘It sounds to me like it’s about the leader of lascivious oglers‘

Now the $800 answer… ‘It’s about this guy who hires non-permanent secretarial help for his office‘

And finally, for $1000, the answer: ‘Toyotas! Yeah, that’s it; it’s about Toyotas‘

Good luck!

Given how much I enjoy “knowing a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff,” you’d think I would be religiously following the Jeopardy “Greatest of All Time” (GOAT) Tournament, but I have to admit I wasn’t. I was in to Jeopardy back in the day when they faced off against IBM’s Watson computer and the computer just destroyed everybody. But in the interviews afterward the champion, I think it was Ken Jennings then, too, said something that changed my view of the game. He said, “Anybody that’s up there usually knows most of the answers, it’s a matter of being fastest on the buzzer. And nobody was faster than the computer.” He’s not wrong. Once it becomes obvious that the game is more about details like that and less about who knows more, it’s not nearly as interesting.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t like showing off what we know! Given the chance I don’t mind having it on in the background, just to test what I know but also to add to that knowledge for next time.

Sure enough, what came up as the Final Jeopardy question last night? Our dear dear friend Shakespeare;

He has 272 speeches, the most of any non-title character in a Shakespeare tragedy.

Hat tip to @Bardfilm who actually pointed this out to me, by the way. I wasn’t watching.

Nor, I will admit, did I know the answer. It seems obvious in hindsight but off the top of my head I immediately went to the histories, not realizing that “tragedy” was right there in the clue. I could think of plenty of people that it wasn’t – Polonius, Richard III, Falstaff … but it took him patiently walking me through the clue before I got it.

But I’m not telling the answer, I’ll let you folks work it out in the comments. I’m sure some know it already (whether you saw the episode or not), but some will probably have to guess.

I have got to get back into posting general interest Shakespeare stories. Ever since the rise of social media and the “retweet” it’s too easy to see something cool and then just hit one button and call it a day. Where’s the fun in that?

Today’s story comes from Canada, where a young man bought a gift for his girlfriend. That give was the 1757 Theobald collection of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. He’d spotted it in a used book store and, because their first date had been to see a Shakespeare show, he thought it would be a nice gift to get the set and then give her the volumes one at a time at various milestones of their relationship. (Apparently my man spent $800 on the set, good work getting credit for several gifts out of it!)

Here’s the problem — it was an incomplete set. Volume 6 is missing, and he’s on the hunt for it. Really that’s nothing new, there are used book stores all over multiple continents sporting incomplete “complete works” collections. I used to go looking for them myself. But until this article it never occurred to me to actively go looking for the remaining volumes. Especially in this case, seeing as there’s just the one.

What especially caught my eye was that name, Theobald. Anybody recognize it? He’s actually got quite a history, having a bit of personal beef with Alexander Pope over the editing of Shakespeare’s work. But I spotted his name as being the guy who produced a play called Double Falshood, saying that it was a version of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio. From what I recall of the story, Theobald basically said “Oh, yes, I have the Shakespeare originals around here somewhere, this is just the cleaned up version.” But he was never able to produce the originals.

So, does anybody happen to have a Volume 6 1757 Theobald lying around in their collection that they want to get rid of? Strangers things have happened!

Alternately, are there any Theobald scholars in the audience who want to fill in the gaps in my Theobald story?