Both my two oldest now are studying Shakespeare — Othello for one, Romeo and Juliet for the other — so the content comes so fast and furious it’s hard to keep up. My oldest has to write a paper on Iago, in fact, because they finished the play when I wasn’t looking.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” she says. “I had to look something up about Iago for research … and you came up. That was weird.”
Sure enough, if you Google “Othello’s ancient” here’s what comes up:
The funny thing is that there in the car I said, “It means his right-hand man, right?” Which is exactly what I wrote in 2011. And she said, “No, it means flag bearer,” which is also what I learned in 2011 🙂
In marketing my merchandise I’ve often noted that “the dream” is to randomly bump into somebody wearing one of my t-shirts, because I’ll know I’ve found a kindred spirit. This week I learned to always have my eyes open because kindred spirits are all around.
My oldest geeklet was inducted into her school’s chapter of the National Honor Society last night. It was held in the school chapel. It just so happens that their chapter coordinator is also her Shakespeare teacher. Here, to the best of my ability to recap it, is her welcome speech:
“This being Boston, I did hear on the radio that there’s some kind of important game on television tonight.” <pause for cheers from the audience> “The Bruins are in the playoffs, and game seven sounds exciting.” <more cheers> “I don’t follow sports, but I do have my own personal reasons for celebrating, because today is also Shakespeare’s Birthday.”
And that, if you can believe it, marks the very first time on a Shakespeare Day I’ve been in the room with a third party who, entirely independent of me, brings it up.
So I did what I always told myself I hoped I’d do. I threw both hands up in the air and yelled, “WOOO!” She pointed at me from her lectern and smiled. I believe there were some cheers for Shakespeare but honestly I can’t remember, I was having too much an “Ok, I can’t believe I just did that” moment 🙂
After the ceremony at the reception, she did come up to me and say, “Thanks for having my back on the Shakespeare thing.” I told her that was the only celebration of Shakespeare Day I had this year. We then started talking about the ending of Othello – or, rather, I started talking about the ending of Othello while my wife pulled me away and let her sit down and talk to her fiancé.
That’s also something I’ve told people many times — if I start talking about Shakespeare, just go ahead and walk away at some point, because I’m not going to stop. 🙂
Hello! Terribly sorry for my absence of late, things are happening that are making life complicated. Your regularly scheduled Shakespeare should resume soon.
This post doesn’t contain much Shakespeare, let’s get that out of the way right now. I don’t like to misuse my audience. But it does have a father (me) and a daughter (mine) so at the end if we want to discuss which of Shakespeare’s play our relationship most resembles, we can see where that goes.
My younger daughter wants to be a writer. She recently entered a short story competition with a small piece that she literally crafted out of thin air when she said, “I need a noun” and my wife said, “Balloon.” We entered the story and she rocketed up to the #4 spot (out of almost 300 entries) and became a finalist for the Community Vote!
For the finals, the votes are cleared and a new round begins. Right now she’s sitting in second place, which isn’t too shabby. But I’ve learned that the person in first place is an existing contributor to that site with nearly 100 other submissions. His bio says he’s been writing poetry since 2004 – which would be the same year my daughter was born. He’s got about 4000 followers on the site who are shooting him to the top of all the charts (in the first round he had 3x the votes of the next closest entry).
Well, I’ve got over 20,000 followers. No, none of this is Shakespeare. But I’m a father trying to make his daughter happy. It doesn’t matter to me if she wins. It matters that when she refreshes her vote count and it doesn’t go up, she’s sad – but when it does, she’s happy. So I want it to go up every time she looks, and I’m unapologetically going to use every means at my disposal to make that happen.
If you’ve read this far and would like to help contribute to the cause, thank you! Here’s the link:
If you saw my earlier posts on FB and Twitter and have already voted, please note that this is the finals, this is a new round! So you can come back and vote again!
Thanks so much for your time. Have we decided which play we most resemble? I’ve been thinking about it while I write. How about Prospero? I went through my vengeful phase, snooping around to see if there might be a way to get the first place guy disqualified ….. but ultimately it’s more about my daughter’s happiness, and the number of reads and votes can do that much more than a couple of bucks of prize money. Now go vote!
Be me, on a typical school day, bustling around getting the kids breakfast as they get ready for school. My middle announces, “Did I tell you my Shakespeare story?”
Everything stops, of course. Well, more to the point everything I’m doing stops, while my wife kind of gives me the, “Seriously?” look since stuff’s still got to get done.
“Do tell,” I reply. “The very fact that you brought it up means this is going to be a blog post.”
“Ok,” she says, putting down her spoon. “Well, my friends and I the other day are talking, and somehow Shakespeare comes up, you know.”
“Sure, sure. I know the feeling.”
“And then my friend is all,” cue dripping fawning voice, “Oh, I *love* Shakespeare, I just *love* Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer’s Night’s Dream!” At this point she switches to brainy smirk, rolls up her sleeves, and begins. “Well, I said to her, do you know Othello? Hmm? How about Winter’s Tale? Or Titus Androkinus?”
My oldest and I exchange a glance and a laugh at that one. Middle continues, “Have *you* ever read the one where the husband bakes his wife into a pie? Hmmm???”
“Wait, what?” I ask.
“That’s Cleopatra,” says my oldest.
“Wait, WHAT?” I ask.
“Isn’t there one about Cleopatra and her husband?”
“Antony and Cleopatra, yes?”
“Isn’t that the one she’s talking about?”
“…???…NO?!”
It’s funny how sometimes the facts get garbled. I explain that Titus baked the sons of his enemy into a pie. I still have no idea where they got baking his wife – nor the connection with Antony and Cleopatra.
My daughter’s in an honest to goodness 100% full-time Shakespeare class now. It’s been a long time coming. They’re starting right out with Taming of the Shrew, and already she’s lost.
“I have to annotate the Induction,” she tells me.
I’d completely forgotten about the Induction. In all the times I’ve told them the story, I don’t think I’d ever mentioned it.
“Oh yeah,” I reply. “So there’s this dude, Christopher Sly, who is the drunk at the local bar. It starts out with him arguing with the hostess about breaking some glasses, then he promptly passes out. A lord comes back from the hunt, sees him sleeping in the street, and says, ‘Hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s take him home and dress him in my clothes and tell him he’s actually the lord of the house.’ Have you ever heard the term gaslighting? They totally gaslight him. Anyway, he’s not really buying it, until they tell him he’s married, so his first reaction is to say Great! Wife? Let’s go to bed!”
“Oh, charming.”
“Exactly. They talk him out of it, though. Meanwhile, there are these roving players who run into the original lord and ask if he wants to see a show, so he sends them over to his house to put a show on for Christopher Sly. That show is Taming of the Shrew. And, then, basically, Christopher Sly is never heard from again. Well, he comes back briefly after the first scene or something, but that’s about it. You’re probably going to get tested on why he wrote it, and that’s a good question. There’s a variety of theories. He didn’t write like that for any other play.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, flipping through her copy, “I didn’t get any of that from this.” Reading, “I’ll feeze you in faith? A pair of stocks you rogue?” She pronounces it “rouge,” like makeup. “How am I supposed to get from that that he’s arguing with the lady at the bar?”
Slowly but surely she works her way through the induction, which she first thinks goes 20 pages until I insist that she read it again and she realizes that every other page is vocabulary, so it’s only 10 pages of content.
So today at dinner she fills me in on how well she fared on that assignment.
“So it turns out,” she says, “that while I was out of class one day last week, she gave out this packet that was an introduction to the play. We were supposed to annotate THAT!”
Both my two oldest now are studying Shakespeare — Othello for one, Romeo and Juliet for the other — so the content comes so fast and furious it’s hard to keep up. My oldest has to write a paper on Iago, in fact, because they finished the play when I wasn’t looking.
