Category: Shakespeare Plays

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the most influential playwrights in history, and his plays have been performed and studied for centuries. From the timeless tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the hilarious antics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s plays continue to captivate audiences around the world. Whether you’re a fan of tragedy, comedy, or romance, there’s a Shakespeare play for everyone. So why not revisit these timeless classics and discover the magic of Shakespeare for yourself?

Browse the entire text of Shakespeare’s plays right here on Shakespeare Geek.

The Complete Works In A Tweet? No, Not Really

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Although this story will be old by the time it gets posted, I would not be living up to the geek part of my name if we didn’t talk about the UK student who managed to fit the complete works of Shakespeare into a single tweet. At least, that’s what the headlines would have you believe:

To be or not to be 280 characters: All of Shakespeare’s works in a single tweet

Someone just tweeted the entire works of Shakespeare with one tweet

You can unzip this tiny image on Twitter to reveal the complete works of Shakespeare

You get the idea.  That last one at least gives more of a clue about what’s going on.

Here’s a link to the original tweet from David Buchanan.

It contains a link to a small image of Shakespeare (Chandos style, for the curious who can’t see it) with the words UNZIP ME over the top.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a zip file is basically a compressed version of another file, or files.  What Mr. Buchanan figured out how to do is make a single file that behaves both like an image and a compressed zip archive at the same time.

So if you were to take that image (right click from your browser, do “Open in Image New Tab”), and then save the image by itself with a .zip extension, and then double click on it to expand the archive, and what you’ll get is the single file HTML version of Shakespeare’s works, from Project Gutenberg.

Is it a cool technique? Absolutely.  Even better is that Buchanan went on to release the source code for how he did it.  So I get to do cool things like this:

This image is actually encoded with the plain text version of The Tempest (also from Project Gutenberg), in case you’d like to play with it.  Save it with the extension .zip, then unzip it, and there you have it!

If you know how to read source code it’s even cooler, because the code to do it is very small (as in, just one file).  It’s very neat indeed, and Mr. Buchanan deserves the credit for demonstrating the technique so vividly.  This is a great example of why geeks are attracted to Shakespeare, because it represents a big body of text to play with that immediately brings a bunch of attention with it every time you touch it.

But saying that the complete works fit into a single 280 character tweet is not really what happened.  The image is linked in the tweet.  The image itself is 2 meg in size!  That’s kind of like putting a First Folio in a room, locking the room, then handing someone the key and saying, “You’ve got the entire First Folio in the palm of your hand!” It does sound cooler that way, though.

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Teachers, How Do You Feel About Your Hermiones?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

No, that’s not a Winter’s Tale reference. That’s a Harry Potter reference.  Psych.  🙂

So once again my oldest has an actual Shakespeare class, and once again it’s not really living up to what we’d hoped.

They’ve started The Tempest.  Here’s my daughter’s (roughly paraphrased) summary of the first day:

We did Act One, Scene one.  It’s frustrating, because she asked us no questions. Zero. I’m sitting there, waiting for this, I know the answers. I’m dying to say Sycorax, I love that name. But she didn’t interact with us, she just told us what happens.

That makes me sad. I once wrote an entire blog post about that scene, and how awesome the boatswain is. So let’s talk about the situation this teacher finds herself in.

I’m sure that teacher has to assume that there’s zero amount of Shakespeare knowledge in that class. It would be a waste of time for her in most classes to ask a question like, “Is anybody familiar with The Tempest?” because 9 times out of 10 she’s going to get blank stares and silence. So why bother?

Because in this instance she would have gotten an answer.  My daughter’s  hand would go up.  As it would with every question (hence the Hermione reference). She could assistant teach that class.

She’s not trying to be a teacher’s pet. On the contrary, she’s generally an introvert who will avoid answering questions because she feels that for her to answer it is to not give others a chance.  But to not even have the question asked?  That seems like an opportunity missed. It would not be a lie to say that she’s been waiting years for opportunities like that.

Maybe the teacher knows that. She’s well aware of my daughter’s experience with Shakespeare already. I know because I’ve also had that conversation with her. So I figure one of two things must be going through her head:

a) she’s completely forgotten, or just generally disregarded, the knowledge that she’s actually got someone in class this time that knows the material. She’s got a plan, it does not assume a Hermione in the class, why change the plan?

b) she’s deliberately not singling her out to keep balance in the classroom, and not elevate my daughter into some sort of favorite.  Maybe she’s even doing that for what she believes will be my daughter’s benefit, so that the others don’t see it as a negative (i.e. teacher’s pet syndrome)

My problem is that I see it as the opposite. Let’s pretend for a moment that there’s more than one kid in that class that already knows the material. Or at least would be willing to hazard a guess at some questions. And all of them are afraid to be the first one to raise their hand.  Doesn’t it make sense that if you know you’ve got a student who isn’t afraid to raise her hand, and knows the answer, that you should do that?  That maybe it would help bring the other kids out of their shells?  Maybe there’s kids in that class that would hear my daughter rave about how awesome Shakespeare is, how she’s known about it since she was little, and maybe they switch from “I’ve always heard that this stuff is boring and irrelevant” to “One of my peers is telling me that it’s interesting and not that hard, maybe I should listen to her.”

Teachers, help me out here. I’m trying to read somebody’s mind, and maybe I’m way off.  It doesn’t matter the particular material.  Say that you’re in the out of the ordinary situation where you know you’ve got at least one student in the class that knows the material ahead of the rest.  How do you handle that? Take advantage and try to use that kid to draw out the others? Or treat everybody the same? Why?

(In fairness I should acknowledge that there’s an option (c), namely, that this class is about monsters in British literature and thus they are studying Caliban specifically, not the play as a whole. So, since scene one really has nothing to do with Caliban, she glossed over it.  I mean personally I still disagree, because I think that kicking off the story in an exciting way rather than a blah blah blah way is important if you want to keep the kids’ attention, but what can ya do. There are calendar time restrictions, and material to get through.)

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Did … Did I Never Post My Othello Costume?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

So I’m not dressing up for Halloween this year, and thought I’d be lazy and do a “Best Of” Halloween post instead.  But then I searched I realized … did I never post my Othello costume?  I know it was on Facebook, but it looks like I never put up here on the blog!

Fall, 2016. I was hired at my new job in December 2015, so this is my first Halloween.  They do a big company-wide party here, with prizes and everything, and I am definitely going through a phase of life where I’m wearing my Shakespeare devotion on my sleeve.

So I decide to go as Othello.

“Oh no,” you think, “You didn’t put on blackface like Anthony Hopkins, did you?”  Well I still work here, that ought to give you a clue.

Nope, what I did was go to as both Othello the play, and Othello the board game.

Step one, I got one of those white painter’s jumpsuits to make a blank canvas of myself.  Then I started transcribing.

You may not be able to make that out, but it’s the entirety of Othello Act I, Scene i.  I may have had delusions of doing more, but that took me forever (and lots more space than I thought) so I stuck with just making the point.

But then I figured maybe people wouldn’t recognize the play. After all, Othello doesn’t show up in I.i.  So I doubled as the board game (sometimes called “Reversi”):

Why am I carrying a stuffed animal? I’ll give you a hint, he’s got green eyes.  He’s a green eyed monster.

Then I figured that there’s still a strong likelihood nobody’s going to get this, so I made it obvious on the back:

If you can get past the glare, that is. 🙂

How’d it go?  I can’t say most people got it.  Couple of the older people at work were all, “Oh, you’re that game!”  Turns out Milton Bradley let the trademark lapse on Othello back in the 1980s and half these people have no idea what that game is. 🙂

Bonus!  While we were in the mood and since I was rifling through my daughter’s stuffed animals, we were presented with this opportunity:

Yes, that’s what you think it is.

I made the beast with two backpacks.

On that note…Happy Halloween everybody!

 

Shakespeare Hated Women Because They Gave Him Syphilis

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Or so Sir Anthony Sher and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate would suggest, according to this article.

The logic seems to go like this:

There’s a really nasty anti-female diatribe in King Lear.

Perhaps it’s autobiographical? Perhaps Shakespeare had something against women?

Hey you know, in the sonnets he mentions mercury baths, and that’s where people went when you had syphilis.

Yeah, yeah!  And another thing, he wasn’t seen around the king very much, and there was a law that if you had syphilis you couldn’t be anywhere near the king!

They then play connect the dots and suggest that if he had syphilis, he got it from a woman, and therefore had some degree of resentment there.

I think my favorite part of the article (and please take that with a heavy, sarcastic eye roll) is where they mention “Oh yeah, and then there’s that thing where Shakespeare might be gay. Which doesn’t mean that he was anti-women, but, you know, I’m just sayin’.”

So confused.  If you give any credit to the theory that he was gay, then doesn’t that completely destroy everything else you’ve said in the article?  “Shakespeare said misogynistic stuff so maybe he hated women because a woman gave him a venereal disease. Or maybe he was gay, which wouldn’t have anything to do with why he hated women.”  THEN IF YOU THINK HE’S GAY WHY DID HE HATE WOMEN? AND IF YOU DON’T THINK HE’S GAY WHY DID YOU BRING IT UP?

Anybody else pulling their hair out on this one?  Careful though, they say that losing your hair was also a sign of syphilis.

 

Shakespeare Uncovered Returns This Friday

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Who’s excited for the return of Shakespeare Uncovered?

WNET’s Shakespeare Uncovered returns to PBS for its third and final season on Friday, October 12!

The series, which covers the fascinating history behind Shakespeare’s greatest plays, will feature six installments hosted by celebrated names such as Helen Hunt, F. Murray Abraham, Romola Garai, Brian Cox, Simon Russell Beale, and Sir Antony Sher.

Each episode will tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare’s famous works and will investigate “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Measure for Measure,” “Julius Caesar,” “The Winter’s Tale,” and “Richard III.” 

The show will air Fridays, October 12-26 on PBS (check local listings) and stream the following day at pbs.org/shakespeareuncovered and on PBS apps.