Every now and then I scan Kickstarter for Shakespeare projects, but I’d missed this one until it showed up in my news headlines. I still don’t know if it’s my cup of tea, but I try to link these things to give them support. Not that this one needs it, looks like it nearly 4x’d its goal in the first day!

Shakespeare Unleashed – A Horror Anthology

Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet… all get the horror treatment…by some of the biggest names in the genre  — including Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, Gemma Files, Seanan McGuire, Philip Fracassi, Lisa Morton, and Ian Doescher, author of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, William Shakespeare’s Avengers and Deadpool Does Shakespeare. 

from the Kickstarter page

I’m not much of a horror guy. Back in the day when Kill Shakespeare came around I remember hating it because whatever volume I happened to read turned Prospero into a villain who gave Miranda to Caliban. Yup, I thought, I’m out. So lord only knows what they’re going to have my beloved characters doing to each other in the pages of this one.

But, still, to each their own. I freely admit to hating those Star Wars books, too, but I know that others love them.

Using Shakespeare to train artificial intelligence is far from new. As probably the most recognizable, largest public domain text corpus, many projects start with Shakespeare on day one. It’s also the foundation for all those “We trained an AI on the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe and then asked if Shakespeare is Marlowe” findings we’ve heard about over the years.

Still, though, I always like to click on the latest story to see how things are developing. This week, “The Conversation” posted: We taught an AI to impersonate Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde – here’s what it revealed about sentience.

Spoiler alert, it reveals nothing about sentience. The only reason that word is there is that they found an opportunity to reference the recent Google news story about suspending an engineer who claimed that their AI has achieved sentience.

The examples provided in the article are interesting if they’re remotely true. As a software engineer, I want much, much more detail about how exactly this experiment was performed. Maybe not source code, but at least “this input produced this output.” It means nothing to say, “we wanted to see … what its outputs would be when considering its own creativity.” Ok, how? How did you ask it to do that? How much information did you have to provide for it to even “understand” the question?

My assumption is that somebody basically wrote a modern English version of “the answer” and then what they did is have a trained AI translate into the literary format they wanted. Such engines aren’t new. They’re getting better, but they’re still nothing resembling intelligence, or sentience.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this article, and it’s mostly fictionalized, purely for entertainment. If it was funnier, I would have assumed I was reading something from McSweeny’s. I think I’m just disappointed, because I *do* click on these stories because I *do* want to hear about quantum leaps in this area, and not just the latest evolution of the same old stuff.

Who’s got a new Shakespeare present? This guy!

For Valentine’s Day this year (I know, I’m late with the post) my wife completely surprised me with a Shakespeare present. I’m very excited about this, because usually I have some clue. Either she or the kids hints around, asking for a reminder about what Shakespeare merchandise I already have. This time she went entirely on her own, and was very excited for me to unwrap it.

It’s actually a very comfortable t-shirt. I’m not terribly comfortable in t-shirts that accentuate how much I don’t go to the gym, if you know what I’m saying. But I like the material for this one. Different than the usual “I hope that’s extra big because you know it’s going to shrink in the fryer” cotton blend that makes the above problem that much worse.

If you can’t tell from the above, the shirt’s artwork is made from the text of Shakespeare’s work. In this case, the sonnets. The text is very small, not the kind of thing that a stranger could come up and read on you. But we know what it is, and you can see it clearly when you look close. It is multiple copies of all the sonnets, all strung together.

I have several pieces of “art made from the text” merchandise that I have acquired over the years. One is a portrait of Shakespeare made from the text of the complete works. One is a “one page poster” of King Lear, and one of The Tempest. But those things are all on the walls of my house and only people that come to my house can enjoy them (my daughter’s friends, in particular, notice and comment on them, which is cool). But something wearable is my first chance to actually take the show on the road.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Ok, ready for the story? I’ve been doing this a long time, as loyal readers know. So when my wife asked, “Have you ever heard of this company?” I actually had. In fact, I’ve posted about them. And I got curious about why I didn’t already have their merchandise!

The company in question is called Litograph, and I wrote about them back in 2015!

I brought up the site and we started browsing through all of their other merchandise. My wife was actually quite annoyed that their search engine had failed for her, and she’d gotten me the sonnets because it was the only Shakespeare product she saw (they have lots of classic literature, not just Shakespeare). That’s ok, though, I still love it. I learned later that our bad @Bardfilm has their Hamlet shirt. My wife asks which one is my favorite, I tell her their Tempest shirt with Ariel and the storm.

Still, I was trying to remember why I hadn’t taken the opportunity to get myself a shirt, even when I was offering a discount! I scanned my emails and turned up the original conversation I had with them way back in 2015. First thought, I am nothing if not consistent:

Can I tell you something?  It’s 10:30pm on Sunday night and I’m here agonizing over your shirts.  Which play should I pick? I want the Tempest, but I’m disappointed that the cut of the t-shirt really loses the whole “Ariel around the ship” effect that you get in the poster. But I’m ok with that.  The Tempest shirt still has the best front/back combo.

Seven years, my favorite still hasn’t changed. But man, how picky am I?

Here’s the funny thing, though. That I had forgotten all about. I found a mistake. And I was not having it.

I sit here clicking each color, checking the back, trying to decide on a combination I like.
At some point I hit “Zoom” on the picture, trying to determine what the second color is, and I see it….the PROJECT GUTENBERG DISCLAIMER TEXT is right there in the middle of the image.
Deal breaker.  I don’t know what happened there, whether you know it’s there and it doesn’t bother you or you had no idea it’s in there, but there’s no way I could buy that. Knowing it’s there, and waiting for people to notice it, would drive me crazy.

Wow, I was a tough critic when I was younger! I get exactly what I was saying, though. I can tell you that my “love quote” Shakespeare pillow has a misquote on it. Heck, the bracelet I had custom-made for my wife, adorned with Shakespeare quotes, ended up with a typo. I don’t miss those things. So I completely understand why I didn’t buy a shirt at the time, I would never have been able to wear it without thinking the whole world could see the same mistake I could.

But! In fairness to the company, I will say that my wife and I have scanned my shirt as meticulously as our old eyes will allow, and we don’t see a similar mistake. I never did get a response to that email, but I like to think that over the last seven years maybe they took the opportunity to fix it…. but you know what? I’m still not going to take the chance ;). I hear the Hamlet shirt’s pretty good.

Right before pandemic, in the summer of 2019, my family traveled to London and Stratford Upon Avon. For Christmas that year my wife and I both got each other the same gift – The World of Shakespeare 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle!

I love a good puzzle, but we’re very casual puzzlers. I have Facebook friends who are regularly posting their completed puzzles and what they’re working on next. Our kids have less and less interest these days so it’s become more a hobby for just my wife and I, when time permits. I’m happy to report that this past weekend we finally finished this one! We actually have an excuse – since we went to both London and Stratford on that trip, we got both a London and a Stratford puzzle … and we did London first 🙂

But we’re here to talk about the Shakespeare one, which has this cool “Where’s Waldo” element for any Shakespeare fan because there are dozens of Shakespeare references trapped inside, from bear-baiting to weird sisters. Each piece you’re looking at and thinking, “Ok, this might be a thatched roof, or Juliet’s gown, or a fairy’s wing?” There’s a document that lists all the references (with pictures so you know what’s what), but for real fun you’ll want to skip that until the end. That way you get to spot all the references yourself. The dude holding the skull might be obvious, but will you recognize all the other ones, too?

Great fun for everybody, even if there’s just one Shakespeare fan in the house. It’s great fun when somebody says, “I’ve got a guy with a sword stabbing another guy” and you get to say, “That’s Julius Caesar. Top right.” Or, “girl sitting in a boat.” “Miranda. Dead center. Next to the old guy.”

Anyway, on with the pictures!

I’d love to get another Shakespeare puzzle but I’m not sure how many there are to choose from! Plus, my wife will kill me.

By the way, if you’re into puzzles and don’t have a puzzle mat, seriously consider one. We got one for Christmas and it’s a game changer. Primarily it’s a big felt mat to do your puzzle on, but it also comes with this inflatable tootsie roll pillow thing. So if you need to move the puzzle you wrap the whole puzzle in progress around the pillow and wrap it up with these velcro straps. The friction of the felt keeps everything from moving around. So if, like us, you use the dining room table for puzzles and occasionally have to pick up and move the whole thing? Problem solved. The kit we got also came with organization drawers so you can break pieces out into different groups (in this case we put “people” in one, for example). Plus glue for when you’re done, because it has to go on the wall after all that effort.

“Wordles, wordles, wordles.”

Hamlet

People have already seen my new creation on Twitter and Facebook, so I apologize to them for the old news. For those who still get their Shakespeare Geek news straight from the blog, I’m happy to announce Bardle!

Yes, Bardle is exactly what you think it is. Everybody else was creating Wordle clones (including Taylor Swift and Harry Potter), so I knew I had to make one. This is an obvious homage to the original Wordle, so all credit to the original creator. We also all know that the New York Times bought the original recently, so there’s a non-zero chance that they go on the hunt and some point and try to take down all these spinoff versions. But until then, the play’s the thing!

Important ways Bardle is different from Wordle

1. All five letter character names are possible answers. This will pose a challenge sometimes for plays you may not have read.
2. Some standard theatrical terms associated with Shakespeare are valid as well. So at some point, you’re likely to see words like stage or scene, to give some obvious examples.
3. Mostly, though, answers will be words that should have some obvious Shakespeare connection. It’s hard to explain until you get the hang of it. One tip is to think of the common scenes and quotes you know from Shakespeare and ask yourself if there are any five-letter words there. Hamlet’s that one about the guy who talks to the skull … oh, wait, skull! All the world’s a stage … world! Stage! Get it? A midsummer what’s what?
4. Lastly, the list of guessable words is made up *only* of words Shakespeare used. This throws some people, who expect to use all their standard starter words. Nope. If the word doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s works, chances are you can’t use it.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know! I want it to be fun and not too difficult, but I also very much want to keep the Shakespeare theme prominent.