All we’re hearing about in the news is how he apologized to his victims, but the more interesting story today is how the judge quoted Shakespeare when sentencing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.

Want to take any guesses? I thought maybe something about the quality of mercy, but apparently the judge was not in that kind of mood.

“The evil that men do lives after them,” he said, “The good is oft interred with their bones. So it will be for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.” 

“Whenever your name is mentioned, what will be remembered is the evil you have done. No one will remember that your teachers were fond of you. No one will mention that your friends found you funny and fun to be with. No one will say you were a talented athlete or that you displayed compassion in being a Best Buddy or that you showed more respect to your women friends than your male peers did. 

“What will be remembered is that you murdered and maimed innocent people and that you did it willfully and intentionally. You did it on purpose.”

Harsh. I approve.

He later went on to quote Iago, but from Verdi’s opera rather than the original Shakespeare text, when he spoke of those who believe in a cruel god.  I can’t find the actual quote, does anybody know it?

“Surely someone who believes that God smiles on and rewards the deliberate killing and maiming of innocents believes in a cruel God,” the judge said. “That is not, it cannot be, the God of Islam. Anyone who has been led to believe otherwise has been maliciously and willfully deceived.”

On June 8, 2005, Shakespeare Geek was born.

10 years.  Wow. That’s older than my youngest child.  If you look closely, you can actually see them grow up before our very eyes. My son saw his first show (The Tempest) when he was still in his stroller. You can find the sonnet I wrote to my daughter on her first birthday, or the time I taught them to sing Sonnet 18 almost before my littlest could speak. (* Alas the actual audio file is no longer available online.)

What a long, strange trip it’s been. I remember how and why I got started, too.  I was listening to Howard Stern on the radio, and Robin was doing the news.  She made a Shakespeare reference. I got it, but then I thought, “You know, when I get to work there’s nobody that I can tell that story to, because I don’t think anybody I know would get it.”

So I got online and started looking for forums that talked about Shakespeare. But this is a tricky subject for me, because I didn’t want to talk about performing the plays, nor did I want to talk about studying them academically. I more or less wanted to talk about things like pop culture references, like hearing a Shakespeare reference on the Howard Stern show.

So I made one.  The original name, if anybody remembers, was actually “Such Shakespeare Stuff.” I started it as a category on my family blog (long since gone), but eventually transitioned it over. Somewhere along the line somebody called me a real Shakespeare geek and the name stuck because I liked the idea that I’d spent my life as a computer nerd type person so geek just naturally seemed to fit.

As you can see by my earliest posts I was really just combing the net for Shakespeare stuff and posting anything I could get my hands on.  There wasn’t much discussion, because there wasn’t much readership.  I thought, when I started it, that maybe I would begin to build an audience of people who didn’t know much about Shakespeare, but wanted to learn more.  That, after all, was typically how my real life conversations went.  Anytime Shakespeare came up (usually because I brought him up), I was the only one in the conversation with any knowledge of the subject. So I did most of the talking and others just kind of listened and hopefully learned.

Oh, then there was the one day that Google quoted me.  They had just put Shakespeare’s work online and kicked it off by quoting me.  Note the name of the blog at the time. 🙂

Then a funny thing happened.  Actual Shakespeare scholars started showing up, who wanted to talk about Shakespeare in a less formal setting.  People like Catkins and Bardfilm, David Blixt and JM and Cass Morris and Alan Farrar (RIP), all of whom knew way, way more about Shakespeare than I did. There were times when I immediately switched over to impostor syndrome and thought, “What am I doing? How can I host this, when everybody that is reading what I’m writing actually knows more about this than I do?”

But my honored guests didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary we would often stumble across topics that hadn’t been studied before, like a bowling reference in Sonnet 20 or our debate over whether Francisco saw the ghost.  And I realized that in my own small way I was contributing to something of value to the conversation, because I was asking the questions and hosting the place to discuss the answers. We had created a place precisely where people with no knowledge of Shakespeare who wanted to learn could interact with people who had the knowledge and were excited to share it. All I had to do was sit back and facilitate the discussion.

One day a coworker came up to me, a coworker who’d never spoken to me previously, and said, “I thought of you this morning.”  Which was cool, because she was a very attractive coworker :).  “I was watching a movie and they said something about Shakespeare, and I thought hey, I should tell Duane about this.”  And that’s exactly why I do this.

We made merchandise, and one day I even saw one of my t-shirts in the wild.

We created jokes, and one day I saw somebody get up on stage and deliver one of my jokes before a performance.

My family and I toured the Folger vault, and I got so close to the most beautiful book in the world I could have eaten it.

I wrote a book.

I wrote an app.

I regularly teach Shakespeare at the local elementary school, and have done so since my children were 7 years old.

Today as I said goodbye to my group of fifth graders (since I’m unlikely to get the opportunity to teach them at the middle school, believe me I’ve already asked), I left them with the four words that have become the mission statement for this blog.  Shakespeare makes life better.  I’ve been doing it now for ten years. That sounds like one of those questions you hear in a presidential debate.  “Ask yourself, is my life better now than it was ten years ago?”  Absofrickinlutely.

I can’t begin to recap 10 years in one blog post, even though I’d like to try.  Thank you so much to all my readers, my contributors, and most importantly, to steal a line from my Rebel friends…

Must tell this story.  A few weeks ago when I was teaching Macbeth in my daughter’s class I really stressed the whole curse thing, and told them that if they are on stage and say the word, bad things will happen.

Well, I’m back today and sure enough a hand shoots up.

“Remember when you were here, and you told us about the curse, and how if you say the name of the play on stage then something bad will happen? Well, Antonia wanted to see if that was true, so, at our dance recital? After the curtain closed, after we took our bows and were still on stage?  She said it. And then, for the night performance? A hurricane came through and blew the roof off the building, we all had to be evacuated.”

Love it. The best part is I know that story to be 100% true, because my daughter is in that dance class, and I was there. Fire marshall and building inspector and everybody had to come in and determine if the building was safe, while around 1000 parents and dancers sat in the cafeteria.

So I just got back from an encore performance at my daughter’s fifth grade class. They’ve got less than a week of school left and the teacher had basically warned me not to expect them to want to learn anything new, so I decided to just have fun with it.

At this age (10, 11ish), death and dying are still pretty cool. When we did Macbeth, it was the prospect of swinging a foam sword and maybe killing your best friend that made it exciting. So I decided to go with that theme.  I got a bag and filled it up with over 100 slips of paper containing the wide variety of ways to die in Shakespeare’s time.  These included:

plague
typhoid
starvation
malnutrition
infection
died at birth
died giving birth
hanged for poaching
beheaded
drawn and quartered
burned at the stake
died in the war (drowned, hit by cannonball, scurvy, etc…)
killed in a bar fight
…

I honestly can’t remember how many I made.  Of course there were a few variations on “Still Alive”, too.

I explained to the kids how lucky we are that Shakespeare lived to be 52 years old, and how easy it would have been for him to have died much younger. How his son died, and his sisters, and eventually Marlowe.

Told them all the stand up and, one by one, draw from the hat.  If you were still alive, you played in the next round. Otherwise you died, sit down.

They *loved* it.  One kid, before drawing, said “I hope I die!”  He got typhoid.  So I explained to him what that was and just how gruesome his death would have been. That’s how it went, around the room, me explaining the circumstances and gory details of each death.

After the first round, 8 kids were left out of about 24.  After the next round just 2.  Then both of them died.

They immediately screamed that they wanted to play again.  In this round a boy got “Died giving birth”, which brought the place to its knees in hysterics.  This time there was eventually just one girl left, and the class insisted that she continue to draw slips until she died. Sure enough she draws an Alive slip again and everybody claims she must be cheating. But then on the next draw she got plague and died.

Highly recommended, if you’ve got an audience for it.  Took me a reasonable portion of my evening to cut up and write out the slips, but totally worth it. I made over 100 slips for the class of 25, which meant that even after 2 rounds of the game there were still plenty to choose from.