Category: Uncategorized

Most of the posts in this category are simply leftovers from a previous era before the site had categories. Over time I plan to reduce that number to zero and remove this category. Until then, here they are. I had to put something in the box.

Don’t Thank Me, Thank Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

After teaching my fourth graders the other day, my daughter kept asking me these mysteriously Shakespearean questions.  “Daddy?  Is Merchant of Venice a Shakespeare play?”  

“Yes,” I’d reply, “Why do you ask?” Knowing that I hadn’t mentioned that one.
“You’ll see in a few days!” and then she’d run away.  Then back, “What about Henry vee eye?”

“It’s pronounced Henry the Sixth, but yes, that’s one too. That was actually one of his first…”

“Ok, gotta go!” and off she’d run.
Look what I got from the entire class!  This was actually on a gigantic card, but I couldn’t fit it all in my scanner:

I love some of the spelling (Julies Caesar, Mercent of Venice…) and the research that went into it, since I didn’t mention half those plays.

Thanks everybody!  I’ll be back soon!

How To Draw Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Last week when I taught the fourth graders, I wanted to bring some handouts.  I’d been playing aroun with the idea of a “How to Draw Shakespeare” thing.  Keep it simple, something that with two seconds you could sketch anytime you had a pencil and a couple of square inches of clean paper.  Here’s what I came up with!

I have no idea why he came out so slanted, but I did it in a hurry and I was trying to make the six of them relatively equal without messing up and having to start all over.  Then it wouldn’t scan properly so I kept having to go over the lines.  That’s what we in the business call version 1.0.

Sonnets by Robo-Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a story that’s equal parts “Shakespeare” and “Geek”.  An MIT student has written a program that uses nothing but the database of Shakespeare’s word choices, and from that created what I’ll call a “sonnet helper”.  It doesn’t write the sonnet for the student, but it does say “Based on what you’ve got so far, maybe this? Or this?”  The student/author is still composing the sonnet, and the computer is merely guiding the word choices.  Very interesting stuff.

Oh, you want to hear the sonnet?  

When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn,
the daytime shadow of my love betrayed
lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form.


We don’t get the whole thing, only snippets.  I suppose it’s not bad.  What’s painful is the idea that poetry could be automatically generated (they actually use the phrased “banged out by the computer”) and that then it would be a matter of just crowdsourcing public opinion to determine what constitutes a good poem.  Talk about trivializing it!  That’s like making a haiku generator and just counting syllables.  There’s a bit more to it than that.
UPDATE : I had no idea that this project was the work of the Swiftkey people, who make the most popular predictive keyboard replacement for Android phones (I use it myself).  Here’s a different link that contains the entire text of the sonnet at the end.

Whoa. Two NEW Portraits Found?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Holy breaking news, Batman!  Obviously “new” and “found” are relative terms in the world of academia, but it looks like we’re supposed to add Worlitz and Boaden to our list of likenesses now?

Images in the link. The Worlitz looks very much like Cobbe.  The Boaden is a new one to me, a full length sitting portrait of a very different looking Shakespeare.

I’d write more but I’m busy reading!  Stay tuned for updates!