Behold, the kind of Valentine’s I get at my house :
Shakespeare’s looking a little more like a Pilgrim than he may have liked, but I love it!
My Shakespeare Valentine. Jealous?
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.
How To Draw Shakespeare
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.
Move Over, Rosaline – Let’s Have More of Mercutio’s Brother
I probably knew this once, but while googling for “Valentine” references in Shakespeare’s work I re-discovered that Mercutio has a brother named Valentine:
Romeo
Stay, fellow; I can read.
‘Signior Martino and his wife and daughters;
County Anselme and his beauteous sisters; the lady
widow of Vitravio; Signior Placentio and his lovely
nieces; Mercutio and his brother Valentine; mine
uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters; my fair niece
Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio and his cousin
Tybalt, Lucio and the lively Helena.’ A fair
assembly: whither should they come?
Romeo and Juliet – Act 1, Scene 2. Lines: 65-73.
shakespeare.clusty.com; February 13, 2014
In the mood for more info I googled “Mercutio’s Brother” and found Mercutio and his Brother Valentine, by Clayton Garrett.
Now, clearly, I’m a bit stuck because I’ve been slamming the new Rosaline movie as having nothing to do with Shakespeare. If anything, we’re at least given a bit of character for Rosaline by Shakespeare – Valentine gets nothing but a name on an invitation! So anything you say about Mercutio’s brother, or his relationships, is entirely 100% not Shakespeare.
Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to go see it, though ;). Maybe it’s a guy thing? The whole young adult high school romance vibe that Rosaline gives off doesn’t do it for me, but having grown up with just a single older brother myself, I think I’d like to see a “behind the scenes” story of Mercutio and his brother, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
I wonder if you can buy the script?
Sonnets by Robo-Shakespeare
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?
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!