Shakespeare's Wife : A Review

http://earmarks.org/archives/2008/01/31/178 But not by me.  This is Germaine Greer’s book about Anne Hathaway, and quite frankly I have no interest in reading it.  But the reviewer seemed to like it, and others among my readers may like it as well, so here you go. It’s not that I particularly dislike Greer, or Hathaway.  It’s just that this looks like a typical biography. Namely, I expect it’ll go something like this: Everything you know about X is wrong.  Here, let me show you with evidence that I found to support my case while ignoring all the evidence against it. If one person can write a book that says “26 was an incredibly old age for a woman to be married” and somebody else can write a book that says “26 was the average age for a woman to be married”, and both claim to have evidence, which should I believe?  The answer, to me, is that they cancel each other out and I don’t pay attention to either.

Books That Make You Dumb

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/01/books_that_make.html Great example of what you can do with mashups.  These guys looked at the most popular books at every college (according to Facebook), and the average SAT score.  So “Lolita” is popular at schools when an average SAT score over 1300, while “The Color Purple” is popular down at the 850 range. Our pal “Shakespeare” spans the 1050-1150 range, where he’s kept company by A Wrinkle in Time, Anna Karenina, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, and others.  Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice also fall in this section, although they both skew higher toward the 1150 mark. Interestingly Hamlet is called out by itself, and drops 100 points to the 1000-1050 range.

Romeo and Juliet : Mad Libs

http://library.thinkquest.org/10502/rajlib.htm Have I linked to something like this before?  I can’t remember, but it seems familiar.  Anyway, you know Mad Libs, right?  This is the game where you fill in a name, a verb, an adjective…. and then you read the story you produced.  Only in this case it’s Act 4, Scene 5  where the Nurse has found Juliet’s lifeless body. I always thought Mad Libs are funnier if you see the template first, and then deliberately fill in goofy words. 

Why Is Shakespeare So Hard?

I saw this question pop up at the top of my referrer logs yesterday, so I guess it’s popular, so I thought it would be fun to make a post out of it and try to answer the question. My first thought is to answer, “It’s self-fulfilling.  Every exposure to Shakespeare you’ve ever had has been telling you how difficult and boring and irrelevant he is, so naturally from the moment you cracked open the book, you thought “Wow, this is difficult and boring and irrelevant.” Let me put it in perspective.  My daughters, 3 and 5, understand Shakespeare. Do they understand the words, or the themes?  No, of course not, that’d be silly.  But if I asked one of them to recount for me the story of “the girl on the island” they’d be able to tell me that Miranda lived on the island with her daddy, who could do magic, and there was a fairy named Ariel and a monster named Caliban….and so on. My point?  People start in on Shakespeare from the wrong end.  They start with Act I, Scene I, line 1, word 1, and say “Hmf, I can’t understand it, I’m screwed.”   They lose the forest for the trees. I say work it backwards.  Learn the story, by whatever means necessary.  Learn the characters, understand their feelings and motivations.  And then you’ll find that the words are a bit easier to understand. How do you do that?  Well, subscribe to this blog, for one :).  And I’m only half joking.  I could point you at “No Fear Shakespeare” and any other number of books that attempt to translate Shakespeare’s words into more readable modern English, but that’s not my point.  My point is that to understand the stories you have to break it down well beyond the words and get to the characters themselves.  Romeo’s a horny teenager whose girlfriend won’t give it up.  Hamlet’s dad died, and he can’t stand his stepdad.  King Lear wants to grow old and die in the comfort of knowing his children love him and will take care of him.  There are *people* in there, people.  If you’re so busy concentrating on the rhyme scheme and pronunciation of the words, you’re making it too hard for yourself. I could write all day on this subject, but I don’t have time here at work :).  Maybe we can get some discussion going in the comments?  Show of hands, how many people out there think that Shakespeare is hard?  How many think it’s easy?  Why?