Comments and Contacting Me

Hi everybody,

Quick administrative note.  Lately I’ve had to take a stronger stance in removing comments that do not add to a given thread.  This frequently happens when somebody discovers the blog for the first time and wants to use the opportunity to say “Hey, have you seen this yet?” and provide me with a link.  This is not typically what I’d think of as spam, I think it’s just overenthusiasm.

Still, though, the rule continues to apply – add something to the discussion.  If you want to provide a link, make it a relevant one.

For those that want to share links and have no way to contact me, I’ve added a link directly in the sidebar over there.  It’s also fairly easy to get me via the Contact page.  I do see links when people send them to me that way, I have a number of regulars who constantly send me stuff.  So don’t be afraid.

Fair enough?  I feel bad deleting comments that come from legit Shakespeare fans, but it’s also not right for me to judge one worthy of deletion and one worthy of keeping.  So typically they all go.

– SG

Teaching With Shakespeare : A Game

Ok, for this game you are stranded on a desert island with a young child, and it is now your job to provide an education for this child.  For maximum points you must meaningfully introduce as many subjects as you can to your student.

Here’s the catch – the only book you have to teach with is a First Folio.  You are allowed to supplement with visual aids, but only to the extent that you could create them with whatever rudimentary means might be at your disposal, such as scratching in the sand with a stick.  Nothing too complicated.

Easy example : You can teach poetry, by showing multiple examples of meter and rhyme scheme.

Harder example : Geography.   You could do a pretty good job of plotting where Prospero’s island is, simply by looking at the description of the ship’s return from Claribel’s wedding in Tunisia.  (This is where I see no way around having to draw out a globe and start pointing to various places.)  There’s actually an island that claims to have been Shakespeare’s inspiration, based entirely on this method (given that there’s no way Shakespeare could have ever been there).

What else can you come up with?  How about math?  Other than the dividing up of King Lear’s soldiers I’m trying to think of how many math problems Shakespeare may have written out for us.

Science?  Given how much science has changed in 400 years this would be a tricky one, and it’s not Shakespeare’s fault.

History?  The case of Julius Caesar is probably the most well known.  How many kids graduate from high school never truly knowing what facts about Caesar’s assassination are true, and which were created by Shakespeare?

How about spelling, or for that matter reading in the first place?  That would be interesting.  I bet with some study you could make a good list of words that are spelled in multiple different ways, and then use that to work on a basic phonetics lesson.

You are also welcome to make the case for more advanced classes such as “debating”, “politics”, “psychology” and so on.

How To Categorize Shakespeare

Here’s a question that comes up in my life a lot.  We talk about Shakespeare here. That’s easy.  But when I go and add the site to various boards and services, inevitably I’m asked to place it into a category.

So, what’s our category?
Art?  Education?  Books and Literature?  Theatre?  Entertainment?  History?
None of those is a perfect answer.  I often end up putting us into Education, because when I look at the big mission of the site it is about discussing Shakespeare and hence learning about Shakespeare.  But education is not always a very big category and doesn’t get much traffic, so I feel like to just relegate us over there is not giving the site enough credit.
Curious to people’s thoughts.  Of course, some sites do offer the opportunity to place multiple tags of your own creation, which is fine – then I can add the actual word Shakespeare and the rest becomes secondary.
But for those cases where you need to pick a single category, what are we?  Think of it from the perspective of the incoming potential audience – they’re in category X, and they see Shakespeare Geek, what would their expectations be about the site?  And would we meet those expectations?
Thanks as always for helping to make the site better!

Shakespeare Geek on Pinterest

After the flood of pictures I took in Washington last week, I finally broke down and decided to join pinterest.com.  This site’s never been heavy into pictures, but if that’s what people want to follow these days, I’ll do what I can to start adding more visual content.

Unfortunately somebody already beat me to “ShakespeareGeek” as a username, so you can find me as ShakesGeek.  Right now I’ve got two ‘boards’ set up — one that will pin stuff directly from the blog (so if you’re already following the blog in some fashion, you’ll have seen it), and another for ‘found Shakespeare’ for all those random Shakespeare related images that I find floating around than don’t always merit their own post.

[EDIT]   Oh, and you may also see a “Pin it!” button in the upper right corner of those posts with picture content.  If you are someone who uses pinterest and you like the content I’m putting up, sharing it in this way would be a great way to support the site.  Thanks!

I Would Challenge You To A Battle Of Wits But I See You Are Unarmed

When I spotted this “battle of wits” quote as attributed to Shakespeare, I immediately thought of the closest thing I could remember, Beatrice’s zinger in Benedick’s general direction in Much Ado About Nothing:

Beatrice
  1. Alas! he gets nothing by that. In our last
  2. conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and
  3. now is the whole man governed with one: so that if
  4. he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him
  5. bear it for a difference between himself and his
  6. horse; for it is all the wealth that he hath left,
  7. to be known a reasonable creature. Who is his
  8. companion now? He hath every month a new sworn brother.

[Citation :  Much Ado about Nothing – Act 1, Scene 1. Lines: 56 ]

This ends up pretty close.  Roughly translated, “In our last battle of wits he lost most of his, and now he’s only left with one, so I’m going to let him keep it so people can tell the difference between him and his horse.”

Is it even possible to give proper attribution to the quote in question, though?  It seems like the generic sort of thing that many people have thought of over the years.

The best answer, I think, came from the ChaCha board.  Every now and then, for one of these quotes, I’ll see someone who has asked, “What play is that from?”  Because, as a general rule, if the quote always says “Shakespeare” but never says the play?  That means he never said it.  Anyway, somebody asks what play this wits quote is from.  The answer that came back was, and I’m not making this up, “It’s not in a play.  William Shakespeare the person said it.”

Oh.  Dear ChaCha answerer, if you have access to documents written by Mr. Shakespeare that the rest of us don’t know about, please share!  You could be a very, very rich person.

Explore more posts in the Not by Shakespeare category.