You might produce some personalized lines from this Hamlet passage if you’ve done something you regret to someone close to you:

Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong; 
But pardon’t, as you are a gentleman. 
This presence knows, 
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d 
With sore distraction. What I have done 
That might your nature, honour, and exception 
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. 
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. 
If Hamlet from himself be taken away, 
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, 
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. 
Who does it, then? His madness. If’t be so, 
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; 
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. 
Sir, in this audience, 
Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil 
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts 
That I have shot my arrow o’er the house 
And hurt my brother.

(Ham.V.2.213-231)

…I would not necessarily recommend, however, taking this position in a situation where something real, like a friendship, is at stake.  Can we truly blame our gravest errors, transgressions, and wrongdoings on our past states of mind as if they were other people, disconnected from our present selves?  It’s comforting to think so.  But saying so may insult the person you’re trying to apologize to.  Instead of saying it wasn’t “you” that did something wrong, I recommend admitting the fault and following with a true apology.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

Mind map—Wikipedia

Tony Buzan, a British writer, has created a standard set of guidelines for making successful mind maps (see 7 Steps to Making a Mind Map on Tony’s mind maps page). Although mind maps don’t contain as much detailed information as a page of text, they do use evocative imagery and trigger-words to inspire new thoughts and connections in your brain more rapidly than any paragraph of words ever could. Some do a better job of this than others, but after glancing at a few mind maps it becomes clear that there’s something valuable about the format’s ability to convey relationships between ideas with such ease.

Included in the selection of reader-submitted mind maps is a Shakespeare mind map. Visually, it leaves something to be desired (it doesn’t follow a couple of Tony’s best practices for mind maps, namely using lots of colors and images throughout the map) but a perusal of the branches does begin to cause my brain to buzz; I begin to think about the plays in the context of their meaning, purpose, audience, and venue. All of the emotions Shakespeare’s works have ever aroused in me come flooding back into my memory. Just the experience of revisiting collected memories and having the opportunity to create fresh associations between them makes reading mind maps an invaluable exercise. Especially since it takes so little time.

But reading mind maps isn’t the only way to create fresh associations in your brain. Especially when it comes to the works of William Shakespeare. As someone who abhors routine and cannot maintain a predicable schedule, I tend not to be able to choose how and when I will absorb Shakespearean media. Sometimes it’s audio, in my car, sometimes it’s by reading the plays on a quiet weekend morning in my kitchen, sometimes it’s reading articles and other Shakespeare blogs on my computer at lunch, and sometimes it’s by watching performances on my television or at some venue in Boston or Cambridge. I’ve found that, while each choice offers experiences the others lack, it is in the combining of these multiple strategies that gets my brain making valuable connections. Just being a Shakespeare playgoer, or just being a Shakespearean actor, or just reading books by Shakespearean scholars isn’t enough if you want to learn something new. You should mix your poisons, so to speak, and beyond that try and connect other things you do back to William Shakespeare and see what your brain comes up with in response.

LibriVox is a fantastic free resource where public-domain works are recorded by volunteers from around the world, at home on their computers. Their selection of Shakespeare includes:

Henry IV Part 1
King Lear
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
Romeo and Juliet

There’s lots more on LibriVox, including sonnets and works in progress.

Ever heard of Shakespeare fan fiction? Well, now you have. I referenced this particular piece in an earlier post, but I felt it needed its own spotlight:

Enjoy. Good luck.

by Kirsty McGill

What on earth are you supposed to talk about in a Shakespeare essay? You know what happens in the story, but short of re-writing it in your own words you’re stuffed—right?

Wrong! There is an easy way of making sure you’ve talked about everything you need to (and possibly sounded intelligent about it too!):

It’s called the CLASI system, which stands for:

• Character
• Language
• Action
• Structure
• Ideas

It works like this:

• Whatever your question, you need to consider the relationships between characters. It might help you to draw a diagram (scribbled or otherwise) linking all the characters so you have this clear in your head before you start. Quite often with Shakespeare plays, it is often important which characters know what, so you might want to add that to your diagram.
• Shakespeare’s language is very different from ours today, so it is important to note the differences. What Shakespeare thought was an insult may seem silly to us.
  Also, the characters had different ways of speaking in different situations. As a guide, look for prose (ordinary speaking) amongst common characters and people who are looking down on others, look for blank verse in “well-to-do” characters speaking to each other (lines with 10 syllables but no rhymes) and sonnets when people are talking to their superiors or loved ones (sections of speech with rhymes)
• The actions section is where you talk about motives—why are the characters doing what they are? What do they do when faced with a situation? Your diagram about characters might help here.
• You need to mention the structure of the play as a whole to explain how a theme is treated or why a particular problem occurs in the plot. Most GCSE essays on Shakespeare ask you to look at a little bit of the play, but it is important to fit that little bit into the bigger picture of the play. Don’t waffle away describing the whole play, but do talk about how the characters ended up at that point and what the consequences of their actions will be.
• Finally, ideas are the core of any story or play. What are the themes of the play and how do you see those in the section you are studying? What is Shakespeare trying to say to you as the audience? In many plays there are themes of violence, love, family feuds and other familiar ideas. Why do these themes still appeal today? You could mention modern film versions of any Shakespeare plays that you might have seen and why people still want to see them.Make sure you order your points so that you actually answer the question you are being asked with a logical argument and put quotes to support each point. If you can jot down notes under each of the CLASI headings, then you should have enough material to fill out your essay.

They do not love that do not show their love.
(TGV.I.2.108)

This quote might be useful if you want to take a lover to task, very gently, for what you might see as reluctance in expressing their feelings. Beware though, as this could open a Pandora’s box you might later wish you’d left well and truly closed! Still, it’s a good quote to remind us all that a show of appreciation now and then is always gratefully received.

Photo by batega.

Love’s Labour’s Lost or Love’s Labor’s Lost?

Google Fight says they’re tied. No matter which one you choose, people searching for one will have trouble finding the other. I want to lean toward using the “u,” simply because that’s how Shakespeare wrote “labour.” But maybe Google is trying to standardize on American English? And if that’s the case, I should write the title without the “u.”

I’m definitely going to lose sleep over this.

Last night I helped to spike the set for 11:11 Theatre Company’s new play, Syllabus of Errors. The time came for me to choose which books in my library would appear on the desk of my character, David, a respected physics professor at Amherst College. Naturally I kept trying to fit Shakespeare into his collection. It was disappointing, in the end, to realize that David probably doesn’t read Shakespeare. Not because he’s a “math guy” as opposed to an “English guy”—there’s probably a converse relationship between teaching physics and loving literature—but simply because I don’t think he’d be into theatrical fiction. Or even fiction in general. He’s too practical. Too convinced that things like Shakespeare aren’t grounded enough in the real world to be worth becoming intimate with. Theatre, as a very critiquable, subjective, and publically vulnerable method of expression would probably scare someone who needs to have all his ideas sorted and rationalized prior to having conversations. Tossing convictions frivolously around a stage in front of hundreds of people probably seems childish to him. Irrational. Too emotional.

The issue of what it means to be a “rational” person as opposed to an “emotional” person has come up a lot for me recently, in both my personal life and on the stage. I think that, in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare, or even most theatre in general, you have to be a little bit susceptible to your emotions. David isn’t. He doesn’t think his emotions will get him anywhere. He puts too much weight on thinking things through at a desk.

It’s exactly that point of view that thousands of very intelligent academic folks make when they address Shakespeare. They focus far too much on the intellectual nature of the works. The parallels. The allegories. The lessons. The history. The hidden messages. Overthinking the words will kill their meaning (not to mention their wit and freshness); sometimes you have to feel them to learn from them. Sometimes that gets you farther than dismissing emotional impact as a side-effect of great literature. Maybe emotions are great literature. Indeed, much of the action in Will’s greatest plays (Hamlet, for one) doesn’t make sense if it’s rationalized. How can Hamlet be so bloodthirsty and eager for revenge at one moment as to kill Polonius, thinking him to be the Claudius, without even checking to see who it was, when at other times he’s seemingly able to hold relatively civil discourse with Claudius? It feels inconsistent. …Until you put yourself in Hamlet’s shoes. Then it feels real. Nobody makes rational decisions in a situation like Hamlet’s. They make emotional ones. And you have to be an emotional audience member to be able to understand that properly.

So I left Shakespeare off of David’s desk. Instead, he’s got nonfiction. Nice, rational explorations of fact followed by clearly marked paragraphs of opinion. You might think that choosing these sorts of books makes David more of a grownup. But I think, instead, it makes him less of one. He’s failed to recognize the importance of feeling those scary emotions that Shakespeare and other playwrights explore so often.

I tend to do the same thing. So maybe it’s time I stopped. Thanks, David, for a wonderful lesson.

(P.S. If you’re around Boston this week, come see the show.)

When someone exits a room in a melodramatic fashion, most specifically when they are overacting the part of “the poor victim” or making a tragedy of something trivial, you might quote Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing:

Alas, poor hurt fowl, now will he creep into
sedges.
(II.1.192-193)

Depending on your company, you may want to limit the size of the quote to “Alas, poor hurt fowl!” because then you won’t have to explain what sedges are.