I almost included this in my previous post, but decided it needed its own entry. The lovely desdemona commented on one of my previous posts about difficult Shakespearean words:

My favorite misunderstood phrase:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

I was at the Globe and saw T-shirts that said this on one side, and then on the other: “Seriously, has anyone seen him?”

Of all places…

For shame, The Globe! “Wherefore” actually means “why,” not “where.”

One of the good things about No Fear Shakespeare (as opposed to the many bad things) is that it helps to clear up vocab issues like this. Watch these two entries here and here in the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest and you’ll see that “wherefore art thou Romeo?” actually means “why are you Romeo?” or some similar interpretation, not “where are you, Romeo?” as most people believe. The word wherefore is cleared up again in Julius Caesar by No Fear Shakespeare, as Shaksper.net points out:

“Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it.”- Act 5, Scene
1.

“I know how they think, and I understand why they’re doing this.”- Same
scene, No Fear Shakespeare translation.

If you like Caliban’s Island then you should most certainly subscribe to Shakespeare Geek if you haven’t already. It’s fantastic.

I was listening to Classic FM, a fantastic UK radio station, and I heard someone being interviewed compare the lyrical qualities of the music of John Dowland (1563-1626) to the writings of Will Shakespeare. From what I can tell, Dowland was all about longing, heartbreak, desire unfulfilled, and other elements of courtly love that are depressing but have nonetheless entertained us for centuries. (If you think about it, many modern pop songs are about pining for love unattainable or as yet unattained. We’re addicted to this stuff!)

Wikipedia reproduces a snippet from one of Dowland’s songs, Flow my Tears:

Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,

Exiled for ever, let mee mourn

Where night’s black bird hir sad infamy sings,

There let mee live forlorn.

Without citing examples, I’m going to take a chance and say Shakespeare didn’t take courtly love very seriously in his plays. Most of the examples of courtly love I can remember happened in Shakespeare’s comedies like Merry Wives of Windsor where the practice was rather mocked. But when it comes to his sonnets, my goodness! They’re all positively packed with melodramatic, bittersweet yearning and restrained desire. Here, I’ll flip to a random page in my book o’ sonnets and you’ll see…

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

…it makes me want to gag myself. I seriously just randomly flipped to that sonnet and the last two lines of it happen to more or less define courtly love.

I think the sonnets were like Shakespeare’s little diary that he kept hidden in his top drawer. You know, the one bound in pink with the little space for you to write your name (”This is the secret diary of _______… keep OUT!”) and the little lock on the side that your younger brother breaks open to get at your private thoughts. And there are little hearts doodled on the page margins.

Yeah.

I, for one, am glad that Will didn’t often make courtly love a dominant element of his major works (besides the obvious like Romeo and Juliet or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I hesitate to call that love courtly, either, per se).

When I shop for music CD’s* at Newbury Comics I make my purchase based on 3 things:

1. Personal recommendations or previous listens. Or, in the absence of either of those…
2. Cool cover art, and most importantly
3. Non-love-themed track titles.

I always, always check to make sure the songs aren’t all called Hey baby or I want you, baby or Be my baby, baby, etc., because I want something more creative than your typical love song. I want music that’s got a few good ideas, and while love songs can have amazing ideas the bulk of them are just chanting the same mantras of desire, lust, and heartbreak that you can find in 100 other places.

Yes, Will Shakespeare included a love story in almost every single one of his plays. But when you think of Titus Andronichus or Richard III or Macbeth or even The Winter’s Tale, do you think of a love story? I don’t. Each has its own emotions and motivations and messages that use love as a tool but don’t exist solely for the telling of the love story. And I think that’s good. People who live their whole lives for love miss out on some of the most exciting thoughts, endeavors, and personal journeys that exist outside of romance. There’s more to life than wooing and procreation. Those drive us, but other things steer us. Don’t be content with going in a straight line, focusing all your energy on the game of love.

That being said, try not to go entirely without love, either. I’m okay if the CD I buy at Newbury Comics has one or two love songs on it.

My point is, Shakespeare seemed to treat love in two distinct ways when he wrote, depending on whether he was writing a play or writing a sonnet. Sonnet Will is definitely Dowlandesque. And even though I seem to have an unhealthy aversion to love songs, I’ll give John Dowland a listen anyhow.

____________________

*I intentionally put that apostrophe in “CD’s.” Writing “CDs” looks weird to me. It’s like writing “I got all As on my report card” or “I grew up in the 1950s.” It just seems wrong without the apostrophe, even though you’re writing plurals and not possessives. “I got A’s.” “I’m from the 90’s.” Much better.

This post on The Chronicles of Ridicule (ho ho, get the pun? I don’t think the author looks all that much like Diesel, if that’s what he’s suggesting, though he does have cool shades) illustrates how often we all quote Will in our daily lives.

http://chronicridicule.blogspot.com/2005/02/dude-youre-quoting-shakespeare.html

(I try to link to all blog posts that use “dude” in the title. That’s what kind of Shakespeare blog I’m running, here.)

Below are all the phrases Crash talks about in his post, each hyperlinked to the instance where they’re used in the plays.

• “It’s all Greek to me.”
• “She is more sinned against than sinning.”
• “I recall my salad days.”
• “He acted more in sorrow than in anger.”
• “His wish was father to that thought.” (from one of my favorite scenes!)
• “They vanished into thin air.” (two possible sources)
• “I won’t budge an inch.”
• “…green-eyed jealousy.” (two possible sources)
• “He plays fast and loose.”
• “She’s tongue-tied!” (a bunch of instances)
• “I am a tower of strength.”
• “I’ve been hoodwinked!”
• “We’re in a pickle.”
• “He angrily knit his brow.” (strange: all but one instance of this expression appear in Henry VI, the other in The Rape of Lucrece)
• “We make a virtue of necessity.” (and a variant here)
• “It was fair play.”
• “I didn’t sleep a wink.”
• “We stood on ceremony.” (what does this mean?)
• “I laughed myself into stitches.”
• “Make short shrift.” (what does this mean?)
• “I received cold comfort.”
• “That was too much of a good thing.”
• “I’ve seen better days.”
• “You’re living in a fool’s paradise.”
• “I hate being a foregone conclusion.”
• “…as good luck would have it.”
• “It’s high time that I read Antony and Cleopatra.”
• “These are the early days.”
• “Out, with bag and baggage!”
• “That’s the long and short of it.”
• “The truth will out.” (and a variant here)
• “You are my own flesh and blood.”
• “…until the crack of doom.”
• “I suspect foul play.”
• “…with neither rhyme nor reason.”
• “Give the devil his due.”
• “If the truth were known.”
• “Keep a good tongue in your head.”
• “Good riddance.”
• “She sent me packing.” (I use this one a lot)
• “He’s dead as a doornail.”
• “Your hat is an eyesore.”
• “I’m the laughing stock of the neighborhood.”
• “My boss is the devil incarnate.”
• “You stony-hearted villain!”
• “That child is rather bloody-minded.”
• “What a blinking idiot.”
• “What the dickens?!”
• And lastly: “But me no buts” …does not come from Shakespeare. It comes from Henry Fielding. This expression is just one of myriad things that get attributed to The Bard just because he’s so famous and thus naturally serves as a catch-all for everything of suspect or unclear origin.

Enjoy poking around that list! As a final note, let me just say that, like the 1,500 words Shakespeare supposedly invented, all of the phrases above probably can’t be credited to The Bard’s imagination. Even if he didn’t coin them, however, he may have been the first to write them down.

Once again I bring you material from The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico. It’s a great book. This time I’ve compiled his list of “Troublesome Words Used in the Plays” into a BYKI list for your learning convenience (words and definitions are his).

You may have seen my other Shakespeare BYKI lists covering Falstaff’s vocabulary. What is BYKI? BYKI is an online tool you can use to learn pretty much anything, even though the company that develops the software, Transparent Language, is focused on using it to teach foreign languages. I think that BYKI is perfectly suited for learning Shakespearean vocabulary, so I make wordlists on occasion and offer them on this site. To use the widget, simply click “Start Learning” and choose a mode (try Recognize It to start).

Why use my BYKI widgets? Because if you know Shakespearean vocabulary before you read the plays, you’ll know the meanings of difficult words as you encounter them, which will allow you to enjoy the flow of the story uninterrupted. This will increase your enjoyment of the plays dramatically (no pun intended). It’s critical to know the meanings of words like

• Dispatch
• Office
• Troth
• Verily

or you’ll miss out on some great literature.

The list below covers all of Will’s plays, and while many of the definitions given are for specific instances of the word (for instance, “power” will not always mean “army,” but it does in Antony and Cleopatra, Act III Scene 7) it will still be useful to know how the words can be used in different contexts. If you ever want to find occurrences of a given word in Shakespeare’s plays, I suggest you try the advanced search feature at Open Source Shakespeare. It’s very thorough.

Without further ado, here’s the list…

NOTE: Some words may look like they’re supposed to be verbs, like “mew,” which means “confine,” but if I didn’t write “to” in front of the word then it’s not intended to be a verb. A mew is actually a thing: a confine or a cage.

‘Tis commonly proclaimed that Shakespeare invented about 1,500 English words. Michael LoMonico’s The Shakespeare Book of Lists enumerates some of the most contemporarily prominent of these words, including

• advertising
• bandit
• critic
• hush
• investment
• kissing
• numb
• shooting star
• undress
• yelping
• zany

(Find more here.) Some of these words are difficult to accept as possibly coined by Will Shakespeare. While words like “zany” or expressions like “shooting star” seem quite inventable, words that are simple, grammatical variants of preexisting words like “kissing” and “undress” (from bases “to kiss” and “to dress,” respectively) seem more like they must have been circulating orally before Will wrote them down. Thus, if you were to revise common wisdom to be more accurate, you’d say that Shakespeare’s works contain the oldest written instances of about 1,500 English words… the difference being that the latter allows for the likely possibility that Will didn’t invent a good number of those words but rather borrowed them from Elizabethan England’s spoken vernacular. If you had been the first person to use the word metrosexual in a novel, 500 years from now it might have looked like you invented it—when, in fact, you heard it from your college friends while discussing why your male roommate owns 24 pairs of shoes.

Yet what’s the likelihood that Will Shakespeare happened to be the first person to write down so many common English words? Weren’t people writing in English for a long time before that? Aside from the obvious possibility that prior usages have simply been lost to the ravages of time, The ‘Pedia notes that prior to the sixteenth century “legal matters in England were conducted in French, Latin had been used to write history, philosophy, and theology, and for the most part [English] writers did not write in their native tongue [of English].” Apparently, Latin, not English, had been the language of choice for writers and poets until Shakespeare’s time, so it’s really not that surprising that he might’ve been the first person to pen them.

And yet… perhaps it’s not so unlikely after all that Shakespeare might truly have invented a good number of the 1,500 terms accredited to his imagination. From the same Wikipedia article linked to above, we learn:

From nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin and Greek and other modern Romance languages, it is estimated that between the years of 1500 and 1659 30,000 new words were added to the English language.

Wow, that’s 189 words a year or one new word every two days! So perhaps Shakespeare could’ve been making up all those words; everybody seemed to be doing it.

Such a rapid pace of linguistic creation seems strange for a time like the sixteenth century, when travel was arduous and communities were much smaller. Things tended change at a slower pace. But something special had appeared in the 1430’s that changed the pace of the spread of information in Europe: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. Suddenly more people could afford books, more people could read, and more text started being written in English. With so much new material and worldly attention giving it bigger shoes to fill, the English language was forced to grow. The language lacked a decent vocabulary and simply needed more words. From this perspective, it becomes more believable that Will could’ve invented a fair number of the words attributed to him… especially words like “puke” (which Shakespeare may have borrowed from German).

And let me tell you, 189 new English terms a year is nothing compared to the number of words invented annually in the face of the most modern technological marvel: the World Wide Web, which has had the effect of Gutenberg’s printing press times a thousand in terms of making information more widely available and connecting people. Think about how often you see unfamiliar terms in the vernaculars of techies, gamers, marketers, bloggers, and every other community nowadays. For instance, read the example for usage of the word “wi-five,” a gamer term, as defined by The Urban Dictionary:

wi-five December 11

It’s a high five that doesn’t involve actually contact, normally over a long distance where a real high-five isn’t possible. Mix of “wireless” and “high-five”, hence “wi-five” (wireless high-five).

Iain (yelling across the room): Dude, that mess was teh pwnz. Wi-five, brosef
Eric (in response): You need to chill with that nano shit, son

Forget the word “wi-five;” would you be as clueless as me if someone said to you, “You need to chill with that nano shit?” New English is constantly being forged by everyday authors, thinkers, and casual users of the Internet. And it’s being recognized by very legitimate authorities of language: Merriam-Webster just announced that its 2007 Word of the Year is “w00t.” Just check out some of these great sites that are entirely devoted to rooting out and defining new words on the fringes of English:

• The Urban Dictionary
• Double-Tongued Dictionary
• Wordspy

Each one of these posts multiple entries per day and still can’t keep up with the actual pace of linguistic creation. (Try subscribing to some of these by RSS or email… they’re fun!) My point is, if we invent dozens of words a day in the face of the technological and cultural revolution that is the Internet, then it’s not so hard to imagine that Will might have been inventing words like crazy in the face of the English language’s growth-spurt, spawned by a different but no less significant technological achievement.

Whether he really made them or not, Will Shakespeare gets popular credit for those 1,500 words. While you’ll probably never rack up so many yourself, if you stay on the cutting-edge of the English language you may, one day, get your own citation in the Double-Tongued Dictionary and live on forever in our lexicon… just like The Bard himself. Only slightly less famous.

Art contribution by MuLaN™.

I had a lot of fun last night: the world premier of Panoply, an original play by 11:11 Theatre, opened on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, MA, and I was part of it. Magnificent fun, acting. But surprising as well. Not only does one learn a lot about themselves when they act, but they also learn quite a bit about audiences.

Audiences are just people, but they’re a particular mix of people, living in a particular time and place. Their reactions to the story being told to them may vary depending not only on the day of the week and hour of the performance, but also the much larger social and historical contexts of their lives. Also, their reactions depend heavily on the quality of the story’s authorship and its storytellers.

You already know all this. But it provides a context for the observation that Shakespeare’s humorous moments aren’t necessarily funny to a modern audience. “Yes, duh,” you mutter as your mouse drifts to the Close button on your browser. But wait! This is important: it’s not just that we read a Shakespearean joke and judge it to be either 1) funny or 2) not funny. Rather, there are several layers of humor that, as they go deeper, become more and more invisible to us but, if understood, could lead you to a much deeper understanding of Will’s world and his plays (mind you, I’m not implying here that I have anything beyond a shallow understanding of these things–I am also a student, not an expert, of Shakespeare’s works, so let’s learn together!).

Before I list the layers, I feel it’s appropriate to quote Donald Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are “known knowns”; there are things we know we know. We also know there are “known unknowns”; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also “unknown unknowns” — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
(Thanks, ‘Pedia.)

People laughed at this quote because the word “know” is repeated 14 times in some form or another, but they shouldn’t have laughed. Its message is important and relevant to understanding almost anything. To illustrate, I will now (finally) make up, I mean explain the four layers of humor in Will’s plays:

1. Humor we get
2. Humor we know we don’t get (for instance, when you don’t know what “maidenhead” means, you can’t quite get the pun @ Rom.I.1.39, even though it’s probably obvious to you that a pun takes place at that spot)
3. Humor we know is probably humor but is going over our heads (for instance, you naturally assume that everything Falstaff says in Henry IV is supposed to be funny but you’re not quite able to tell why)
4. Humor we didn’t even know was supposed to be humor

It’s layer #4 that I came across while reading The Merry Wives of Windsor, inspiring me to write this post. An insult, delivered by Pistol, labels Falstaff as a “Base Phrygian Turk” (Wiv.I.3.86). If I hadn’t glanced at the Pelican’s footnotes, I never, ever would have recognized this as a funny thing to say. In fact, I had to go back to the ‘Pedia and do research to figure out why this is funny. It turns out that although Phrygia does, in fact, exist in Turkey, it would have been remembered by Elizabethans as a mostly mythological region in ancient Turkey that acted as an ally to Troy in the fabled Trojan War. So calling Falstaff a “Base (low) Turk” would have been one thing, but calling him a “Base Phrygian Turk” makes no sense, crisscrossing times and places, and demonstrates the ill-educated nature of Pistol’s wit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I know. It’s not all that funny. And I didn’t even know it was supposed to be funny to begin with! But that illustrates my point: Pistol says a lot of things similar to this, and in order to fully appreciate his character you have to educate yourself to recognize jokes an Elizabethan would get but a modern reader/observer would miss. Otherwise, you’ll think Pistol’s a complete waste of space, and he’s not; he’s a strong comic presence.

Try a handful of simple things:

1. Look up words you don’t know. Sometimes this will lead you recognize humor you didn’t know was there.
2. Pay attention to the presence of misspellings and homophones.
3. When a line seems to come from nowhere, investigate. There’s probably a reason for its existence, and it may be humorous. To your inner-Elizabethan.
4. Read annotated versions of the plays (it’s actually hard to find non-annotated versions of the plays) and pay attention to the notes. After a while you’ll start to pick up on patterns yourself.
5. Go watch good Shakespearean actors perform the plays. If they really are doing their job, they’ll somehow let you know when humor is afoot. Then you can investigate afterwards if you like. (Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado comes to mind: when Benedick is talking about “hanging his bugle in an invisible baldrick” (Ado.I.1.230) Ken delivers the line whimsically even though most of us have no freaking idea what he’s talking about.)

The world premiere of Panoply went smashingly well, I think, and both the actors and the audience were pleased with the way it turned out. But I was still shocked by the points at which the audience responded with laughter versus the points at which they responded with silence. I suppose audiences are all unique, just like the stories that are told to them, and we can’t always see all the layers of humor, emotion, and social context at play before them.

It’s funny: no matter how hard you try, it’s difficult to come up with Shakespeare-related terms that haven’t been used yet. The world is Shakespeare-saturated. (Strange, then, that I somehow managed to snag www.will-shakespeare.com).

Today I discovered that a small theater group out of San Diego named Talent to aMuse produced a play in October 2007 called Caliban’s Island that merged The Tempest with the cast of Gilligan’s Island. I kid thee not. An online news source covers it here.

As bizarre as this may seem, I admit that I’ve often thought about what it would be like to create Shakespeare “what if” crossover plays (I do this while the rest of you are reading up on the 2008 presidential elections… you time-wasters). For instance, just yesterday I imagined how it would play out if Macbeth usurped the throne of Denmark and was revenged upon by Hamlet. The two stories could fit surprisingly well in many ways. You could weave other characters from the two plays into the story as well (for instance, you could have the Weird Sisters channel Hamlet’s father’s spirit instead of him appearing directly to Hamlet). Like my blog title, I’m sure that kind of idea is far from original. In fact, I’m sure of it.