Capon

Keeping with the food theme, today’s word is capon. Still a popular dish in France and elsewhere on the continent, it is no longer enjoyed as much in Britain as it was in Shakespeare’s time. To be precise, a capon, according to the OED, is a castrated cockerel, overfed,and served as a delicacy.

Hamlet, Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline…all contain a capon. Falstaff is particularly fond of the dish: Poins finds a bill for  two shillings and two pence worth of capon in Falstaff’s pocket, and Hal, teasing his old friend, rhetorically asks of him,

Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it?

Given Falstaff’s breezy relation with the law, it’s a little ironic that Jacques, in As You Like It, has capon down as a dish to be enjoyed in the fifth stage of a man’s life,

And then the Justice In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes a severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances…

That’s all for this week. More wise saws coming soon!

Word of the Day: Baker

One of the raving Ophelia’s most mysterious lines goes:

Well, God dild you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. (4.v)

Ever wonder what she’s talking about?

This is a reference to popular the medieval legend of Jesus asking for a loaf at a baker’s. The folk story tells us that the mistress then dutifully put one in the oven for him, but the daughter said it was too large and halved it. However, it swelled to an enormous size, and the daughter was transformed into an owl as a punishment. Reference to the legend here is possibly also related to discussion of gratitude and ingratitude; in addition, the metamorphosis, which in Ovid often happens to a woman after some kind of sexual trauma, is linked to Ophelia’s unsure position and degeneration into madness.

And now you know! (courtesy of Jude and Colette)

XML and the Natural Language Toolkit

I’ve been playing with the nltk (natural language toolkit) and the really useful Jon Bosak xml annotated corpus these days,  and  this are some of the graphs I’ve been able to parse after analyzing the speech of the main characters of the play (characters that say more than 100 lines of code:

exclamations and interrogations

Here we can see that Macduff is screaming a lot, and that when everybody talks is never to question, but to assert… Poor Macbeth and Lady Macduff question everything, while Lady Macbeth just as much as asserting.

Regarding amount of words in the play, by far Macbeth is the one that talks more:

amount of words spoken by main characters

But what about lexical variety? In this next graph, we can see the variety of the words:

Macbeth - lexical variety

Here we can see the variety of characters speech.

The brown-ish words are said just once per character. The light greens are word that will repeat on their speech, and the dark greens are repetitions of the light green words. I still need to take more measures to see if this is actually the way everybody speaks: by repeating a lot of small words with just some new words once in a while. (There are more words that appear just once, than the words you will repeat through most of your speech! Think about it!)

Musings on Technology

I’ve just been reading my way through the transcript of Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare: they are an absolutely fascinating insight into past critical preconceptions, and contain the first seeds of many ideas we now take for granted, such as, for example, the psychological dilemma of Hamlet. Many of the most interesting moments in the lectures seem to come from the powerful combination of Coleridge’s mind and the medium of public speaking. This got me thinking, and wondering whether the introduction of new media to Shakespeare always has a role to play in new appreciations of the playwright. Shakespeare himself was sharply aware of the limitations and advantages of the Elizabethan stage, and translations of his plays to the cinema have led to new patterns of emphasis in his works. Who can forget the St Crispin day speech from Henry V in Olivier’s film?

The Open Shakespeare project is, to a large extent, introducing a new medium to Shakespeare criticism: the internet. Our annotation tools should go live soon, and soon anyone will be able to leave a record of their response to Shakespeare online. The advantage of the internet is to add an completely democratic input to the existing advantages of computer-based criticism: easy correction, the capacity to perform complex statistical analysis quickly, and many others. What the new breed of technocriticism will look like is anyone’s guess.

That said, there are already many blogs on Shakespeare, and each charts a personal and technologically-informed response to the playwright. Two you may like to visit are: 38:38, which follows the adventures of reading all 38 plays of Shakespeare in 38 days; and A Year of Shakespeare, where one man seeks to read the entirety of Shakespeare’s opus in a year, commenting on this and many other things along the way.

To return to Open Shakespeare, and our own plans for technocriticism, one must admit that there will of course be problems: some type of peer-review may be necessary to prevent people from spamming the plays, and certain elements of the site may need a modicum of protection. However, Wikipedia has met and surmounted these problems with a fair degree of success, so I can’t see why we could not do so too. For every problem, there is also an advantage, and one of the greatest is the flexibility of our working model.

All the technology for our site is ‘open‘, and we have many ideas on how to expand it. These include the incorporation of video, of recorded drama, and the possibility of a ‘My Open Shakespeare’. This latter project would allow everyone to create their own collection of favourite or useful quotations into an anthology that they could access at any time, anywhere in the world. They may even be able to then make use of the fast-growing ‘print-on-demand’ industry to produce their own Shakespeare Anthology as a tool or a gift. Once annotation begins in earnest, we shall ourselves aim to produce the first ‘Open Knowledge Shakespeares’: drawing on the knowledge of the online community to produce the first democratic editions of Shakespeare, whose models anyone could download and print.

These are just a few of the possibilities available to us: do get in touch if you have suggestions of your own, or would like to help realise these ambitions. I feel Coleridge would have had a lot to say about this project, and I’ll finish with one of his most laudatory claims for Shakespeare.

Shakespeare built upon everything that was absolutely necessary to our existence, and consequently must be permanent while we continue men.

Open Shakespeare @ the ADC

Open Shakespeare is continuing to advertise itself around Cambridge. This week, audience members at the ADC Theatre’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ will find one of our flyers in their programmes.

We’re very grateful for the ADC’s support, so do go along to see the play if you can. It runs from Tuesday 23rd to Saturday 27th at 7.45pm (with a Saturday matinee at 2.30pm), and looks set to be a very stylish production…

Facebook, Newspaper Article, and Other Things

The Open Shakespeare Project has been getting some more publicity recently: we have founded a facebook group, with an amazing picture; and a student newspaper, Varsity, has published an article on our work.

In other news, I need to point out that the translation of Hamlet published on the website is one dating from around 1830, and that we will be trying to get more modern translations up soon. That said, Guizot’s work, as well as being conveniently outside of copyright, is also interesting in its own right: it was one of the earliest unadulterated translations published in France, and both influenced and provoked future translators. Since then, there have been many more, and, doubtless, there are many more to come…

Look out for this week’s word of the week, courtesy of Colette and arriving soon!

Shakespeare en Français

Bonsoir tout le monde,

If you’ve ever wondered what Hamlet looks like in French, you can now find out via the Open Shakespeare website. The standalone text, based on Guizot’s translation of Shakespeare can be found here.

If you want to see how good a job Guizot did, you can compare the English Hamlet with the French one here.

There’s some work to do on streamlining the system to make uploading further translations a bit easier, but hopefully one day you’ll be able to trace Shakespeare’s progress around the globe through our website. (Please forgive the pun).

Pour l’instant, amusez-vous bien de Hamlet!

Lapwing

Better late than never, this week’s word is LAPWING.

The name given to a variety of species of crested plover, the lapwing is associated with forwardness and decisiveness (ironically) in Hamlet, based on the legend that the chick would burst out of their egg so quickly that the remained engrained on their head. As Horatio says of Osric,

This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head. (V.2)

It is also associated with deceit and treachery – an association which Shakespeare inherited from Chaucer’s description of the bird in The Parliament of Fowls – given its habit of luring other birds from their nests by flying past them. In Measure for Measure, the roguish Lucio admits to Isabella:

… ’tis my familiar sin,
with maids to seem the lapwing and to jest
tongue far from heart (I.4)

‘The lapwing cries tongue far from heart’ went on to become a proverb.

To see the plays that this week’s word is taken from, see Open Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Open Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

And, if you want to volunteer a future word of the week, or get involved with Open Shakespeare more generally, click here.

Incarnadine

Each week, a member of the Open Shakespeare team will be selecting a word of the week to be displayed on the site’s front page. This could be one of the thousands of words Shakespeare coined, or a pre-existing word he used in a noteworthy way:

This week’s word is INCARNADINE.

When it first appeared in the 1590s, it meant ‘flesh-coloured’. Shakespeare was the first person to use it as a verb rather than an adjective, when Macbeth finds himself unable to wash the murdered Duncan’s blood from his hands:

No; this hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine Making the green one red (Macbeth, II.ii.77)

The striking juxtaposition of ‘incarnadine’ with ‘red’ was memorable enough to lead to a subtle redefinition from ‘flesh-coloured’ to ‘blood-stained’. When later poets such as Cowper, Longfellow and Byron used the word, they were alluding to this definition – and, indeed, to this very scene.

To see the full play that this week’s word is taken from, visit our copy of Macbeth.

And, if you want to volunteer a future word of the week, or get involved with Open Shakespeare more generally, please visit our site.

New introductions

Click on the links below to read the most recently uploaded short introductions – and, of course, the plays that go with them:

The Winter’s Tale

Titus Andronicus

King John

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Love’s Labour’s Lost

As You Like It