Open Shakespeare Out of Hibernation

Exam season is finishing, our free time is returning, and Open Shakespeare is coming back to life. We held a short meeting yesterday evening, and can now announce what we intend to do in the near future:

EXPAND: there will be an Open Shakespeare Party in Emmanuel Fellows’ Garden, Cambridge at 3pm on 14th June. Be there if you can, and if you can’t visit our newly refined ‘Get Involved’ page.

WRITE: the first round of introductions will soon be completed, but we want to welcome more submissions, especially if they build upon the work of previous writers.

BLOG: the Word of the Day feature will be back with us very soon, and will hopefully expand in terms of both writers and articles. The blog itself has already had a little bit of an overhaul, and some out-of-date material will be replaced over the coming weeks.

TEACH: following suggestions made at OKCON, we are proposing the use of Open Shakespeare as a classroom aid. Through this we help to raise the profile of the project, and offer a new way for school children to collaboratively engage with Shakespeare.

These are the main points of the meeting, whose minutes are available for perusal. It remains only for me to quote Nestor, in Troilus and Cressida, and say that this post is only a hint of what’s ahead, and yet…

in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.

Introduction: Cymbeline

A play of politics and prophecy, masques and magic, gods and ghosts, nightmares and nationalism, Cymbeline (c. 1609-11) resists categorization.

Like The Winter’s Tale it traces a fine line between comedy and tragedy; like Antony and Cleopatra it vacillates between the epic scale of the histories and the intimate focus of the romances. But perhaps speculations about genre have no place around Cymbeline. The words of Arviragus, a kidnapped prince raised in a cave, suggest that the play takes a less genre-directed approach to storytelling:

What should we speak of
When we are as old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.

The whole action of the play is motivated by the desire to create a great story. Shakespeare seeks out the intrigue that creates narrative, and pursues complexities of genre and theme with abandon. Like the princes straining at their “pinching cave”, the play expands from the enclosed gardens of the English court circa AD 5 to 42, to the Welsh wilderness, via Rome – all in pursuit of a good story.

When the Roman Caius Lucius cannot wrest tribute from Cymbeline’s court, he tells the Britons, “The day was yours by accident”. Cymbeline relishes accident, chance, and hazard: bed-tricks, cross-dressing, and disguises lead to the birth of political Britain, resurrections, and a beheading.

Accidents create stories with which to “discourse / The freezing hours away”. The long-view of epic which, in Act III, sees Britain imagined as “a swan’s nest” in “a great pool”, zooms in, in Act V, on a lovers’ embrace. Posthumus, finally embracing Imogen, says, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die”. The newlyweds have travelled far; they have mistaken each other for an adulterer and a headless corpse, but in the final scene they are reunited, and tell each other their stories.

Cymbeline is characterized by a fascination with dramaturgy. It often provokes elaborate staging, particularly when Jupiter descends from the heavens riding an eagle! Spectacularly elaborate productions have included Peter Hall’s (1988) and JoAnne Akalaitis’s (1989), while Mike Alfreds (2001) let the audiences’ imaginations negotiate the scope of the story, using only 6 actors and no scenery.

Since George Bernard Shaw’s description of Cymbeline as ‘exasperating beyond all tolerance’ (1896), the play as been considered difficult to stage. However, modern cinema is surely equipped to negotiate the twists and turns of the fantastical plot of Cymbeline. Considering the 21st century’s taste for epic tales like The Lord of the Rings and Avatar, a film which unleashes the diverse potentials of Cymbeline is long overdue.

Contributed by Hazel Wilkinson

Word of the Day: Bilbo

Perhaps there will one day be a site called ‘Open Tolkein’. Until then, allow me to draw your attention to the occurences of the name of one of the Old Inkling’s most famous characters in the works of the Bard.

Although there are many fairies and spirits in Shakespeare’s works, and the occasionaly talking animal, there is a notable shortage of hobbits, let alone hobbit names. What then would ‘bilbo’ mean?

The word is quintessentially Elizabethan: its first recorded use in English is by Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and available examples decline rapidly after 1630, resurfacing only to add historical tone to such later works as Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock of 1826. In all these examples, ‘bilbo’ means a type of sword, or, as an extension of this, a swashbuckling bully, one wearing of a ‘bilbo’. This is the sense of the word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, used as Falstaff describes his ignonimous concealment in a laundry basket:

FALSTAFF…I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that

The word ‘bilbo’ comes from ‘Bilbao’ or ‘Bilboa’, a town in Northern Spain that was renowned for its ironwork during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such ironwork included swords that were, according to the OED, “noted for the temper and elasticity of its blade”, but also comprised other products, one of which finds its way into a very famous speech by Hamlet.

HAMLET Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutinies in the bilboes. Rashly,
And prais’d be rashness for it,–let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,
When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

“The mutinies in the bilboes” are sailors or soldiers convicted of mutiny and punished by being attached to “A long iron bar, furnished with sliding shackles to confine the ankles of prisoners, and a lock by which to fix one end of the bar to the floor or ground”. Good quality spanish iron prevented any thoughts of escape, but was pliable enough to be shaped into shackles. Hamlet mentioning the word may also suggest that his thoughts are already turning towards his duel with Laertes, which may well have been conducted with bilbo-swords.

Thus concludes our tour of Spain, ironmongery, existentialism and laundry baskets. One final thought: Tolkein, as far as I know, never revealed the origin of his hobbit’s name, but, bearing in mind that Bilbo’s destiny is shaped first by the forged ring but also by the beautifully crafted sword, Sting, he bears, one might suggest that Tolkein, well-read academic that he was, was making a crafty little reference to a scarce-noted word in Shakespeare’s works.

Word of the Day: Parrot

There are nine occurances of this word in Shakespeare, which first entered the English language with Skelton’s satirical Speke Parrot around 1525. The nine instances focus on a variety of the bird’s aspects, and not just the most obvious. Testament, one supposes, to Shakespeare’s powers of perception, or, given his resemblance to a pirate in the Chandos portrait, perhaps even proof of a long and hitherto unsuggested experience with parrots.

Rather unsurprisingly, Shakespeare makes use of the parrot’s well known imitative abilities: Benedick calls Beatrice a “rare parrot teacher” for the way in which she teasingly repeats his words against him at the start of Much Ado About Nothing. Similarly drawing on the idea of repetition, Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice sighs,

How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence,
and discourse grow commendable in none only but
parrots. Go in, sirrah; bid them prepare for dinner.

Less obvious observations on parrots also abound….

…Their noisy responses to the rain (As You Like It) and to bagpipes (The Merchant of Venice)

…Their habitual scratching of their head (Henry IV pt II)

…And, last but not least, the association between parrots and lechery:

THERSITES. Would I could meet that rogue Diomed! I would croak like a raven; I would bode, I would bode. Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore; the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!

The association turns on the fact that parrots enjoyed ‘nuts’, and in Elizabethan times, as now, nuts had sexual overtones. Froth is described as “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes” in Measure for Measure, for example.

Thus concludes Shakespeare’s observations on parrots, bagpipes, and sex. More soon.

Word of the day: Quintessence

…as found in the quintessentially Shakespearean ‘What a piece of work is man!’ speech from Hamlet. ‘Quintessence of dust’ marks the speech’s turning point: the former word is the last gasp of Hamlet’s ironic praise for mankind, the latter is the first explicit admittance of his estrangement from others:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

The OED cites this speech as a reference for its third definition of quintessence: ‘the most perfect embodiment of a certain type of person or thing’. But, for an early seventeenth-century audience, the word had a metaphorical quality which it has since lost: ‘quintessence’ was the mysterious ‘fifth element’ that was responsible for combining the other four and giving a particular substance its character; one of the key projects of alchemy was to expose this quintessence. So, for Hamlet, ‘man’ is something simultaneously fundamental and slightly pathetic – and, whatever it is, it always lies just out of his reach…

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

Happy New Year!

The first few weeks of 2010 have seen the Open Shakespeare team writing more short introductions – roughly two-thirds of the canon now has an introduction on the site or ready to upload. We are also sorting out the last few issues with our annotation software, and preparing a longer introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times – watch this space…

Latest Developments on Open Shakespeare (v0.8)

The last six months have seen significant developments on our Open Shakespeare project, many of which have are reflected on the website: http://www.openshakespeare.org/

The most major advance is the availability of new HTML and PDF editions of the texts, see, for example, these versions of Twelfth Night:

• http://www.openshakespeare.org/resource/view/92/twelfth-night-moby/
• http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/twelfth_night_moby.pdf

We’ve also made improvements to multiview, cleaned up the web interface, revamped the domain model (proper Work/Edition/Resource distinction), and much more!

Going forward our main efforts are, on the “tech” side, to integrate a new (javascript) annotation system, and on the content side it’s developing our open “critical edition” (an effort now being led by some students at Oxford and Cambridge).

We’re also holding a regular Open Shakespeare (virtual) meetup every other Saturday @ 4pm (London time) with the next one this coming Saturday (the 24th). All are welcome, so if you’re interested in Shakespeare why not drop in — details for how to participate are on the project wiki page.

More Text Up from Shakespeare’s Entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition

Another 3 pages (4600 words) are up from the EB 11 Entry on Shakespeare covering most of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. Current material can be found on:

Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition page

Source version (plain text in subversion) can be found at:

http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/shksprdata/ancillary/britannica-11th.txt

Open Shakespeare / Milton Mini Hackathon and Planning Session

After a fairly quiet period over the last 6 months development will be hotting up again thanks to discussion at Open Knowledge 2008 and the involvement of Iain Emsley (who will be focusing especially on a sister Milton project). To kick this off we’re planning a mini-hackathon:

• Wiki page: (sign up here) http://www.okfn.org/wiki/MiniEvents
• When: Saturday 26th of April. Start at 1400 and run until ~ 1900
• How long: Whatever time you can spare. Be it an hour or the whole afternoon.
• How to join in: log in to the irc channel, announce yourself, and then just crack on with one of the work items (see below)
  • irc channel: #okfn on irc.oftc.net
• What: plan and work on Open Shakespeare / Milton
  • trac: http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/roadmap
  • Current tickets: http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/report/1
  • For those not inclined to coding there’s plenty else to do. In particular we need to finish off proof editing Britannica entry, see http://okfn.org/wiki/tmp/BritannicaShakespeare