These pictures and videos got me thinking about something I said about Open Shakespeare’s annotation tool at OKCON, that by allowing people to digitally annotate we would collect and preserve a continuously evolving catalogue of responses to Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s Staging has done something similar, but, whereas Open Shakespeare is concerned with the text, this site records the response of actors and directors to what Shakespeare wrote. Each performance is, after all, its own unique (re)presentation and interpretation of the text.

The overlap between our work is obvious, and the next step of the process seems clear. If we accept that Open Shakespeare should allow anyone to contribute and share their responses to Shakespeare, and if we decide that performance of a play is itself a response to Shakespeare, then our website should expand to allow records of performances to be included. Such records can exist in written form (I think of that Swiss doctor’s description of a performance of Julius Caesar in 1599), but also as images or videos. Each media in turn brings its own problems. A video recaptures the experience of one spectator, but is one spectator’s view representative of the whole audience’s experience? An image captures a moment, a mood, but gains its force through exclusion. Text can only appeal to the eyes and the ears via the brain.

Given the weaknesses of each medium as a record of responses to Shakespeare, the only reasonable conclusion is to adopt a composite approach. Discussion has begun on how best to do this given the current framework of Open Shakespeare, and if anyone reading this has anything to contribute, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

And because I cannot write a blog post without quoting Shakespeare, please allow me to point out one exquisite exchange between the Clown and the Countess worried about her son Bertram, lines which serve as hints for an actor’s behaviour, as much as recognition of the limitations of the written text.

> CLOWN Why, he will look upon his boot and sing; mend the ruff and sing; ask questions and sing; pick his teeth and sing. I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song. > > COUNTESS Let me see what he writes, and when he means to come.

Shakespeare’s Staging, and Open Shakespeare too, should let us see what Shakespeare writes in more ways than one.

The poem shares its theme with Venus and Adonis, but is a “graver labour”, lacking comedy and playfulness. Here, “Lust-breathèd Tarquin” succeeds in raping “Lucrece the chaste”, and the language is that of brutal military conquest: “She says her subjects with foul insurrection / Have battered down her consecrated wall”. A sense of conflict is also conveyed by the fact that the poem is structured around a series of stark absolutes – light and dark, male and female, guilt and innocence, purity and lust, “Beauty’s red and Virtue’s white”. Beauty is, in this poem, a dangerous thing, speaking louder than words of reason and restraint: “All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth”. Vision, however, is privileged, and the poem’s insistence on the language of sight has been linked by Christopher Tilmouth to Renaissance concepts of shame as a sensation that occurs when sins are witnessed. Guilt, shame, sight and voyeurism are all important concerns for the critical conversations that surround the poem.

The first section of the poem gives voice to Tarquin, as he contemplates an act which he knows will ruin him. He claims that no “excuse can my invention make” to justify “so black a deed”, and yet he still chooses to sneak into Lucrece’s chamber. Once the deed is done, the narrative then gives voice instead to the reaction of the innocent victim, as she considers whether she must share the guilt for the deed. After considering at length a painting of the Trojan war, she becomes sure that her only choice is, “To clear this spot by death”. Lucrece’s suicide has baffled such commentators as St Augustine who wish to argue for her innocence, but it is this action that constitutes the concluding tragedy of the poem. Tarquin has marred “the thing that cannot be amended”; Lucrece kills herself and her husband Collantine decrees Tarquin’s “everlasting banishment”. The poem has attracted particular attention from feminist critics such as Jane Newman, who is interested in the simultaneous eloquence and powerlessness of the wronged female.

This poem seems to be closely linked with a number of Shakespeare’s other works. The setting means that it is naturally compared to the other Roman plays, most obviously Titus Andronicus (because of this play’s interest in the powerlessness of words, especially as regards the raped and mutilated Lavinia). The theme of rape also sets it alongside Venus and Adonis and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Tarquin’s fears about the moral implications of his intended action are related to the monologues in Macbeth. The description of the innocent Lucrece as she sleeps is reminiscent of the descriptions of Desdemona in Othello and Imogen in Cymbeline. Shakespeare also mentioned Lucrece in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

HENRY V When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard…

The puns of this passage, on “racket” (the tool of tennis players, an uproar, and, perhaps even a type of catapult) and on “hazard”, suggest what remains constant between Early Modern tennis and our own version of the sport. However, historians quibble and call the earlier version of the sport, ‘real tennis’, since it was distinguished by always being played in a room off whose walls the ball was allowed to bounce. Maybe something of this is behind Pericles’ metaphor, in the play that bears his name:

PERICLES A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him;
He asks of you, that never used to beg…

Rather like a more tragic Dromio (kicked about, you will recall, like a football), Pericles spends this play wandering, and Shakespeare uses the sporting metaphor to capture the apparently equal senses of futility and of divine order inherent in a romance. Something similar, if darker, is going on when Gloucester, in King Lear, laments that “Like flies to want boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport“. The link with ‘real tennis’ behind Pericles’ words is simply that “the vast tennis court” is at once an unlimited space in which the Greek Lord is helpless, whilst at the same time being a defined space in which certain rules are in effect, just as one may play at tennis, but only in a specific arena.

Of course, as with football, the game of tennis does not always stay within neat bounds. The remaining passages from Shakespeare show off the less salubrious side of the sport: Polonius imagines gentlemen “falling out at tennis”, whilst Hal mocks Falstaff’s off-white shirt with comparison to those of foppish tennis players. Even if there is a similar disorderliness about tennis as we find with football, one distinction is still clear: tennis is a noble’s game, its indecorum taking place among the decorous, and, after all, played by Henry VIII.

There is one quotation left, which I admit to have been saving since it my favourite oddity of the old game of tennis, that its balls were stuffed with human hair. Thus Claudio describes the loss of Benedick’s beard in the following terms:

CLAUDIO No, but the barber’s man hath been seen with him; and the old
ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.

you base football player

Before sending the man sprawling. The insult tells us a few things about what the Elizabethans understood as ‘football’, which was for them a far less decorous game that the one whose World Cup begins today.

So-called Medieval 'Mob Football', courtesy of Wikipedia

With the ffotebale…[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons …

However, football was saved from too much persecution by the pious James I, who wrote, in his Book of Sports that Christians should play football every Sunday afternoon after worship. But was it really a game involving feet only? After all, it would be difficult to cause all that damage in Manchester, even with the skills (and temperament) of a Zidane. The other use of the word in Shakespeare’s works, does, however, suggest that the sport was beginning to focus on the relationship between ball and foot by Shakespeare’s time:

DROMIO OF EPHESUS Am I so round with you, as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather…

“Spurn” here means ‘to kick away‘ (this original, now obsolete, sense dates back to 1000AD, and survives in our modern ’spur’), thus hinting at the increasing importance of the feet. Other details here are also revealing: that the ball was spherical, and thus different from the rugby ball; and that the casement was made of leather, a material still used in many footballs, if not that of the current World Cup, which is made out of ethylene-vinyl acetate and thermoplastic polyurethanes – with a latex bladder.

Footballs are not the only spherical things in The Comedy of Errors: Antipholus of Syracuse describes his search for his long-lost family as the search of one water drop for another in an ocean, and there is also the memorable description of the nymphomaniac maid in search of Dromio’s heart:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
…
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Oh, sir, I did not look so low.

Although football is not mentioned here, perhaps we have in The Comedy of Errors – with its many peregrinations, its cosmopolitan references to countries all over the world, its obsession with money, its hints that footballs were to be kicked and made of leather – the beginnings of the modern game, and, in Dromio’s kitchen wench, the earliest recorded WAG.

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.

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

Sören Auer, speaking on ‘Linked Open Data’, mentioned the beneficial effect that a ‘pingback’ service had provided to the blogosphere, helping to foster conversations and build networks of opinion. This made me wonder at the benefit such a tracking service would have for Open Shakespeare: if you were told when text you had annotated was annotated by someone else, you would have the chance to both share in the new contribution as well as discuss it. The system could also cover the critical introductions and would foster a more personal involvement in the site, which can only be a good thing. There is one downside: such ‘pingback’ services are vulnerable to spam, and Sören Auer was unable to sketch out a suitable response to this threat.

Tom Morris gave a presentation on ‘Citizendium’, whose modus operandi may have something to teach us when it comes to the writing of critical introductions. On Citizendium there is a fixed front article, behind which is a more fluid draft text. Such an arrangement allows both a space for rapid alterations and heated discussion at the same time as it protects the front matter from too extreme a modification, well-meaning or otherwise.

Away from the presentation, I had long discussions about printing the Open Shakespeare Editions with Ben O’Steen. One suggestion was that the problem of incorporating the annotations into the printed text could be solved with a script similar to that which converts blog comment into a printable format. Whatever the solution, some kind of tagging and annotation management system would probably be a prerequisite.

The last idea to come from OKCON (so far…) concerned widening the audience for Open Shakespeare. Several people recommended that we try and get school children involved, since the website could be a useful teaching tool, and encourage a new engagement with Shakespeare. Again, one hesitates to open the website to such a large audience without more means of managing annotations in place…but, still, a trial with just one class and one scene of a play seems to me something we could try right away…

What’s new is that textual and historical evidence is now available that confirms this play to be from some time in the early 17th century. It contains, for example, the word “absonant”, which is found only in texts by Shakespeare…and by his successor as writer for the King’s Men, Fletcher. Thus the play is most likely a collaborative work between the two, as was perfectly normal for the period. Other Shakespeare/Fletcher collaborations include King Henry VIII, and possibly parts of Pericles.

I post this news here because such a claim was only made possible thanks to advances in technology dealing with texts. New databases of texts make searches for references to a play far faster and easier, whilst new stylometric algorithms make the most of such databases to pick up minute differences in vocabulary usage that allow an author’s DNA to be distinguished. For the curious, Shakespeare uses “thee” and “hath“, whilst Fletcher, being fifteen years his junior, uses the more modern “ye“.

Perhaps one day, The Open Shakespeare Project will contribute to such breakthroughs. Until then, we have a separate issue to deal with: do we add Cardenio / Double Falsehood to our site?

What do you think? Could you write an introduction to it?

Borrowing from the Portuguese story of Felix and Felismena, the plot focuses on two friends, Valentine and Proteus. Each leaves home and travels from Verona to Milan. Proteus leaves behind his beloved Julia, having exchanged with her rings and promises of “true constancy”. On arriving in Milan, Proteus discovers that Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia and that they have planned to secretly elope together. Unfortunately, Proteus also falls for Silvia, declaring that “the remembrance of my former love / Is by a newer object quite forgotten”. He decides to do whatever it takes to win her for himself. The ensuing drama concerns itself with the limits of male friendship and the foolishness of lovers. The action comes to a climax in one of the most controversial scenes in the canon of Shakespeare’s writing. Many of the most famous performances have gained their notoriety because of the way that they have creatively navigated it, prompting Stanley Well’s comment that the play “has succeeded best when subjected to adaptation”. In the depths of the forest, Proteus threatens to rape Silvia, uttering the infamous line “I’ll force thee yield to my desire”. However, moments later he is reconciled to Valentine, who, despite being fully aware of what his friend has done, seems to offer him Silvia: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. The play closes with Proteus and Julia happily reunited, and a decree that both they and Valentine and Silvia shall be married on the same day, sharing “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness”.

Although the popular opinion is that this is one of Shakespeare’s least accomplished plays, it has enjoyed a rich stage history. Notably, Peter Hall chose it has his first production as artistic director of the RSC in 1960, and John Barton directed another important RSC production in 1981. The play has been set in almost every imaginable era – the medieval, the renaissance, the music-hall 1930s, the rock-and-roll 1950s, the fashion-obsessed 1990s – and is not always confined to Verona and Milan. It attracted further attention after being featured in the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998), despite never being explicitly named. The play is regularly admired for its spirited comedy. And for the fact that one of the characters is a dog.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

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.

“I am a member of the Open Shakespeare Project (www.openshakespeare.org – not to be confused with Open Source Shakespeare) and found this article extremely interesting. I feel that your conclusion points towards many of the approaches to Shakespeare that our project incorporates, and that are part of a more ’social’ approach to Shakespeare.

It occurs to me that as well as spreading Shakespeare to a far larger audience, cheap editions of Shakespeare are also a godsend for students, who may write their thoughts all over their pages without fear of ruining something expensive. If all these scribbles were collected, a formidable body of knowledge of Shakespeare would be available, as would an evolving record of responses to this writer.

Our site has recently acquired the ability for anyone to annotate Shakespeare’s works, and soon will add the capacity to attribute, tag, sort, and hide the annotations made. With this we hope to create an ‘open’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays that would grow along similar lines to Wikipedia, harnessing the power of the internet to bring many minds to bear upon a single subject.

Such problems as found with the OSS still pose difficulties for us: we have to use Moby as a source text since all others, including (lamentably) the wordhoard text, are under copyrights that conflict with our Open license. Nevertheless, just as textual problems are flagged up in a critical edition with a footnote, so too could such problems be drawn to the reader’s attention through annotation. As Whitney Trettien’s article points out, the web comes into its own when it is an ‘expressive medium’ itself, and not one which, like the OSS, unthinkingly delivers content.

Essentially, ISE already has this kind of thinking process, displaying an editor’s annotation on each text right down to the textual variants. It even has the ability to sort such annotations. However, the problems you identify – different kinds of editing, slow progress, uneven quality – all inevitably result, I feel, from the fact that each text only has a single editor. More editors would speed progress but it is not, of course, a given that more editors would improve quality. Wikipedia is still notorious for its occasional inaccuracies.

Nevertheless, such inaccuracies can be resolved by the same process that generates them. If anyone can annotate, so anyone can also review annotation and improve it. I realise that this is a rather utopian position and that people can as easily vandalise as beautify, but I feel it to be a more tenable one than that held by the websites here. The internet allows for unprecedented levels of input as well as appreciation, and such potential is not exploited by the sites reviewed in this article.

Talking of input and appreciation brings me to one further aspect of these sites that interests me, namely how easily one can print from them. The OSS shines in this respect, but attempting to print an ISE fascimile is rather more difficult. I must also admit that printing from an annotated text at The Open Shakespeare Project is currently impossible: the tool only went live fairly recently, and the site is still very much under construction. One day we hope to harness the accumulated and peer-reviewed annotations of many to produce a printed text, and thus complete a cycle between internet and ‘real world’ Shakespeare.

Such a cycle is ignored at the peril of digital scholarship, for it is the mix of real events and online responses to them that makes Facebook so addictive. Other addictive qualities, such as the relatively small time commitment and the chance to interact with other users could be profitably replicated by internet Shakespeare projects. After all, anything capable of sustaining those involved in the long task of making productive use of Shakespeare is always welcome and need not be to the detriment academic rigour.”

Here is the author’s reply:

James: thanks very much for this thoughtful and very interesting response to the review. I’ve had a quick look at your site and think it’s very interesting. It seems to me that you really are pushing forward with a Web 2.0 approach to things, making your site a good deal more interactive than the three I review here. I like the idea of building up a ‘database’ of annotations — and you’re right, of course: textual annotation might be a way round the problems of having to use an outdated source text. I still tend to worry about Wikipedia as a model, however. I always like to tell my students stories of humourous examples of deliberate tampering with Wikipedia, as a way of warning them off using it in their research (perhaps you may know what happened to Thierry Henry’s page, after France put Ireland out of the World Cup?). Will OSP be entirely ‘user governed’, or will you have some sort of ‘top down’ quality control mechanisms? Andy

The discussion raises some interesting issues. How bitesize and user friendly is our website? To what extent should ‘Open Shakespeare’ be user-governed? Any comments and suggestions you may have will be very welcome.

There is no review of our project on the site, but I have written a long comment to the 25th paragraph of Andrew Murphy’s article, ‘Shakespeare goes digital’, outlining the advantages of our social media approach to Shakespeare in relation to the other sites he has reviewed.

Do have a look, and leave any comments of your own. I shall probably try and write something in response to the Trettien article over the next few days, given that this article also focuses on new approaches to Shakespeare.

More words of the day shall also be forthcoming. I’m rereading Shakespeare’s tragedies at the moment and have had a few ideas for articles on the use of:

Crocodile
Bilbo
Music

Let us know which ones you’d like to see!

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.

Yet the play continues to strike readers and directors as more complicated: the submissive subject matter of Katherine’s final speech is undercut by the very fact that she’s allowed to speak at length at all. And, from the very start of the play, Shakespeare emphasises the artifice of the play’s world, raising questions over how seriously such matters should be taken. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s delight in plays-within-plays is taken to its extreme. It opens with an induction – often omitted by modern productions – in which drunken tinker Christopher Sly is made to believe that he is a lord and has the rest of the play performed before him. (This frame narrative abruptly disappears in the Folio text of the play; the 1594 play The Taming of a Shrew, also performed by Shakespeare’s company but generally considered a plagiarised imitation, features a fuller version of Sly’s story.)

Regardless of these issues, the play remains popular for its characteristically Shakespearean wordplay, with Petruchio and Kate’s sparring in Act II resembling an offensive game of word association, and its opportunities for spectacle, such as Petruchio’s “mad attire” for his honeymoon. Although it’s no longer generally considered to be the first play Shakespeare wrote, it remains a good example of how Shakespeare began his career with conventional version of genres that he would come to subvert more and more.

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…

Here’s how to get annotating:

1. Click ‘read texts’ on the homepage.
2. Scroll down to find your play of choice in the list and click on ‘annotate’.
3. Find the line you wish to annotate, then highlight it, then click on the little notepad that appears.
4. In the newly-present dialogue box, type your words of wisdom.
5. Press enter to save your annotation and close the dialogue box.

Work has already begun on Hamlet, but feel free to annotate wherever you wish.

As to what you should write in an annotation, we currently have no guidelines: shorter is usually better, and, obviously, offensive comments will be removed – but apart from that, all insights and explications are very welcome.

Improvements to come include: restricting editing and deletion to the owner of each annotation, showing user information on annotations, the ability to filter annotations, and the capacity to use markdown in each comment.

To return to that line of Hamlet: the folio has ’solid flesh’, but the first quarto has ’sallied flesh’, and the second quarter has either ’sallied’ or ’sullied’. Each variant changes the way we see Hamlet.

But what does this have to do with Open Shakespeare? Well, this little example shows how important it is to have a reliable text for each play, especially now that we will be annotating and one day producing critical editions from them. Currently, we have the Gutenberg text of the first folio, although, like many other first folios, this text is actually a hodgepodge of other first folios recomposed sometime in the 18th Century. We also have the Moby Shakespeare, so called for the man who produced the most widely circulated digital version of Shakespeare’s plays – but without saying what edition he used…

Having consulted with a few professors here in Cambridge (credit where it’s due: the info about composite folios comes from Prof. Kerrigan), it appears that there is a first folio actually in Cambridge. If we could find a way of digitising it, this would be a great benefit to Open Shakespeare, establishing, if not a ‘perfect’ text (which, once the Globe and Shakespeare’s own playtexts burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII could never now be possible), at least one with some historical authority.

I have no idea how we will digitise the Cambridge folio, so any suggestions would be welcome. I heard once that a young Arthur Miller, in order to hone his play-writing skills, copied out almost all of Shakespeare’s plays by hand. So, if you’re an aspiring playwright with lots of time on your hands, do get in touch.

Leave us a comment with your guess as to the speech and speaker …

The problems with classifying Troilus and Cressida are best exemplified in one of its final scenes: as the Trojan Cressida, transferred to the Greek camp, succumbs to the advances of the Greek Diomede, she is overlooked by two parties. One is Thersites, the sour fool whose relentless commentary on the perverse world of “wars and lechery”, where Greeks dine with the Trojans they will kill the next day, drives the play’s bitterly humorous satire. The other party consists of Ulysses and the spurned Troilus, whom Shakespeare endows with the sincere poetry of love that gives the play its heart and its tragic energy.

Shunted between classification as a comedy (in one of the Quarto editions) and a tragedy (in the First Folio), the play is a satisfying fit in neither. Were it written today, its ending would perhaps have been described as a descent into meaningless violence and the audience is left neither with catharsis nor reassurance that “all is mended”, instead having Pandarus bequeath them his “diseases”.

Although the immediate reception of the play remains unclear, this work only fully captured public and academic interest in the twentieth century, and is still often considered difficult and ‘elitist’. However, its refreshing anti-war stance when compared to the history cycle has made it popular production in contemporary peace-time, and audience’s unfamiliarity with it allows directors freedom in their interpretations.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf,
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark.  (4i)

To be specific and to use the OED, it is the mouth (maw) and throat (gulf) of a shark glutted with prey (ravin’d) that the witches specifically require.

As for the verb, it is Horatio in Hamlet who uses the word to describe Fortinbras’ rabble-rousing efforts:

Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes… (1i)

He goes on to  emphasise the voracious qualities of the animal and, by extension, of Fortinbras’ soldiers. The only other use of the word as a verb similarly plays upon the sense of man giving in to his animal cravings, as Thomas More tells a crowd that if they give in to such cravings they will only become victims of more violent men.

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another…

Thomas More is a collaborative work, and one in which critics believe Shakespeare participated, contributing this speech. The evidence? Amongst other things, his use of the word ’shark’.

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!

Henry Bolingbroke, although banished, soon returns, ostensibly to reclaim his family lands, seized by Richard from an ailing Gaunt, who, in criticising the state of Ricardian England, delivers the famous definition of his country as “A precious jewel set in a silver sea” from his deathbed. Throughout the play, Bolingbroke and Richard II are opposed, and the former shown to be a consummate Machiavellian who remains to a large extent opaque to the audience.

Richard, by contrast, is perfectly and poetically open about his feelings: an openness that makes for wonderful poetry, but also for a poor Machiavellian. His character was much beloved by romantic critics, who saw him first and foremost as a poet, and it is a rare audience indeed that feels no sympathy for the weakening king. His final long speech seeks to populate his prison with “A generation of still-breeding thoughts”, but his invention slowly turns to the realisation that although he has “the daintiness of ear / To check time broke in a disordered string”, he “for the concord of my state and time / Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.” That image of broken time, like other moments of fracture and rupture in the play, establish a legacy that haunts all the following plays, as first Henry IV and then Henry V attempt the task of, in Hal’s words, “redeeming time”.

Written entirely in verse, and occasionally in couplets, the play has its own distinctive music. It also has a distinctive history: Elizabeth I famously compared herself to Richard II, and a performance of the play was requested by the Earl of Essex in the run up to his ill-fated and abortive attempt at a rebellion in 1601.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

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)

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!)

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.

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…

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!

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!

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.

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.

The Winter’s Tale

Titus Andronicus

King John

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Love’s Labour’s Lost

As You Like It

The play is Shakespeare’s most faithful rendering of a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron (which would also inspire plot points in Pericles and The Merchant of Venice), although Shakespeare continued his traditional imposition of a comic subplot, in which Bertram’s follower Parolles is exposed as a coward by his fellow French soldiers. This lack of adaptation is one of the reasons for the play’s failure to gain widespread attention. As with Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Parolles was more entertaining than the lovers to a Jacobean audience, to the point that the play was abridged and renamed in his honour.

Until the nineteenth century, much critical debate hinged on whether Bertram or Helena was more sympathetic, with neither coming out very well; indeed, many see the play as remarkably conservative in its sympathy with an older generation who successfully orchestrate what they think is best for their children. The fact that the text only survives in a corrupted manuscript is a further problem. Productions remain rare, but when the balance between traditional romance and social realities is struck correctly, All’s Well that Ends Well can be a satisfying play to watch.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

The Rome of Shakespeare is far more multi-faceted than that of Plutarch, particularly in the way each character seems aware of Elizabethan interpretations of their actions. Brutus’ description of Caesar as a “tyrant” echoes, for example, a verdict delivered in Elyot’s Book of the Governour”. Such theatrical and cultural self-consciousness comes to a peak in *Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, but is already present here in an obsession with representation and interpretation that spans the length of the play. The word “like”, picked up from North and found in such phrases as “like himself”, highlights the sceptical difficulty of knowing another human, whilst the deciphering of Caesar’s dream proves to be a crucial moment of the plot.

Since the performance seen by Platter, the play has enjoyed a great deal of popularity, and is still frequently performed today, often with a political message. Certain lines, “Et tu Brute”, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”, and “The evil that men do” have entered modern popular culture, the last featuring in both an Iron Maiden song and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel.

Falstaff dies offstage, Pistol is humiliated and Bardolph hanged – but they make us laugh before they go, as does the French princess Catherine’s unsuspectingly bawdy English lesson, and the many accents of the British army. However, as in the three plays that precede it, the question of what it is to be a king dominates the action of the play once more. Wherever we see him, receiving the French ambassador at the English court, coldly stopping a coup at Southampton, delivering an ultimatum at Harfleur and a battle cry at Agincourt, Henry V is always in authority, even when, in a scene reminiscent of his youthful antics, he wanders disguised amongst his soldiers, asking himself afterwards “what have kings, that privates have not too / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” These lines reveal the tensions of kingship as both a construction and an ideal, a tension that finds an echo in the structure of a play whose chorus endlessly iterates the need for the audience to believe in that other constructed illusion, the spectacle of the actors on a stage, tasked to “cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt”.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

In a discontinuity between this play and its predecessor, a new reconciliation takes place between Henry IV and Prince Hal, this time fraught with Hal’s error of being caught wearing the crown when his father awoke. Hal consoles his father with the idea that he only took it in “The quarrel of a true inheritor”, a reference to the fact that, for the first time since the regicide of Richard II, the crown will follow a bloodline, and so it shall, in Henry IV’s words, “descend with better quiet, better opinion, better confirmation”. The dying king then offers Hal the advice of using a foreign military campaign to unite the country, something that looks forward to the events Henry V.

The nature of this play, as both elegy and anticipation, makes it difficult to perform as a standalone production and some critics have speculated that the strangeness of its outlook is the result of a lack of material left in Holinshed for Shakespeare to use. Nevertheless, its distinctness from Henry IV, Part 1, may also be seen as a virtue: the worlds of the court and the tavern are more distinct here, and each adopts a particularly distinctive idiom, be it the Hostess’ request to “Do me, do me your offices”, or Henry IV’s reflection that if the “book of fate” were seen, then “The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, / What perils past, what crosses to ensue / Would shut the book, and sit him down and die”.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

At the end of the first tavern scene, Hal, alone on stage, proves that he is no prodigal, and instead claims that “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will.” That reference to time recalls an earlier speech by the imprisoned Richard II, portraying the King as guarantor of his time, and, indeed, this play and those that follow it probe the questions of what it means to be a king, and to what extent kingship is just a construct, made from rich cloths and language.

As the play moves towards its conclusion on the battlefield, the world of the tavern and of the court are often side by side, with Hal shuttling between Falstaff and his father. The royalist victory at the play’s conclusion appears to confirm the end of Hal’s ‘prodigality’, and his reception into the royal flock. Yet the audience will also remember Falstaff, uproarious in the tavern, cynical on the battlefield, and ending the play claiming that he, not Hal, killed Hotspur.

James Harriman-Smith

“The Bastard”, one of Shakespeare’s most colourful characters, is the illegitimate son of the dead Richard III. The play in fact revolves around the disputed succession of King John to the English throne after Richard’s death; he is opposed by the vigorous Constance, an early manifestation of the Shakespearean strong older woman, whose son has an equally valid claim to the throne.

Despite King John’s relative obscurity, Constance’s poetic speech on grief – beginning “Grief fills the room up of my absent child” – is one of Shakespeare’s most famous; it may reflect Shakespeare’s feelings about the death of his only son, Hamnet, who died about the time the play was written. King John, like many of the history plays, often fails to get the recognition it deserves; it is both exciting and lyrical, and makes a rewarding read.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

The Winter’s Tale deals with themes of sexual jealousy, patrilinearity and growth, joining pastoral fertility comedy with tragic culpability and deaths. It culminates with the most puzzling ending in Shakespeare, when Hermione – whether through magic or trickery, it is unclear – emerges from a statue, reborn. Study of The Winter’s Tale together with The Tempest is useful in looking at the fascination with artificiality and magic which enchants Shakespeare’s late work.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

As an example, here’s the short intro to Measure for Measure:

http://www.openshakespeare.org/work/info/measure_for_measure

Enjoy reading!

Although no direct source has been identified for the play as a whole, there is a fascinating relationship to New World discovery evident throughout. This has particularly been highlighted in the figure of Caliban, a grotesquely formed and morally monstrous inhabitant of the island, once its master, now Prospero’s slave. For many critics he represents a certain view of the native populations of newly colonised lands in the Americas. Shakespeare’s evident use of passages taken from Michel de Montaigne’s essay Des Canibales, newly available in English, evokes the most idealistic images of the New world, as a new Eden. There is a clear tension at work between this ideal and any form of political reality – at the very least there appears to be an open question about the nature and validity of sovereignty and enslavement.

Other dichotomies brought into play surround the early modern (and particularly Jacobean) fascination with magic. Prospero seems to stand for a kind of erudite sorcery, closely related perhaps to neoplatonic magicians such as Agrippa. By contrast, the island itself seems to spontaneously produce supernatural experiences, and Caliban’s mother was a witch in the more generally accepted sense. Furthermore, we cannot really speak of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ magic, for Prospero at times seems himself corrupted by power. The parallel drawn between his charms and the ’spell’ cast over a theatre audience also raises questions about the whole mimetic operation of the theatre. All Prospero’s various wrongs are righted by his “deliver all” of freeing Ariel and sending the royal party home.

However, the Prospero’s epilogue to the play surpsises us by revealing that the last (and unexpected) prisoner of the play is the theatrical magician himself, whose sovereignty is suddenly dependent on the release of the audience’s mercy. The final plea of his epilogue uses an image that draws as much on the theological language of absolution as that of political imprisonment: “As you from crimes would pardon’d be/From your indulgence set me free”. This idea of an appeal to the divine through an appeal to the audience brings out the commonality of the artistic creation, enacted through the ministration of spectator and actor, just as mercy is through priest and sinner, or politics through king and subject, but all vitally owe their power to that which surpasses all charms: the Divine. This final note seems a fitting one for Shakespeare to close his many meditations on power, guilt and the nature of theatre itself.

With influences from the masque tradition, this play would later prove a popular subject for operatic adaptations from the 17th century, including one by Henry Purcell’s. Whilst recent productions (notably the RSC’s 2008–9 co-production with The Baxter Theatre Company, Capetown) have continued to emphasise the colonial themes, there has been increasing attention to other less politicised aspects of the play as well. Besides studies on forgiveness, on magic, and on stagecraft itself, recent work on Shakespeare and music has particularly used The Tempest to comment on the Bard’s evident awareness and appreciation for this element of theatrical production.

Contributed by Arabella Milbank

The play reworks the case of confused twins from The Comedy of Errors but, partly inspired by Barnabe Rich’s short story Of Apollonius and Silla, the twins are no longer of the same gender and Shakespeare piercingly explores the embarrassment this brings. While disguised as Cesario, Viola cannot quite believe that Olivia, whom she is courting on behalf of Duke Orsino, has been “charm’d” by her superficial “outside” appearance. Many contemporary productions of the play have taken this embarrassment even further: the ambiguous nature of Antonio’s wish to be “servant” to Viola’s brother Sebastian has been exploited and, in 2002, the RSC’s Olivia could not resist one last kiss from Viola even when revealed as a man.

However, the characters of the play’s subplot, in which Olivia’s condescending steward Malvolio is tricked by the rest of her household, not only get more lines than the principal parts, but were also responsible for the play’s contemporary popularity. The play was briefly retitled Malvolio and a poem of 1640 describes how “the Cockpit galleries, boxes are all full / to hear Malvolio, that cross-gartered gull”. After a lull in popularity during the Restoration, the play returned to critical attention when Lamb realised that Malvolio’s priggishness could in fact be founded on a tragic “sense of worth”. Certainly the character’s imprisonment on account of his madness in Act IV betrays the hand of a playwright soon to produce Hamlet.

Although the title refers to the Feast of the Epiphany and its subversive revelry, the characters are said to be affected by “midsummer madness” and there is no evidence that the play was written for the feast – the first recorded performance was in February 1602. In many ways, its subtitle What You Will suits it better: it is the play’s self-conscious refusal to signal a definitive message that has kept it fresh for directors, critics and audiences.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

Contributed by Colette Sensier

The crazed protagonist’s self-love – “Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I” – is communicated in a variety of ways, both blunt and subtle, over the course of the play. Richard speaks more than a third of the lines in the script and from the very beginning is essentially his own sole ally. Inspired by his ambition to gain the throne, he is capable of total heartlessness – he is ultimately responsible for six deaths, not including his own – and can cover his tracks through a troubling facility for the communication of outright untruth. Like Othello’s Iago, Richard manipulates those around him through clever language and the exploitation of emotion, leaving in his wake a trail of guilt, grief and fear. Some of the most artful language and captivating tragedy in all of Shakespeare is to be found in this, the playwright’s penultimate history.

Contributed by Emma Mustich

Ideas about the play have varied: is Antony and Cleopatra the tragedy of a once-fine military hero weakened and disempowered by his love for a fickle woman, his power misdirected to “cool a gypsy’s lust”? Or is it the story of a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, who are fixed on “the nobleness of love” and are condemned for it? When watching, or reading the play, both realities swim into view. The opposing forces of land and sea, Rome and Egypt, male and female, logic and passion, war and love struggle and combine in this play to paint a landscape for the reader to get lost in.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

Unusually, the complex relationship between father and daughter here takes the limelight from more traditional Shakespearean love stories based on lovers’ courtship. And the key moment of an uncommonly biographical play – Act III’s tempest – depicts man and nature losing control in harmony.

Indeed, the most interesting thread in this high Shakespearean saga is the author’s preoccupation with the boundary between order and chaos. As long as we retain a kind of regularity in our human relations, Shakespeare seems to suggest – as long as our house (or in Lear’s case, his court) is in order – we are protected from the cruel disorder of the outside world, the thunderous power of nature, and we retain our senses. When the rules of human relations break down, however, and we leave our literal or figurative castles to face the wind which blows and “crack[s its] cheeks”, cosmic order gives way to the wilderness of the storm, and men once high and mighty can lose their minds and the will to live. Haunting and raw, King Lear is the ultimate literary education in the nature of power and the power of nature.

Contributed by Emma Mustich

Probably written and performed in late 1604, Shakespeare took the story of a Moorish warlord moved to a state of murderous jealousy by his ensign from Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. While Cinthio’s story is relentlessly brutal, with Othello finally bludgeoning his wife Disdemona with a sandbag before being killed by her relatives, Shakespeare gives his a near-erotic level of intimacy – Othello smothers Desdemona in bed, before turning his sword on himself when his mistake is revealed.

However, in many respects, it is not Othello but the villainous Iago with whom the audience is closest. It is he who raises dramatic irony to unbearable levels by describing his “net / that shall enmesh them all” to the audience from the very first act. While the reasons for his actions, other than a desire to “play the villain”, are rarely clear, his command of both verse and prose never fails to captivate his audience, creating a seductive evil which would inspire Milton’s Satan.

At the beginning of the 20th century, critical debate raged principally over whether Othello an entirely “noble Moor” brought down by Iago or whether the “green-eyed monster” was always lurking within him. More recently, critics and directors have explored the significance of Iago’s class, the play’s abundance of misogynistic language and, the unavoidable question of race. Some argue that the play subverts the contemporary stereotype of the lusty Moor by suggesting that “the sun where he was born / drew all such humours from him”; although the use of blackface actors is now directorial anathema, many modern black actors refuse the role because of its inherent use of blackness as a mere dramatic hook.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

As for the plot, Shakespeare frames his narrative around several key relationships. First we have the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta announced at the play’s beginning and celebrated at its end. Next the relationship between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, that enters stormy waters over the question of Titania’s “Indian Boy”. Third is the relationship between Hermia, Demetrius, Lysander, and Helena. At the start of the play, Demetrius loves Hermia, and his father wants them to marry, but Hermia loves Lysander and together they elope to the woods outside Athens, with Demetrius in pursuit and Helena, who loves Demetrius, pursuing him. As in many Shakespeare plays, the wood becomes the site of several magical transformations as relationships are at first confused by the tricks of Puck, and then reordered. The sub-plot of “rude mechanicals” rehearsing in preparation for the queen’s marriage further complicates matters as Puck turns Bottom the Weaver into a donkey, and then, at Oberon’s instruction bewitches Titania into loving the beast. This too is all resolved, and the play ends with a series of reflections on the events in the wood. Bottom articulates the strangeness of his half-recalled experiences, Theseus dismisses the young lovers’ accounts as ramblings typical of “the lunatic, the lover and the poet”, whilst Hippolyta points out how such tales “grow to something of great constancy / But howsoever, strange and admirable”. Puck concludes the play with an epilogue that tells the audience that they have “but slumbered here”, further complicating an already ambiguous play that combines meditations on married life, falling in love, power and dramaturgy with the tantalising, half perceived language of a dream. “Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream”.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

Anne Barton described this play as “the most classical of Shakespeare’s comedies”, and any glance at its plot will prove her insight. For many critics the play closely follows the comic pattern of movement from injust world, to disorder, to a better place. That said, much more is “Obscured in the circle of this forest”, than any formula implies. In this play, Shakespeare probes the limits of the pastoral, a genre that was popular amongst the Elizabethans. What does it mean to say “Sweet are the uses of adversity” when the exiled courtiers must take the deer and “kill them up / In their assigned and native dwelling place”? Do we agree with Touchstone when he says “the truest poetry is the most feigning”? For all the classical elegance of the play, there are no shortage of subtleties: the boy playing the female Rosalind must disguise himself as the boy Ganymede – and where does that leave the question of gender? As we laugh in condescension at the buffoonery of the rustics, or in incomprehension before Rosalind’s complex machinations, we can never forget nor fully grasp the complexity of one of the most famous of all Shakespeare’s speeches: Jaques, the melancholic fool, telling everyone that “All the world’s a stage…”

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

The play is firmly rooted in the tradition of courtly love and is even considered responsible for a boom in sonnet-printing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. Examples abound: Romeo’s paradoxical musings on love echo Petrarch; when he meets Juliet, their first words to each other form a sonnet; and the lovers’ separation following Romeo’s exile is inspired by the contemporary French poet Guillaume du Bartas. However, the play never seems like a poetry anthology with a plot, thanks to its textured cast of secondary characters; the staging possibilities provided by masked balls, sword fights and descents into crypts; and an often-overlooked sense of humour.

Although a performance is not officially documented until Samuel Pepys expresses his disdain for it in 1662, the play was popular right from its composition. A quarto edition of 1597, successful enough to be reprinted just two years later, declares that it “hath been often (with great applause) plaid”. This popularity has endured: no other Shakespeare play has been filmed in more languages and it has survived modifications in plot (as an inter-racial or lesbian romance) and setting (to 19th Century Louisiana, 1960’s New York, and 1990’s California). But all of these adaptions keep Shakespeare’s Verona as their inspiration, a place where “love’s light wings” struggle to overcome the “stony limits” of conflict.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

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.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

After the recent death of his father, our protagonist, the melancholic Hamlet, soon seeks revenge. Yet, over and over again Hamlet loses his mettle and his will to action develops into tortured reflection. Hamlet is a dramatisation of all mankind’s moral struggles; at once comic, tragic, and romantic. In its depth, Hamlet defies all definitions and continues to captivate audiences and readers alike.

Contributed by Jude Jacob

Of the three so-called ‘problem plays’, Measure for Measure is perhaps the least classifiable: while Troilus and Cressida leans towards unfulfilled tragedy and All’s Well That Ends Well towards bitter comedy, this play is more concerned with offering its audience a literally open-ended debate about the role of the law than conforming to any genre. Ostensibly a comedy, Shakespeare now refuses to take for granted the genre conventions kept to in his earlier works: disguise, obsessive love, the working-class fool and the happy ending signalled by marriages all become problematic and artificial. Conversely, he seems at first to be creating a tragic villain in the character of Angelo – the ruthless self-examination in his soliloquies of Acts II and IV betray the fact that this play was written alongside the great tragedies.

Decried by both Johnson and Coleridge, and almost ignored for much of the nineteenth century, the play has since been rehabilitated by both directors and critics. Whatever it occasionally lacks in coherence of tone and plot, it compensates in its thoughtful and still-relevant exploration of the division between justice and mercy, the spirit and the letter, piety and pragmatism.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

We’ve been thinking for a while that it would be a nice addition to the Open Shakespeare project to produce an “Open Shakespeare Edition” of the Bard’s works.

By an ‘Edition’ we meant something designed as a book and suitable for printing: so an elegant title page, relevant front-matter, properly typeset text etc. This could then be downloaded by users and printed or even offered in dead-tree version directly using print-on-demand.

Recently, we’ve made a start on this endeavour using the moby XML sources, xsl and latex. An example of the results can be seen at:

http://www.openshakespeare.org/images/twelfth_night-v0.2.pdf

As a cursory look at that will show, while the body of the play doesn’t look too bad, the front-page could do with improvement (and the front-matter generally needs some planning). So, questions for readers:

1. Anyone out there with design skills or suggestions who could help us out?

   • Would it make sense to run a design competition?

2. What kind of general look should we go for? For example, should we go for:

   • Ultra traditional (but perhaps with some mods e.g. replacing the standard ‘copyright’ section with something about open knowledge)
   • Something irreverent, for example along the lines of the sketch on http://okfn.org/wiki/ShakespeareBookDesign

Any ideas or suggestions post a comment or drop us a line we’d love to know what you think.

Main changes include:

• Major refactoring of internal code to be cleaner and simpler
• A new cleaner and reorganized web interface
• Search support via Xapian: http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/
• Statistical analysis and graphing
  • By word: http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/love/
  • By text: http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/text/hamlet_gut
• Start on Open Milton

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

• 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

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

What we now need to do is ‘proof’ this to correct the OCR errors. This kind of think is perfect for distributed volunteers so if you’d like to help out just step up and starting correcting with one of the sections. To make it especially easy for people to make edits the text has in a temporary location on the Open Knowledge Foundation wiki (only the first five pages for the time being):

http://okfn.org/wiki/tmp/BritannicaShakespeare

http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/ticket/24

We’ve now written code to grab the relevant tiffs off wikimedia:

http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/src/shakespeare/src/eb.py

You can also find them online (28 pages) starting at:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A800.TIF

Next step is to then OCR this stuff (after that we can move on to proofing whether by ourselves or via http://pgdp.net). When we first had a stab at this back in April we tried using gocr. Unfortunately the results were so bad that they were unusable. Recently an old ocr engine of HP’s has been released as open source under the name of tesseract:

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

We’re going to have a go using this — though if there is anyone out there with access to an alternative system we’d love to hear about it.

http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/

Changelog

• Annotation of texts (js-based in browser) (ticket:20, ticket:21) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/04/10/annotation-is-working/)
• Switch to unicode for internal string handling (resolves ticket:23: some texts breaking the viewer)
• Add functional tests for the web interface (ticket:11)
• Substantial improvements to speed of concordance (ticket:22) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/01/03/improvements-to-the-concordance/)
• Switch to genshi templates from kid
• Switch to plain WSGI from cherrypy

Outstanding Issues

• Annotation cannot handle long texts because of javascript performance issues

About Open Shakespeare

A full open set of Shakespeare’s works along with anciallary material, a variety of tools and a python API.

For more information see the about page:

http://www.openshakespeare.org/about/

Get involved: http://www.openshakespeare.org/participate/

Mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss/

To see the system in action visit:

http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=phoenix_and_the_turtle_gut&format=annotate

Quite a bit of effort has been made to decouple the annotation system from Open Shakespeare so that it can be easily reused elsewhere. You can find the code for the annotation system (nicknamed annotater) here:

http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/annotater/trunk/

There are still some substantial issues with the Open Shakespeare implementation the most obvious of which are:

a) large texts bring the javascript to its knees ((The Phoenix and the Turtle is the shortest of Shakespeare’s works which is why I’m using it).

b) security/user authentication for annotation adding/editing/deleting

But the basic system is working.

The main work in porting annotater was twofold:

1. To create and independent annotation store web application which reproduced the restful web interface needed by the marginalia javascript (we’ve also improved this by giving it a normal human-usable CRUD web interface in addition to the restful one)
2. Plugging this together (aka debugging/hacking around) with the existing marginalia javascript (for example the paste-based WSGI store web app just would not process posts sent using x-www-form-urlencoded!)

Annotater is now fully functioning and we can entirely reproduce the basic demo in the original marginalia though with the major difference that our version has a proper store backend so all creation/deletion updates of annotations get persisted to a real db and aren’t just in memory (to try this out just start the demo wsgi app via $ python annotater.py).

The next step after this is to integrate annotater into open shakespeare along with doing any polishing up of the package that is needed to achieve this.

Relatedly and r:74 is a first step on filtering the concordance — in this case to exclude roman numerals and various non-words. Doing this made me think about whether the concordance should be storing actual words or just stems — for example, it does not seem to make much sense to have different entries for kill, kills, killed etc. Using a stemming algorithm such as the porter stemmer (which I notice has a nice python implementation directly available) we can easily stem each word as we go along. This would have several benefits one of the most prominent being a dramatic reduction in the basic dictionary size (i.e. the number of distinct words in the concordance).

1. stet: javascript annotation system used for gpl v3 comments system

   • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet_(software)
   • Bit of a hack at present and did not seem designed for external reuse (when I last looked the README was fairly emphatic that this was very alpha with little documentation)

2. commentary: javascript based wsgi middleware developed by ian bicking

   • http://pythonpaste.org/commentary/
   • Rather hacked together (apparently he coded it in a week). Had problems getting it working locally and no documentation to help in adaptation. Seems to be unmaintained (demo site is currently down) which is perhaps not surprising given how many other projects Ian has on the go.
   • One nice feature is that you don’t seem to have to mess with the underlying web pages you want to add comments to (this only works if you are sitting on top of another wsgi application)

3. marginalia: javascript library and spec for adding web annotation to pages

   • http://www.geof.net/code/annotation/
   • javascript code seems well factored and understandable and docs are good

4. annotea: W3C project based on RDF

   • http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
   • Been around a long time and now seems to be inactive
   • Server and client support rather lacking. No simple interface based on, e.g., javascript — you have to write a special client yourself — which is a major drawback
   • That said the protocol is well-documented and so writing a client (or a server) shouldn’t be that hard (other than having to mess around with rdf in javascript …)
   • The Schema seems reasonable
   • xpointer based which according to the marginalia site is a problem

For example there’s an online version from the Schoenberg Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania. But checking the printable version one finds the following:

©2003 Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image

University of Pennsylvania Library.

And this isn’t exceptional. There’s a list of available online folios on:

http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/book.html

All of the copies listed are closed (copyrighted with no open license) — with most not allowing for any types of use without permission (the only exception being the State Library of New South Wales which allows for “educational, non-profit, purposes”).

It’s a rather unfortunate situation and it would be great to know if there is a scan of a shakespeare first folio out there which truly is open.

http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/

Changelog

1. Can now view mutiple texts side by side (ticket:15). See it in action at:

   http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=othello_gut_f+othello_gut

2. Now include moby/bosak versions of shakespeare as well as gutenberg (ticket:10) (though more work remains to be done to process these versions to plaintext and html)

3. Fix bug whereby we were missing some of the available gutenberg texts (ticket:18)

4. Install the shakespeare python package (ticket:16)

5. Move to py.test from unittest

6. New project website at http://www.openshakespeare.org/

Outstanding Issues

1. Several of the source texts (all of them Gutenberg folios) seem to break the viewer due to kid (the templating system) complaining about about ‘not well-formed (invalid token) xml’. Any help in tracking this down would be greatly appreciated.

About Open Shakespeare

A full open set of Shakespeare’s works along with anciallary material, a variety of tools and a python API.

For more information see the about page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/about/

Mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss/

• http://demo.openshakespeare.org/
• http://demo.openshakespeare.org/concordance/

NB: concordance only includes sonnets (this is not a necessary restriction but saved on concordance build time)

Many of the improvements in this iteration are internal and will make future work faster and easier. More details on the changes can be found below.

Any and all feedback most welcome and if anyone wanted to start hacking away with me that would be fantastic (there is now a trac installation to assist with this — details below).

Main improvements

• move away from gutenberg-centric setup present in v0.1
  • will now be simple to add new material
• using domain model and database backend
  • much more flexible concordance with faster creation
• web interface improved
  • concordance now provides snippets and link through to sources

Trac Installation

There’s now a trac installation for project management:

http://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/

For latest developments check out the timeline:

http://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/timeline

All the TODOs are now tickets. Active tickets:

http://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/report/1

A roadmap with links to current future tasks:

http://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/roadmap