Shakespeare Quarterly part II

Here, for those interested, is my response to Professor Andrew Murphy’s article in the Shakespeare Quarterly:

“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.

Shakespeare Quarterly

We received an email from The Shakespeare Quarterly a while back asking for our responses to an online edition of the journal, entitled “Shakespeare and New Media”. The articles cover everything from the online presence of Shakespeare institutions to the impact of video blogs about Shakespeare.

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!

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.

Introduction: The Taming of the Shrew

At first glance, the continued popularity of The Taming of the Shrew can seem rather hard to stomach. Its two subplots focus on the wooing of Bianca and Katherine, the two daughters of the Paduan gentleman Baptista Milona: while the former finds herself fought over by three lovers who value her “silence…mild behaviour and sobreity”, the latter’s fierce outspokenness leads her to be spurned by all but Petruchio, who sets out to “tame” her. With Petruchio making claims like “she is my goods, my chattel” and Katherine concluding the play with a speech which celebrates wifely obedience, it’s hard not to see the play as misogynistic. Such misogyny would not necessarily have been of concern to the original Elizabethan audience, for whom the tamed shrew was a convention of farce stretching back to the Roman comedians – indeed, the wives in many traditional ballads turn out much worse than Kate!

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.

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…

Annotation is here!

The fabled ability to annotate any text of Shakespeare is now part of the Open Shakespeare website! Massive thanks to Nick for all his work on something far too complex for me to even describe its complexity (apparently there were difficulties with there being ‘no TextRange in the DOM’).

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.

Editions

There’s a famous line in Hamlet: “O that this too too solid flesh would melt” (1.ii.129). Not only is it the start of an agonised soliloquy in which Hamlet tortures himself over his mother’s apparent desire for her dead husband’s brother, but it is also a line over which many generations of scholars have wrangled. You see, there are several different editions of Hamlet: a first quarto printed in 1603, and then another in 1604, before the folio edition appeared in 1623. The quartos (so named for being the size of a quarter of a sheet of paper) would normally be used for any critical text because they are the earliest. Unfortunately, the quartos for Hamlet are so corrupt that they can’t really be trusted. Nevertheless…they still might contain passages that are more correct than the folio, composed after Shakespeare’s death, ever could be.

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.

Word Cloud

What do you get when you combine wordle.net with the most famous speech Shakespeare ever wrote? This:

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

Introduction: Troilus and Cressida

The siege of Troy provides the backdrop for Troilus and Cressida, but – like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde – Shakespeare opens by claiming that he “leaps o’er…those broils” of the war itself. But, again like Chaucer, Shakespeare finds some parts of the war unavoidable: the play is just as much about the petty rivalries of the Greek camp as it is about the doomed love affairs of the two eponymous Trojans. Love and war are inseparable and mutually destructive forces. The recapture of the “face that launched a thousand ships” is shown to lose its noble veneer, to be replaced by a lecherous act which has turned “crowned kings to merchants”.

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

Word of the Day: Shark

Admittedly, ’shark’ is not the first word one associates with Shakespeare, but both the noun and the now obsolete verb were used by the Bard. The noun crops up as one of the ingredients for the witches’ potion in Macbeth:

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’.