Sonnet CXVI:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The hero’s vivid verse betokens what
Revision moods for marriage norms befall.
Rethinking home life won’t disturb ours, but
Denying some their rights makes shames for all.
Religious voters revved up, think again.
Deem this opinion, not like proven fact.
We minimise Him at evoking men
To harbor hidden love and not to act.
To honor same-sex lovebirds who invest
In that we vehemently do erect,
To think that love should not be too suppressed;
It tends to kick in where we least suspect.
For while the Bard was wed to Mrs. Anne,
He wrote this sonnet for another man.

I’ve been asked by the good folks at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to participate in a project with other bloggers in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday. The idea is to describe in a blog post how Shakespeare has influenced my life. My first impulse was to decline. First of all, it would require providing a name and bio, and I blog anonymously. Though I’ve linked to it several times, I’ve never posted my full name on the blog. More importantly, Shakespeare’s influence is an aspect of my life I don’t usually like to talk about. But perhaps this is an opportunity. By speaking out now, I can help others avoid the nightmare I have lived through. Because you see, my friends, Shakespeare has completely destroyed my life.

As a high school student, I showed a modicum of potential to become a productive member of society. I went into college as an undeclared major, with an array of exciting career options ahead of me. I took classes in a variety of disciplines, with the naive hope of discovering my passions. I took an acting class on a whim, and the professor suggested that I audition for her play. I was ready to do it, until I found that the play was by Shakespeare. Now, I was always taught to stay away from Shakespeare, but the professor was persuasive and I figured there wouldn’t be any harm in trying it just that once.

I was cast as Sebastian in Twelfth Night. I memorized my difficult lines by rote and went through the rehearsal process. One night, while I was waiting backstage and listening to the play, a single line caught in my ear and made me smile. “Hey, that’s pretty clever,” I admitted. A bit later, another line stuck in my head. “I see what he’s doing there.” Like popcorn popping, the revelations began to gradually speed up. Each weave of imagery, each implied metaphor, each beat of the iamb was like a jolt of adrenaline to my young brain. I was converted into a card-carrying Shakespeare fan.

I continued with acting as well, and in my junior year I had the opportunity to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That was the experience that first sent me down the rabbit hole. No longer just a casual Shakespeare fan, I had become a full-blown addict. And of course the comedies proved to be merely a gateway drug to the harder stuff. My senior year, I discovered Hamlet, and what should have been a year of personal exploration and maturation was completely lost to that play. I would read it over and over, fascinated by the experience of making new discoveries every time, no matter how many times I had read it. Any thoughts I may have ever had of doing anything else were drowned in that play.

I needed more… Masters degree… Ph.D… My dissertation was on teaching Shakespeare to elementary school students. No longer content to be merely a user, I had become a dealer. A pusher. Could I decrease my own misery by dragging down others with me? I was determined to find out. I started teaching graduate-level Shakespeare courses at NYU – first a beginner, than an advanced class. I was completely out of control. I founded a Shakespeare reading group. I started a Shakespeare-themed blog. I taught for the Folger’s summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute for teachers. Conferences. Lectures. Seminars. Nothing was ever enough. When life threw me a curve ball, I went looking for answers at the bottom of a Riverside Complete Works anthology. I re-read Midsummer, and hit Bottom.

And what has it all gotten me? I am forty years old, and I have never held a full-time job. I support myself by working part-time, training teachers, administrators, school-based data teams, graduate students… anyone, as long as it will pay for that next Caedmon audio production of As You Like It. Had I never discovered Shakespeare, never developed that unquenchable thirst, who knows where I’d be today? But I know where I’ll be tonight. There’s an off-off-Broadway production of Measure for Measure in the West Village. Picture it. I walk the mean streets of Manhattan, desperate for a fix. I turn down a dark alley where I see a non-descript door propped open with a piece of plywood. I slip twenty dollars to a kid with purple hair who hands me a program and waves me in. And I know that, tonight, I will get what I need. And for a junkie, tonight is all that matters.

My name is Bill Heller. And I am a Shakespeare addict.

The sixth-graders I’m working with are studying figurative language now, so we looked at figurative language in a scene from Antony and Cleopatra. They enjoyed the “salad days” metaphor, and the exchange where Cleopatra asks her servant Mardian about what it’s like to be a eunuch.

Cleo. Hast thou affections?
Mar. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleo. Indeed!
Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.

In other Shakespeare teaching news, I met with the eighth-graders who are doing As You Like It, and it looks like I will be working with them after all. And I’ve also hooked up with an enthusiastic seventh-grade class that has already read Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet. It looks like I have a few online classrooms to set up.

More to come!

with apologies to Elizabeth Bishop

This is a school in Brooklyn.

This is a student out in the yard
Who needs his Student Metrocard
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

These are the books that are much too hard
For the struggling student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a principal with budget cut short
Who is forced to scale back and is needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the curious student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the yearly progress report
For the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the sleeping student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the panel that serves as a Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the hard-working student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the Mayor who’s closing the schools
And like it or not we must follow his rules
For he chooses eight of thirteen on the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the faceless student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a city in fiscal dismay
That inflated its scores for Election Day
To support the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the hungry student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a state that pulls funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the creative student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the failing student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a country that lives only to borrow
And spend money on yesterday, not on tomorrow,
With the help of the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the brilliant student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

These are the teachers who catch the blame,
Year after year it is always the same,
In a country so broke it must constantly borrow
And spend money on yesterday, not on tomorrow,
With the help of the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the innocent student who’s losing his card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

That’s a great question. I think it’s fair to say the idea that human beings develop in distinct stages was pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the 20th century, when he outlined his psycho-sexual stages of development in childhood. Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist strongly influenced by Freud, described his own set of psycho-social stages, which carried through to adulthood.

Groundbreaking as these ideas were, they were to some degree anticipated by Shakespeare in his Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It. In the speech, Shakespeare describes seven developmental stages that carry through from childhood to adulthood, and the common characteristics that men display at each stage. Freud and Erikson would later codify this scientifically, but the Bard was able to figure it out just by observing the human condition. Point: Humanities!

It’s worth noting that both Freud and Erikson wrote about Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, to describe their theories. In a 1962 article entitled “Youth: Fidelity and Diversity,” Erikson actually references Shakespeare’s “ages of man” before spending about four pages examining fidelity and identity in Hamlet. So it would seem that the answer to the question is, yes, Erikson was influenced by Shakespeare to some degree, as was Freud. But influence often tends to be reflective, and the developmental psychologists certainly left their mark on Shakespeare as well.

I touched on this a bit about a month ago. I used to use “Mosh” to teach poetic devices, and I’m having trouble finding a more contemporary replacement. I’ll just give a sampling of each of the poetic devices I mentioned in that post. I tend to use only the middle stanza and the chorus, which I make into a handout. I also distribute the Prologue for Romeo and Juliet as a handout, so we can compare the two.

Repetition: “We gonna fight, we gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march”; “All you can see is a sea of people”; “If it rains let it rain”; “Rebel with a rebel yell”

Rhyme: Not only is there end rhyme, but there is internal rhyme as well. “They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go/ Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know”; “yea the wetter the better”; “that we need to proceed”

Rhythm: “Mosh” is written in anapestic tetrameter, which I always point out is the same meter as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”… and other popular poems as well. The Prologue for Romeo and Juliet, of course, is in iambic pentameter.

Alliteration: Note that in “we gonna mosh through the marsh” the words “mosh” and “marsh” start and end with the same sounds. Compare with “doth with their death” in the Prologue for Romeo and Juliet.

Antithesis: “They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go”; “from the front to the back”; “some white and some black”

Allusion: There’s a reference to George W. Bush in the passage.

Emendation: This is where I edited the reference to George W. Bush. I usually change it to “Stomp, push, shove, mush, [mock] Bush” even using the brackets like a Shakespeare editor.

In a 2006 interview with Brian Williams, President Bush claimed to have recently read “three Shakespeares” in addition to curling up with some Camus:

WILLIAMS: We always talk about what you’re reading. As you know, there was a report that you just read the works of a French philosopher. (Bush laughs)

BUSH: The Stranger.

WILLIAMS: Tell us the back story of Camus.

BUSH: The back story of the the book?

WILLIAMS: What led you to…

BUSH: I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeare’s.

WILLIAMS: This is a change…

BUSH: Not really. Wait a minute.

WILLIAMS: A few months ago you were reading the life story of Joe DiMaggio by Richard Ben Cramer.

BUSH: Which was a good book.

WILLIAMS: You’ve been on a Teddy Roosevelt reading kick.

BUSH: Well, I’m reading about the battle of New Orleans right now. I’ve got an eclectic reading list.

Williams didn’t ask him what “Shakespeares” he read, but I have my guess at one of them, as well as a selection I wish he’d read.

The constant pi is nature’s random digit generator, stretching out infinitely long and with no predictable pattern. This means that any finite string of numbers can be found somewhere out in the vast expanse of digits.

So if we were to express the Complete Works of Shakespeare in, say, ASCII code, it would indeed be represented as a very long, but certainly finite, string of digits. This string of digits is represented somewhere in pi, not once, but an infinite number of times. What’s more, the very first time it appears would be a finite distance in. Which means, there is some number X where you could say that if you start X digits into pi, you can read the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Before you get too excited by that, you should realize that X is so unfathomably large that it would most likely be beyond human comprehension to even find a way to express it, let alone come anywhere near identifying it. You may think of the monkeys-at-typewriters thought experiment (and for our purposes, we can consider both the digits of pi and monkeys typing to be generating random characters). Even using theoretical monkeys, the number of simian typists needed would be beyond astronomical.

But, yes, the Complete Works of Shakespeare are somewhere in pi with a probability of 1. If the thought of that makes you smile, I’ve done my job.

Henry IV was often referred to as Henry Bolingbroke, but actually, his last name was Plantagenet.

In fact, all of the English kings from Henry II to Richard III carried the surname Plantagenet. This means that throughout the entire Wars of the Roses, the Yorks and Lancasters all had the same last name, which is found throughout the history plays. This is because both sides were led by male-line descendants of Edward III. There is a reference to this in Richard III, as Richard hits on the widow of the cousin he killed:

Glo. He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband,
Did it to help thee to a better husband.
Anne. His better doth not breathe upon the earth.
Glo. He lives that loves thee better than he could.
Anne. Name him.
Glo. Plantagenet.
Anne. Why, that was he.
Glo. The self-same name, but one of better nature.
Anne. Where is he?
Glo. Here.

The long Plantagenet line comes to an end in 1485, when Richard III is defeated by a young man named Henry Tudor.

Rick Astley, before he became well known as a singer, did a bit of acting and even performed in some Shakespeare. Most of his Shakespeare work was done on stage and not screen, but there is a video clip of him performing the “never give her o’er” speech from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The video can be found on YouTube here.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

From Sonnet XLVIII:

And even thence thou wilt be stol’n, I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Irreverent historian Howard Zinn offered to let vast upbeat hope touch fresh lives.

It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

That’s a good question. For the past five years, I’ve been using “Mosh” by Eminem. It was great for teaching repetition, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, antithesis, allusion, and emendation (where I edited out the profanity). Useful as it is, though, it’s starting to get a little old, so I’d appreciate any good suggestions. Are there any popular hip hop songs today that use a lot of poetic devices that might be good for teaching Shakespeare?

Well, the Tudors were English, but it’s important to remember that they reigned from 1485 to 1603, a time of extraordinary changes in publishing, literacy, and what would be considered “the English language.” This was the time of the Great Vowel Shift, as Middle English transitioned into Early Modern English, and the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance.

Probably the most famous work written by a Tudor monarch would be the Defense of the Seven Sacraments, which Henry VIII wrote in Latin, a very common written language at the time. However, his personal letters are in English.

Bloody Mary refers to Queen Mary I, another Tudor monarch who reigned from 1553-1558. She was daughter to Henry VIII (by Catherine of Aragon) and older sister to Elizabeth I. She died before Shakespeare was born, and does not appear in any of his plays, not even the one that bears her father’s name.

The phrase “ghost the fine worth” is an anagram of “Twelfth Night, or Shoe” if you add an extra “L” into the mix. But “Shoe” is not the subtitle of that play, and the extra “L” is cheating, so that’s probably not it. If you do allow substitutions, you can swap “S” for “KNURY” and make “King Henry the Fourth, Two.” The closest I can come is to remove an “O” from the original phrase and replace it with “AEM.” What play title could you anagram then?

UPDATE: Play title discovered by Dharam. See comments for answer.

It’s hard to really put a play at a particular grade level. I prefer to teach the play I want to teach, and plan instruction to fit the students I’m teaching. I’ve only taught As You Like It twice, once to 7th graders and once to graduate students. The lighthearted tone of the play and the fun situations that it depicts make this a fun choice for even the youngest students studying Shakespeare. So if you’re wondering if As You Like It would be a good play for your students, it probably is!

The historical Macbeth died in 1057, so the event you’re looking for is most likely the Battle of Hastings in 1066. This completed the Norman invasion, and basically defined what we think of England even today. William the Conqueror became King William I of England, and every English monarch since – whether King John or Richard III or Henry VIII or George III or Victoria or Elizabeth II – has been a direct descendant of his. That is one impressive legacy.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

The invitation rhyme I posted a couple of days ago got a good reaction, so I’d like to share with you another invitation rhyme. I wrote this one as an invitation to a reading of Henry VIII.

Enjoy!

The First hailed from Normandy, only to wreck it.
The Second one quarreled with Thomas of Beckett.
The Third one ascended to power at nine.
The Fourth was the first of the Lancaster line.
The Fifth one conducted a martial romance.
He married his queen after seizing her France.
The Sixth lost the War of the Roses, the fool.
The Seventh ignited a new Tudor rule.

But do you recall…
The most infamous Henry of all…

I was telling someone of my list of favorite scenes this evening, and it made me think of a reading that I was planning to have several years ago. Instead of choosing one play, I would edit together a collection of the most popular scenes for us to read. Due to scheduling problems, we weren’t able to have the reading, but I did send out an invitation. The invitation was written largely in iambic dimeter (!), and I thought the readers of this site might appreciate it.

Enjoy!

A witches’ brew. A fiery shrew. A knavish sprite. A portly knight. A maid’s disguise. A Jew’s surprise. A bastard’s plan. Each age of man. A paper crown. A motley clown. A nightmare haunt. This John of Gaunt. A guarded door. A jealous Moor. A castaway. St. Crispin’s Day.

A eulogy. A balcony.

The death of kings.

And other things…

It’s the very best of all the scenes, speeches, and sonnets from Shakespeare, hand-picked and edited by yours truly. Be there … or not to be there.

From Sonnet CV:

Let not my love be call’d idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

If Danny and Allison got less poll votes, Adam Lambert or Kris Allen will also be doomed by a nil vote. So, cynics, you deserve the chosen one.