Shakespeare, famously, shunned computers. Like some sort of retro hipster, he didn't write his plays on a laptop, refused to use spellcheck, and didn't register his copyright on the blockchain. Lord, what fools these mortals be! What would Shakespeare's plays have been like if their characters understood basic cybersecurity? Now, it is true that very […]
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The best thing about Shakespeare is that you can endlessly redefine the stories. Romeo & Juliet works as well set in NYC to a musical score as it does set in fair Verona. The Tempest is just as good whether the action takes place on an island or an alien planet. Shakespeare can be set […]
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Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again!0 That's a rallying cry I can get behind. Willy wrote for the groundlings - plenty of sex and violence, interspersed with fart jokes and casual xenophobia. When your audience are drunk and violent, you really need to bring your best rhyming couplets. Shitfaced Shakespeare knows its West End audience have had […]
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Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off on a journey, it is worth seeing if […]
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Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in […]
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I'll cheerfully admit to only having a hazy familiarity with the play (it's the one with twins that isn't 12th Night, and with the shipwreck which isn't Tempest, and with the annoyed money-lender which isn't Merchant of Venice... wait... perhaps I have seen it in aggregate!) On the one hand, this is an entirely traditional […]
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This is a short but interesting look at the way Shakespeare's comedy was understood by his contemporaries - and how his legacy still influences modern comedians. There's a good deal of discussion about the role comedy played in society, and the interplay between actors and playwright would have worked. But, sadly, it never quite makes […]
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Who "owns" the English language? Do you cringe when you see "centre" spelled (or spelt) "center" (or vice-versa)? Which Americanisms do you think are super awesome? This book asks us a simple question: What if, instead of worrying about the “ruination” of English by young people, jargonistas, or Americans, we celebrated English for being robust […]
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Exactly a decade ago, I wrote about how Shakespeare invented the emoticon. Nestled deep in "Winter's Tale" is the first recorded use of the typographic smilie :) As I discussed, Sir Smile's smile appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th folios. One hundred years after the 4th folio was printed, the smile vanished. The […]
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Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster. While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper authored by one JC Shakespeare. As you can probably tell from that snippet, there is […]
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