Change Criticism Forever – Participate in the Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint The votes are in! We are annotating Hamlet This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our …
The story of Shakespeare on the internet is a tangled tale, and this post is an attempt to unravel it. In expounding the advantages and shortcomings of online editions, I hope also to explain a few of the problems Open Shakespeare faces. Editions Used by Open Shakespeare Every work on the Open Shakespeare website has …
I spent much of this afternoon perusing the materials available at Shakespeare’s Staging, after its director got in touch with Open Shakespeare. Amongst all the images of past productions, my favourite was one of the earliest: a drawing of Edward Kean as Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well. I find you get a real …
Lacking inspiration for a Word of the Day article on the day that it all kicks off in South Africa, I freely admit that I’m taking the obvious subject. Expect other articles in due course on ‘Tennis’, and any other seasonal events that come to mind. The word ‘football’ occurs only twice in all Shakespeare’s …
Last weekend was OKCON, and I delivered a 15 minute introduction to Open Shakespeare there. Little of what I said was new, and the real interest for me came from the discussions I had with other conference-goers during the day. A few of these discussions, and one or two presentations, have given me a several …
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 …
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: Click …
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. …
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 …
Keeping with the food theme, today’s word is capon. Still a popular dish in France and elsewhere on the continent, it is no longer enjoyed as much in Britain as it was in Shakespeare’s time. To be precise, a capon, according to the OED, is a castrated cockerel, overfed,and served as a delicacy. Hamlet, Comedy …
Rufus Pollock
Iain Emsley
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