Thursday Chatter | April 9

Good Flames, what cheer?

Our writing theme this month was born of Shakespeare and I have a strong desire to chatter in Iambic pentameter. Worry not, I shall refrain.

Over the centuries, there has been much ado made about Shakespeare and his reputation. Some people insist he was not educated enough to have written his plays. They even accuse him of stealing the work of other playwrights. Others will tell you he had some level of familiarity with seven languages and a vocabulary bigger than his eventual fame.

I choose Team Shakespeare. We all know that a formal education is not an indication of intelligence or ability. Being so gifted with words, then he was likely an excellent listener. For someone with the right mind, listening and observing is a kind of hands-on education in itself.

What I have always loved about Shakespeare is the way he plays with words. The sounds they make were just as important to him as the meanings. And if they has more than one meaning – woohoo – those went straight into his bag of tricks to be thrown down like an Ace in the middle of a poker final.

Did you know, that Shakespeare’s word play actually created new words that are still a part of our speech today? About 1700 of them, scholars have counted. I found this article yesterday that has a cool grid linking Shakespeare’s word to the first play it ever showed up in. He did for language what we still do today, he re-purposed nouns into verbs into adjectives and combined multiple words into a single one. In fact, if Shakespeare hadn’t demonstrated that our language was so flexible in this way, we might still be executing a search for a person’s published, public references on the internet -instead of just googling them.

Shakespeare was the Bard with googliness.

What’s your take on Shakespeare? Have you read his work? Studied his sonnets? Can you quote him on the fly? How many of his plays have you (knowingly) seen on stage or in film adaptations.

I’ve had the good fortune to see “The Tempest” and “Much Ado About Nothing” acted on stage (in person) and I try to watch all of the film adaptations that follow the plays verbatim. My favorite of all his plays is “Titus Andronicus”, but I’m morbid like that, Yo. “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” follow on the favorites list.

Talk to me about The Bard today.

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There’s still time to get your act together – April’s week one prompt is waiting for you.

APAD – soul food – write it while it’s hot.

Camp NaNoWriMo – 21 days left. Don’t miss it.