17 ms·

Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems

68 points by martialg 4y ago

charlieo88 4y ago
But did they use an infinite number of monkeys?
teddyh 4y ago
Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/65 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/65 Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare_(1564-1616)#Works https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare_(1...
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  Sure, but how many of them have 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio? https://www.folger.edu/collection-materials https://www.folger.edu/collection-materials
  - teddyh 4y ago
    The texts on Folger’s site have a CC-BY-NC license, prohibiting commercial use. Wikisource seems to use CC-BY-SA, and the Gutenberg texts seem to be in the Public Domain as long as the name “Gutenberg” is removed from the text.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- snitzr 4y ago
  http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html
geekamongus 4y ago
Did 10,000 monkeys finally do this thing?
- wawjgreen 4y ago
  they didn't because they won't because they can't. it has been statistically proven impossible.
NickRandom 4y ago
I know this is Heathen Heresy but I never enjoyed Shakespeare. As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale. Average grades on them were between A+ to B's but dayamn! that olde timee englishee is hard to parse (even with the crib notes) and made me question the validity of them as an example of 'good English writing' 'Get Thee to a Nunnery!' Indeed. And don't even get me started on Chaucer <shudder>.
- defrost 4y ago
  Team John Webster with lashings of Molière FTW Tartuffe & The Duchess of Malfi rank with the works of that upstart crow.
- asimpletune 4y ago
  I know how you feel, but it's really not so bad. It's kind of like being used to c-style syntax and then going to some other convention. To people who are interested, here are a few things that I figured out. A lot of the weird words are actually just contractions. They kind of make sense when you think about it though. So, 'twas is "it was", etc... sometimes these are used to convey the past too. All the thy, thee, thou kind of stuff can be the next difficulty. If you pay attention though you realize that they all mean some version of "you", and which one is used depends on the meaning. I think it goes sort of like this: Thee is when "you" is the object of some verb, e.g. "He told thee". Thy is like "you" but possessive, e.g. "Mind thy business". And thou is like "you" when it's just the normal subject of a sentence, e.g. "thou are a saucy fellow". Actually, I didn't get Shakespeare in school at all. Then one day I just picked it up as a joke and started reading it aloud to a friend... 5 min later I'm like, "But wait, like, so what exactly happened to the King? Don't you think it's a bit sus for his Ghost to be haunting the sentinels? Clearly they all see the ghost, so they're not making it up, meaning something sketchy has happened..."
- quartesixte 4y ago
  Chaucer is practically in a different language. Middle English basically needs to be learned separately before you can be thrown into reading the Canterbury Tales in its original text. Any self respecting Chaucer course in a university literature program will begin with a week of just Middle English instruction.
asimpletune 4y ago
I also really appreciate Standard E-Books https://standardebooks.org https://standardebooks.org. Their renditions of public domain works is better than most paid Kindle versions.
quartesixte 4y ago
Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely. Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School. Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous. The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy! edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson. There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that reading Shakespeare at school is "kill[ing] the love of literature in children"?
- hnhg 4y ago
  I don't know, I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare as a kid at school. It stayed with me too. I actually can't remember the other books we read, except Lord of the Flies.
  - dcist 4y ago
    It stayed with me as well. I loved reading Shakespeare in school. I think reading Shakespeare can instill a love of language in a young kid.
    - 4y ago
billfruit 4y ago
Does it included the notes and annotations found in the Folger print editions. I recommend Folger editions if you want to read Shakespeare in print, they are inexpensive and has each facing page filled with definitions of obscure words and explanations.
wolverine876 4y ago
Note that many editions of Shakespeare modernize the language a bit. I don't know what Folger does (anyone know?) and I haven't found an authoritative source for the original, but Open Source Shakespeare is the best I've found so far: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ Does anyone know an authoritative source for the 'original' text [0]? I suppose books in the Interet Archive might be a good place to look next. [0] In some cases, the true original has been lost to time and the earliest text we have was published many years later.
themadturk 4y ago
A couple of years ago I read The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, the story of how Henry Folger got obsessed with early editions of Shakespeare and created the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He was a high ranking executive at Standard Oil and had the money to buy up a large number of copies of the First Folio, bringing them to America. An interesting story of obsession and, let's face it, greed coming out of the Gilded Age.

68 points by martialg 4y ago

But did they use an infinite number of monkeys?

Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/65 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/65 Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare_(1564-1616)#Works https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare_(1...

SeanLuke 4y ago
Sure, but how many of them have 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio? https://www.folger.edu/collection-materials https://www.folger.edu/collection-materials
- teddyh 4y ago
  The texts on Folger’s site have a CC-BY-NC license, prohibiting commercial use. Wikisource seems to use CC-BY-SA, and the Gutenberg texts seem to be in the Public Domain as long as the name “Gutenberg” is removed from the text.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
snitzr 4y ago
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html

geekamongus 4y ago

Did 10,000 monkeys finally do this thing?

wawjgreen 4y ago
they didn't because they won't because they can't. it has been statistically proven impossible.

NickRandom 4y ago

I know this is Heathen Heresy but I never enjoyed Shakespeare. As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale. Average grades on them were between A+ to B's but dayamn! that olde timee englishee is hard to parse (even with the crib notes) and made me question the validity of them as an example of 'good English writing' 'Get Thee to a Nunnery!' Indeed. And don't even get me started on Chaucer <shudder>.

defrost 4y ago
Team John Webster with lashings of Molière FTW Tartuffe & The Duchess of Malfi rank with the works of that upstart crow.
asimpletune 4y ago
I know how you feel, but it's really not so bad. It's kind of like being used to c-style syntax and then going to some other convention. To people who are interested, here are a few things that I figured out. A lot of the weird words are actually just contractions. They kind of make sense when you think about it though. So, 'twas is "it was", etc... sometimes these are used to convey the past too. All the thy, thee, thou kind of stuff can be the next difficulty. If you pay attention though you realize that they all mean some version of "you", and which one is used depends on the meaning. I think it goes sort of like this: Thee is when "you" is the object of some verb, e.g. "He told thee". Thy is like "you" but possessive, e.g. "Mind thy business". And thou is like "you" when it's just the normal subject of a sentence, e.g. "thou are a saucy fellow". Actually, I didn't get Shakespeare in school at all. Then one day I just picked it up as a joke and started reading it aloud to a friend... 5 min later I'm like, "But wait, like, so what exactly happened to the King? Don't you think it's a bit sus for his Ghost to be haunting the sentinels? Clearly they all see the ghost, so they're not making it up, meaning something sketchy has happened..."
quartesixte 4y ago
Chaucer is practically in a different language. Middle English basically needs to be learned separately before you can be thrown into reading the Canterbury Tales in its original text. Any self respecting Chaucer course in a university literature program will begin with a week of just Middle English instruction.

asimpletune 4y ago

I also really appreciate Standard E-Books https://standardebooks.org https://standardebooks.org. Their renditions of public domain works is better than most paid Kindle versions.

quartesixte 4y ago

Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely. Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School. Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous. The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy! edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson. There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
Is there any evidence that reading Shakespeare at school is "kill[ing] the love of literature in children"?
hnhg 4y ago
I don't know, I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare as a kid at school. It stayed with me too. I actually can't remember the other books we read, except Lord of the Flies.
- dcist 4y ago
  It stayed with me as well. I loved reading Shakespeare in school. I think reading Shakespeare can instill a love of language in a young kid.
  - 4y ago

billfruit 4y ago

Does it included the notes and annotations found in the Folger print editions. I recommend Folger editions if you want to read Shakespeare in print, they are inexpensive and has each facing page filled with definitions of obscure words and explanations.

wolverine876 4y ago

Note that many editions of Shakespeare modernize the language a bit. I don't know what Folger does (anyone know?) and I haven't found an authoritative source for the original, but Open Source Shakespeare is the best I've found so far: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ Does anyone know an authoritative source for the 'original' text [0]? I suppose books in the Interet Archive might be a good place to look next. [0] In some cases, the true original has been lost to time and the earliest text we have was published many years later.

themadturk 4y ago

A couple of years ago I read The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, the story of how Henry Folger got obsessed with early editions of Shakespeare and created the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He was a high ranking executive at Standard Oil and had the money to buy up a large number of copies of the First Folio, bringing them to America. An interesting story of obsession and, let's face it, greed coming out of the Gilded Age.