Shakespeare
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Shakespeare: Poetic Genius and Capitalist Monster
This puts a whole new spin on The Merchant of Venice: According to this Associated Press article, Shakespeare wasn’t just English literature’s foremost creative visionary; he was also a hardhearted grain merchant who sometimes landed in legal trouble for his unethical business…
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Coauthor a Book with Charles Dickens, Sort of
Google is nixing their RSS reader in July, but at least we still have this fun demo of real-time collaborative Google docs. “See what it’s like to collaborate with famous storytellers,” says the blurb on the side of the page.…
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Straight Outta Stratford
Whom do we have to thank for the line “I’ll teach you how to flow”? LL Cool J? Method Man? Actually, it’s Antonio, Prospero’s villainous brother in The Tempest. HTMLGiant collects this and other Shakespeare quotes that sound like 1990s hip-hop…
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My Kingdom for a Better Burial Site
Richard III, whom Shakespeare portrayed as deformed and murderous, has been dug up not in a cathedral or mausoleum but underneath a parking lot. The BBC reports that after extensive research and DNA testing, archaeologists are sure “beyond reasonable doubt”…
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Thou Art More Lovely and More Efficient
As the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data. Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more efficient—than hard drives: DNA itself.…
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A Twitter Bot That Knows Its Poetry
Located, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming couplets. It’s unclear whether the account is a bot or a human with computer assistance…
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Better Books, Better Brains
If you’ve ever felt like reading good literature gives you more comfort and insight than any self-help book ever could, you’re probably onto something. Scientists at the University of Liverpool recently conducted a study indicating that the brain “lights up”…
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Ward Off Your Enemies With Shakespearean Verve
Jazz musician Pete Levin has provided a quick and easy way to verbally shatter any foe with Ye Olde Official Shakespearean Insult Kit. Users are given four fields – an introductory phrase field and three adjective fields – with which…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Happy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t done for like ten years, so posts…
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The Blurb #11: A Fresh Eye
Why do so many of us, as readers or maybe as a society, assume that originality springs forth out of nothing, although at the same time we understand that every idea, every story, has a precedent?
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Here’s some interesting reading from the world of poetry this week. Michael Schaub at HTMLGIANT picks up where the Poetry Foundation left off a little while ago about martinis and poets. You’ll like their entries. This is a little dated…
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The Book of William, Reviewed
The Book of William — the new book chronicling the fortunes of Shakespeare’s First Folio, by regular Rumpus contributor Paul Collins — gets a nice brief writeup in the “Nonfiction Chronicle” feature of the NYT Sunday Book Review: “Part antiquarian-book primer,…