William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52 | Hacker News Reader

William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52

nytimes.com

113 pointshvo73 comments

"Shakespeare was the most commonly used spelling in his day, but by the 18th century, the version most favored was Shakespear, and only in the 20th century did Shakespeare become the standard. Interestingly, of the six surviving signatures the great man himself left behind, not one is spelled Shakespeare."

He must have gotten it wrong. Thank goodness we've corrected it for him. Not like he was particularly good at English.

Of the six signatures, three are abbreviations, and the other three don't coincide among themselves. Besides, he did use the modern form when he wrote his name in print, just not in his signature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_Shakespeare's_name

Oh be quiet with your logic and evidence.

In the Romantic and Victorian eras the spelling "Shakspere", as used in the poet's own signature, became more widely adopted in the belief that this was the most authentic version.

I guess I lean this way. (I do acknowledge what you said about the man himself spelling his own name differently, makes me wonder why...) But I have always been perplexed about different spellings and pronunciations of proper nouns. My name is Dave in every language, I assure you. Sounds like the Elizabethans were all kinds of lax with spelling!

> My name is Dave in every language

No it most likely is not. For one it is a short form of the name David, so it has already been mangled, and then like any other written word will change how it is written to attempt to show the sounds in the written rules of that language. This can lead to additions of letters or some very strange changes to the spelling of the name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_%28name%29

"Hebrew: דָּוִד, Modern David, Tiberian Dāwîḏ ... In Christian tradition, the name was adopted as Syriac: ܕܘܝܕ‎ Dawid, Greek Δαυίδ, Latin Davidus. The Quranic spelling is داوُد Dāwūd."

So just around the Mediterranean, where the name originated, we have (in the English alphabet) Dawid, David, Davidus, Dawud. All for the same name.

I wouldn't respond to any of them. Do you understand my point? I am "Dave" (or David to my mother). That's it. You can spell or pronounce it however you want, but you're speaking of or to someone other than me.

I wouldn't respond to any of them.

I take it you haven't lived in a country where pronouncing "Dave" is tricky. If I was to not respond to everybody who didn't pronounce my name correctly when I lived in England it would have been some very lonely and infuriating years. At the end of the day I accepted that the exact pronunciation of my name wasn't that important as long as everybody understood who we where talking about.

I've travelled to plenty (I used to work for a large multinational and travelled to all parts of the world) and people I interacted with across many disparate cultures made the effort to pronounce my name as I was introduced (or introduced myself) to them. I also made every effort to pronounce their names as they pronounced them. Accents being what they are, it wasn't always perfect, but they never decided to call me a local translation of "Dave."

But again, I think we should call Italy "Italia" because that's how Italians spell and pronounce it. When I ask a local something about Padua and they look at me confused until I ask them about Padova, we should all be making the effort to call it "Padova."

they never decided to call me a local translation of "Dave."

I had a German friend in England called "Peter" and everyone always called him the English pronunciation of "Peter" no matter how he introduced himself. Maybe it's different with an English name in a non-english speaking country, since the 'correct' pronunciation is often known thanks to TV and movies.

That would have been considered disrespectful in my company, and to me personally. That said, I spent some time in Germany working with Germans, but we would only call someone "Peter" if he (or heck, she) asked to be directly.

I suppose this boils down to identity for me, having had hours to reflect on this conversation now. My name is a huge part of my identity. How it can be changed in any way without my consent is bizarre to me (respect to the untold number of immigrants that had their names changed at Ellis Island and elsewhere on a whim).

In any case, yeah, unless he asked to be called Peter, WTF?

That would have been considered disrespectful in my company, and to me personally

Me, I quickly realized it was about picking my battles. I could fight every day I lived in England to get people to pronounce it correctly or I could accept a reasonable best effort approximation and move on with my life. I found that most expats/immigrants with strange names took the same approach. These days when I'm in England or North America I've even started to pronounce my own name slightly wrong to speed up the whole process. Hell some people I know even preemptively changed their names to something easier to save everybody the effort.

Mispronunciations where (almost) never due to malice and my friends converged on a good pronunciation fairly quickly, and that was good enough for me. Spending a few years of your youth with most people getting you name wrong quickly desensitizes you to such minor details.

What if you move to a country where the language doesn't have one of the sound in your name. Like 'D' or 'V'? And you have to transliterate your name to fill forms.

It's a common problem for at least Russian and Chinese names which can't be spelled accurately with the roman alphabet.

As a concrete example, Japanese doesn't have a native 'V' sound, so your name would be slightly mispronounced.

As I mention above, I'm not so obtuse as to have a negative reaction to someone making an effort to say my name as I introduce myself, because of a non-native sound.

Different alphabets do introduce unique challenges, but across all languages using the same Roman alphabet, it's spelled D-A-V-E. (Or D-A-V-I-D if you insist.)

But then, I've never had anyone in any culture besides my high school language teacher tell me my name was something different.

> I wouldn't respond to any of them.

This is a difference in era and culture, I think, rather than only one of spelling. Look at all of the "other names" listed on the Christopher Columbus page of Wikipedia. In Italy he was Cristoforo Colombo, in Spain he was Cristóbal Colón.

You're right, and I'm sure globalization and the Internet make me more stubborn about the whole thing.

It's been a while since my last Greek lesson but isn't Δαυίδ actually 'Danis' and not 'David'?

That's an upsilon in the middle and a delta at the end.

Dawei in Mandarin.

Everyone were all kinds of lax with spelling. If you ever get involved with genealogy you will likely learn to hate the extreme levels of inconsistency there will be in written records covering the same person. It's not unusual to e.g. find church records written by the same priest spelling a parishioners name differently in different records, and these were official records.

That's because spelling was sort-of-phonetic. If it made the sound of the word you wanted, it was okay.

In fact there was no concept of standardised correct and consistent spelling.

> My name is Dave in every language, I assure you.

My name is David in English and French. Which brings up the awkward question of whether it's Дъйвид or Давид in Bulgarian.

Well, you know, Prince changed the spelling of his name, too. [1]

[1] http://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html

In Japanese, your name is デイブ, which sounds more or less like "deibu".

I am sure there are languages in which your name is Deivas or Дэйв.

Judging by those spellings, we've also been pronouncing it wrongly. A pronunciation like "shax pear" does seem to have more of a early modern English ring to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

In an intersection of recent topics in HN, I highly recommend the Globe's 2012 rendition of Twelfth Night, in which Stephen Fry plays Malvolio. I was never so much a fan of his as most seem to be around here, but his performance was frankly good, if somewhat similar to the character from Blackadder II. As for the rest of the cast, they range from solid to excellent.

Cheers for that. I stumbled across their online player recently, but was a bit overwhelmed. Might give your suggestion a go:

https://globeplayer.tv/videos/twelfth-night

Indeed, saw it in NYC. Thought his performance was good. Mark Rylance, of course, was incredible.

Is there a place you can watch it online?

Sadly (?) the only memories I have of Shakespeare are the forced readings in my sophomore (Julius Caesar) and junior (King Lear) years in high school, both of which I hated and for which Cliff's Notes were my crutch to get through.

Much of what he writes about requires, I think, experience in the 'real world' in order to understand and relate to te play. In high school I couldn't understand why Hamlet dithers; what kind of hero feigns insanity and procrastinates? Heroes, everyone knows, charge right at the Death Star and the only question is whether he'll use the battle computer or the Force.

Sometimes I wondered, are these just random ravings of a lunatic? I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Now I understand it and his genius is a a pleasure, an education in humanity, and a wonder to behold. But perhaps it's wasted in high school. Another problem is that there are so few good films of his plays, so people don't have a chance to see well-done versions of them. Some of the films are so poorly produced and such wooden film-making that I'm afraid they will scare people away.

I thought it was illegal not to have read Hamlet by 21?

Seriously though, give it another try. Shakespeare's wide-ranging enough that there's likely to be something to your taste. And with his comedies, especially, I'd recommend watching Shakespeare and not reading him- that's how his plays were meant to be experienced. Although it's nice to read an annotated version and discover all the (often dirty) jokes you didn't get.

Added benefit to reading Shakespeare: you'll understand about 40% more literary allusions (read the Bible, Ovid, Homer, and Virgil to get the rest).

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that there are so many succesful modern retellings of his plays. Something about the stories are just timeless.

Watch the originals, by all means, but the reimagined ones are not too shabby either:

Romeo + Juliet, modern day "Verona Beach"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VBsi0VxiLg

Much Ado About Nothing, set in modern days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnmZc8uoEbo

Hamlet, set in the 1800's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rd74Gniz-A

Richard III, set in WW2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXc0-EME0C8

His stories were timeless, even when he first wrote them, as they often drew on existing stories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_plays#Source_m...

As someone new to Shakespeare, you should definitely start out by watching performances, rather than reading scripts. Until you've absorbed the rhythm and the literary style, it can be very difficult to follow their plots just from a cold reading of the text; particularly for the histories. (And while King Lear is classed as a tragedy, I've personally always felt that it reads more like one of the histories)

If you do start reading the scripts for pleasure (which totally is not required!), then it's probably a good idea to start with one which you've seen performed, just to let your brain adapt itself to seeing the words in written form, and to get used to looking back and forth between the text and the annotations, without needing to worry about losing the plot.

This. Plays were the movies of their time; they were meant to be watched. The scripts are great, too, but they're supposed to accompany the play, not the other way around.

It's like reading the lyrics to a song. Sure, some lyrics are absolutely fantastic in their own right, but they were meant to be sung to music, not just read by themselves.

Hell, even with music, some bands go from being mediocre to flat-out amazing when they perform live.

Over the years I've seen (heard) a lot of Shakespeare plays, and I mostly agree with you. Yes, just reading the play is inadequate because the written form is so bare. Attending a live performance is a much better experience. The dialog is meant to be spoken and to be heard.

What I do recommend, and is my own practice, is reading the play before going to the performance. We are especially blessed to read Shakespeare today, the internet is so very helpful. So many versions of every Shakespeare play, most have annotations about Elizabethan language that help the reader make sense of it.

Reading AOT makes it much easier to follow what's happening on stage. Even small local productions can be done well, Shakespearean plays were always meant as entertainment, go and enjoy!

I think you are right about the classification of the plays, Comedy, Tragedy, etc, don't necessarily fit our modern sensibilities. In Shakespeare's time, "Merchant of Venice" was called a "comedy", but in our era we'd say it's more tragic than not. I'd agree familiarity with the play is more important than its categorization.

It's been a long time since I was in that position; almost none of the plays are new to me at this stage. (I'll confess, though, that I've neither seen nor read Coriolanus, Cymbaline, or Timon of Athens. Or, for that matter, any of the Apocrypha) For me personally, I would absolutely do exactly the same as you; if I was going to attend a production of any of those plays which I've not yet experienced, I would read the script, first.

But for someone who isn't yet accustomed to the language, I expect that it would be a hard slog, getting through the texts without an actor's interpretation to help you along.

> But for someone who isn't yet accustomed to the language, I expect that it would be a hard slog, getting through the texts without an actor's interpretation to help you along.

That's the beauty of the web. The online transcripts of the plays provide many explanations of the language and its cultural context, which makes the dialog so much more understandable to people coming to it the first time.

Without doing this it will be difficult for a beginner to understand what the actors are saying or what's happening on stage. Frankly, I can have trouble with plays I've seen only once before or haven't seen in a long time, I figure it won't hurt to read it before seeing it again.

>What I do recommend, and is my own practice, is reading the play before going to the performance.

But what about the spoilers?

You don't watch/read Shakespeare for M Night Shyamalan twists, but instead for the quality of the language, the actor's performances, and the director's liberties with the script.

> Until you've absorbed the rhythm and the literary style

also reading outloud helps

i used to tell people the first one will take you two months, the second one will take you two weeks, and the third one will take you two days

i meant it as playful encouragement but i think it may have put some people off

also, i just like taking more time with texts than it takes me to read them

it took me two weeks to read the first sentence of basho's oku no hosomichi:

"moon and sun are passing figures of countless generations and years coming or going wanderers too"

I'd highly recommend performances using original pronunciation if you can track some down. It makes a remarkable difference compared to the RP commonly used for Shakespeare. Half the rhymes just don't work in modern English, and especially not in RP English.

It took me a little while to tune in to what sounds to modern ears like a heavy West Country (pirate!) accent. That said I found it far easier to enjoy than RP.

For a little background on OP, see a 10 min Open University explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s or this 6 min comparison of a speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi-rejaoP7U

Grown up in Japan and got into theatre, I've tried a few of Shakespeare (in Japanese translations), but I didn't fully get it---until I came to US and actually read it aloud in English. I agree that it is much more approachable as spoken words.

I never enjoyed Shakespeare until I began reading King Henry IV on a mobile WAP site on my Nokia about 12 years ago while guarding some railroad tracks.

i think there is a lot to be enjoyed in his writings, i would encourage you to reinvestigate his work

the other comments in response to yours speak well of approaching his work

    LEAR
    How old art thou?
    
    KENT
    Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, 
    nor so old to dote on her for anything.

who answers the question 'how old are you?' like this? what does that even mean?

i love the way shakespeare densely muses on social and personal issues indirectly whilst playing with language and dialogue

i sometimes read his works like others read holy books, meaning i'll just open up to a random spot and read a few lines until i find just an immeasurably unique use of language and close it satisified

shakespeare wrote for the pit and penny people, the work is intended to be fun, it just happens to also be brilliant

Schools tend to pick the worst plays. Try as you like it, taming of the shrew, and other comedies.

They are also setup for live plays, and it loses something when the actors are not trying to get there lines in over a laughing audience.

Try watching Shakespeare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsYrGIQnmxo

> “To be or not to be,” said Hamlet, prince of Denmark, “that is the question.” Yesterday, Hamlet’s creator was; today, he is not. Of that there is no question.

OK, so I'm moved to quote Samuel Butler:

> To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

I got that (as I recall) from Peter Watts' Echopraxia.

It's rather comforting, because I can always imagine that I will awaken ;)

When I wake up and my first thought is "I'm alive!" It's actually going to be a good day.

Right. And when my first thought is "WTF?", it helps to think "At least I'm alive!" ;)

That's beautiful. The thought of dying scares me though because I just hate the idea that it will happen in the middle of an important thought.

right, if you were in the middle of solving P versus NP it would suck to be hit by a lighting bolt.

On exactly the same date, Miguel de Cervantes, Novelist and Poet, is dead at 68.

What a wretched year! Bowie, Rickman, Prince and now Shakespeare too?! Say it ain't so. Taken too soon. RIP.

You know why I love Shakespeare? Because only thoughtful minds can understand his writings. Ones that can bear to get out of their technology-infested worlds and actually focus on a story that has and can keep your attention, when words meant more than simple communication.

Promises were called oaths and there were such things as enduring love, faithfulness, and trust, yet, there were still scandals and mistakes. But it was all overcome in a story that few today would venture to understand in its original context.

It takes little intelligence to comprehend what a text means, but in poetry and stories we find beautiful manifestations of every moral and in these I think we find the vulnerability of this plague we call humanity.

    Miss Hathaway had as a lover
    That infamous son of a glover
      Whatever Will said
      In their second-best bed
    She edited cover to cover

A sort of rambling article from NYT whose most notable feature was a beautiful sidenote style and the lack of a scrollbar. For those interested in Shakespeare and new media, here's a thing I've been working on http://gavinpc.com/project_willshake.pdf

Contrarily, I found it engrossing.

Yeah the lack of a scrollbar and an inability to highlight text really irked me, especially because I wanted to search some of the terms in the article to find out more. I really don't get why they bother with these anti-features...

Your PDF is thought-provoking, as was the NYT article.

Thank you. That means a lot to me.

I have worked on that project mostly in secret for over ten years, and I had resolved that yesterday had to be a release date of some kind. So yeah, I hadn't slept, and I needlessly (and foolishly) criticized the OP whose thread I'd recklessly hijacked for self-promotional purposes, hoping that a topical limerick from my college days would buy me a little good will.

I should have done a Show HN instead.

Shakespeare

https://cardiffshakespeare.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/william-...

http://www.shak-stat.engsem.uni-hannover.de/

Am I the only one who finds the tense in the title a bit confusing? For a moment I was wondering whether he was actually born in 1964...

The entire article is written in present tense, as if it's a current news event; makes for a more interesting read. I don't think they're too concerned about people thinking William Shakespeare just now died.

Not necessarily. Anne Hathaway, Bill Shakespeare's wife and star of The Dark Knight Rises, was born in 1982. :)

What about people thinking this was taken from a 400 year old edition of the paper?

First Prince now Shakespeare?!

This is wonderfully sly and humorous.

Moderators, can you append [1616] to the title? This is old news.

On that note, it's pretty impressive that the NY Times already had online presence back then. This was way before Geocities and Lycos.

And way before New York, even. New Amsterdam was renamed to New York only after 1664.

I don't get it

I agree in that I'm wondering if this is related to Prince dying?

I'm guessing it's by chance, since it's the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, so presumably this was planned.

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