Blot Some Lines

A long time ago we had a great discussion over that classic quote about how Shakespeare "never blotted a line," and the follow-up "Would he had blotted a thousand!" Did that imply that he made 1000 mistakes that should have been erased ... or that he could possibly have made room for 1000 more moments of genius?

Tell me your least favorite line(s) in Shakespeare. The one that makes you cringe, and which he'd never written it. Makes you want to just take your red pen and strike it from existence, because it just doesn't *feel* right.

I'm not talking about snipping of entire characters and speeches because you need to cut down on time and/or people. I'm talking specifically about lines that rub you the wrong way because they don't flow like they should, or they sound out of character, stuff like that. As if you were a modern editor and were sending notes back to the author with whatever the mark is that's the editor's equivalent of "WTF were you thinking here, Will?"

I ask because I'm wondering whether people will accept the challenge, or whether I'll get a lot of "Every word Shakespeare wrote was perfect" debate.

The Proper Way to do a Memorable Quotes List

So, Stylist Magazine wrote me today with a link to their Shakespeare's Most Memorable Quotes article. I get lots of similar requests and often brush them off as linkbait. But this one is actually quite good, and worth a link, and I'll tell you why.

First, there's 40 of them, not just 10. So even those most of them are the same old classics we've heard a million times, there's plenty in there that you're not used to seeing make the cut - including selections from Merry Wives and Measure for Measure.

Each quote is cited - play, act and scene. I can't tell you how much it bothers me when I cruise through the various quote databases online and find quotes mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, because people just blindly copy something from one place to another with no research or concern for quality.

There's a picture for just about all of them of an actual stage (or film) production. So part of the fun is recognizing which productions you've seen, and which actors you can spot. For a small handful they went with a drawing or book cover - I wonder why? And, having said that, does anybody know where that Lear image comes from? It's quite jarring.

Note as well, if it doesn't become obvious, that there's both rollover text as well as a slide show. So you can either hover your mouse over each image to check out the quote, or just click on one to zoom in, and then page through all of them. The user interface engineer in me appreciates that very much.

So, something for everybody. Even if you know all the quotes you can still have fun checking out the images. Somebody over there didn't just try to drum up some traffic by sticking Shakespeare's name on a bullet list. They actually put some research into it. Well done, Stylist!

Narrative Timelines

Here's a question I don't think we've ever covered before. Does Shakespeare ever play with anything other than a traditional, sequential timeline? In other words, is there ever a time when Scene 3 takes place chronologically before Scene 2? For example in a flashback, or a staged re-enactment of one of those many "Here let me tell you what happened offstage..." moments? I know that there are a good handful of instances of "Ok, now, flash forward a few years." But does he ever, for any reason, flash backward? Would an Elizabethan audience have even understood that concept?

The opening to Taming of the Shrew would be close to what I mean, if it started with grandparents Petruchio and Katherine being pestered by their grandchildren to tell the story of how they met. Know what I mean? It's certainly a standard form of storytelling these days, and I'm wondering whether it would have been completely alien to Shakespeare and his audience.