From Henry IV, Part Two:

Come hither, Harry: sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe. God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head:
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Two weeks back, Ms. Christiane Amanpour hobnobbed live with five former secretaries of state.

They told her why their instinct is for the new president to talk to both allies and enemies.

They told her in synch why we must both close Guantanamo and end torture.

They told her why it is time to move on climate change.

They told her why they think Iraq’s a hot potato.

Dumb liberal bile!

You can read a transcript of the interview here.

Well, I am pleased to report that the Cymbeline project turned out very well.

For their video project, the 8th grade class I was working with decided to create a modern-day talk show (instead of a reality show) with characters from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as guests. The show includes scenes from the original play, an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game… all written, performed, and produced by the students!

They presented their video at an in-school film festival, and represented their school at a citywide film festival hosted by my organization. And now, through the magic of the Internet, I share the video with you:

If you want to share this video with others, you can link directly to this post or embed the video from its TeacherTube page (where you can also watch the video if you have trouble loading it in here). We will also be featuring the video on the school’s home page.

UPDATE: The kids put the video on YouTube. It’s a much higher quality than what I was able to post to TeacherTube, so if you want to embed the video on your site, you should use that one.

I was planning to post a Greek Tragedy 24 as a follow-up to last month’s Shakespeare 24, but it turned out to be much too derivative. Part of the problem seems to be that the two genres being parodied are much too close to make such a union humorous. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 24 is today’s answer to the ancient Greek tragedy. A statement like that requires some explanation.

The most obvious similarity is the real-time format. Ancient Greek drama was, for the most part, presented in real time. The audience of that age would not have accepted the traditional story-telling techniques that we take for granted today, such as flash-backs and multiple locations. Aristotle’s unity of time is often translated as meaning that the action of a play must take place within 24 hours (which would have worked just as well for this comparison), but Aristotle never actually wrote this, and if you read the plays, they could pretty much take place in the time you spent watching them. The plays start after most of the action has already happened, and the main character is about an hour and a half away from the great reversal of fortune and recognition he has coming. During the play, characters come in and out, but the audience usually stays put. Oedipus realizes that he needs to speak with someone and has to summon him and wait for him to come, unless he just happened to have already summoned him on another matter and, oh look, here he comes now. Audiences of the time had no problem accepting that sort of thing, I suppose. Shakespeare did not have to play by these rules for his audiences, shifting his scenes between Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, and famously skipping over sixteen years in The Winter’s Tale, to name just two examples.

Similarly, when Briscoe and Curtis (or whoever the current line-up on Law & Order is this year) get a lead on a suspect, we can immediately cut to them arriving on the scene. When Jack Bauer gets a lead on a suspect, he actually has to physically get to the location. It’s worth noting that only the unity of time, not place or action, is observed. The show can easily switch back and forth between Washington DC and Los Angeles, and have multiple story lines going at the same time. But what the real-time format does for both 24 and Greek tragedy is to give an immediacy to the events being depicted. We can feel like this is something happening in front of us in the moment. When our hero is faced with a choice to make, he has to make it right now, even if it is an impossible choice.

This element of the impossible choice is crucial to both 24 and Greek tragedy. Greek playwrights would often show characters torn between their solemn duties to their oikos (family) and their polis (state). Agamemnon is told that the goddess Artemis will not allow him to sail to Troy unless he sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. He now must choose between his responsibility to the polis to wage war with Troy and his responsibility to the oikos to protect his daughter. There is no right answer, only two wrong ones. In true Jack Bauer fashion, he puts national security first, and offers up the kid. Antigone makes the opposite choice. She is told by King Creon that she may not bury her traitorous brother, and she has a duty to obey. But she also has a duty to bury her brother, and she makes that decision - which she will ultimately suffer for. Actions have consequences, and the characters are willing to accept those consequences even when they did not have a better choice.

Similarly, characters on 24 are often put in situations where they have to choose between oikos and polis, between someone they personally care about and national security. National security on this show is less about “protecting our way of life” and more about “millions of people will die” if we don’t stop the threat. Either way, there will be serious consequences. The show finds just those moments where the “right thing to do” is something that most of us couldn’t do. But Jack Bauer can, and he becomes elevated to the level of the mythical hero.

And there we find another similarity. Ancient Greek dramas were often set at a time when, for the Greeks, the mythological overlapped with the legendary. Gods interacted with humans, and humans were a special breed of heroes. The stories did not have to be realistic - their mythical nature allowed the playwrights to explore larger themes. In 24, events are contrived to fit the real-time format, and we accept it. Jack is able to shuttle around from location to location in record time, and we accept it. Most of all, Jack is able to embody the courage, resolve, and self-sacrifice that we admire in our present-day heroes. He does so far beyond what any human would actually be capable of doing. And we accept that, too. In our post-9/11 world, that’s the larger theme.

To sum up: Shakespeare 24 - Very funny. Greek Tragedy 24 - Too “on the nose” to really be funny. But I enjoyed coming to that recognition, and now I am pleased to share it with you.

Clay Shirky has a posting well worth reading about the changing nature of how we spend our time. You should really read the whole thing, but I think his point is well summed up by his reaction to a television producer when he was explaining to her how Wikipedia works:

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The producer still just thought it all a fad, but Shirky would soon have an experience that’s hard to dismiss.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

The thing is that this change in our culture is more than just about our attitudes towards media or technology. Students are going to be coming to school expecting a more self-directed, interactive form of learning than we’ve been giving them. They won’t wait to be given permission to publish their writing or participate in their democracy. We need to make sure that school is a place where they can learn to acquire information more efficiently and express themselves more effectively, not a place where they are stifled in their attempts to do so.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Via News on the Rialto, we learn of an international event called Shakespeare 24:

Shakespeare 24 (S24) is an exciting worldwide Shakespeare performance event. Beginning in New Zealand and ending 24 hours later in Hawaii. 60 youth groups will stage 30 and 45 minute adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays at 7pm, local time on Shakespeare’s 444th birthday, April 23rd 2008.

It all sounds very exciting, but I have to admit that when I first saw the title of the post, I had something else in mind entirely…

MEMO: CONFIDENTIAL

SEASON SEVEN PLOT OUTLINE FOR SHAKESPEARE 24

In a prologue, Jack Bauer asks for the audience’s generosity in accepting the extremely contrived plot in the season to come, and informs them that the following events take place between 8am and 9am.

8:00am - 9:00am: On his way home from a mission, Jack is stopped by three witches, who offer cryptic prophecies of a terrorist attack to take place in the next 24 hours. After he threatens them with a belt sander, they agree to get more specific. The attack will come in the form of a virus that makes the infected people seem like they are dead for a short period of time, after which they will be perfectly fine. Jack doesn’t think that sounds so bad, but the witches assure him that it can actually cause quite a bit of trouble.

9:00am - 10:00am: In the White House, Sandra Palmer is now president. She is having drinks with a group of community activists, when she realizes that one of them is Richard Heller, long lost son of the former Secretary of Defense. She immediately welcomes him into her cabinet as the new Secretary of Defense.

10:00am - 11:00am: Richard is installed as the new Secretary of Defense. He makes a phone call and tells the person on the other end that the plan is working and that he will be president by the end of the day. Sandra Palmer mysteriously dies of a poisoning.

11:00am - Noon: The vice president is sworn in as president. The Speaker of the House, suspicious of the poisoning, leads a campaign against him.

Noon - 1:00pm: Jack is visited by the ghost of his father, who tells him there is a mole in CTU, and that Jack shouldn’t trust anyone. Jack appoints his most trusted lieutenant, Agent Iago, to head up the investigation.

1:00pm - 2:00pm: The president is impeached, and the Speaker of the House is sworn in as president. The former president is imprisoned and is later killed by henchmen working for Richard. Iago puts a suspicion in Jack’s mind that Chloe is the mole.

2:00pm - 3:00pm: The president is alerted to the terrorist threat, and must cancel his trip to the Holy Land. He asks Jack to track down the leader of the cell. Jack traces the money trail to a Jewish moneylender near Venice Beach.

3:00pm - 4:00pm: Jack arrives at the moneylender’s place, and tries to interrogate him, but kills him accidentally. He finds three caskets, and knows that two of them are rigged with explosives, and he must select the correct casket to find out the location of the terrorist base. With some help from the moneylender’s daughter, he chooses correctly.

4:00pm - 5:00pm: The president is assassinated by a sniper, hired by Richard. The president pro tempore of the Senate is sworn in as president. He gives a rousing speech and then orders an air strike against the terrorist base located by Jack, but the terrorists are tipped off by Iago - the mole in CTU. During the phone call, we finally see the leader of the terrorist cell is Jack’s nephew, Josh Bauer. Josh escapes with his top henchmen before the air strike hits.

5:00pm - 6:00pm: The president is killed by a bomb planted by Richard, and the Secretary of State is sworn in as president. Jack learns from aerial surveillance footage of the strike that his nephew is involved in the terrorist plot. The new first lady discovers that Richard is a terrorist and tries to warn everyone, but she is dismissed as mentally unstable. She puts a curse on Richard, and calls Jack to tell him of Richard’s involvement. Then, she disappears.

6:00pm - 7:00pm: The president dies in what appears to be an automobile accident. The Secretary of the Treasury is sworn in as president. Jack goes to the White House to stop Richard.

7:00pm - 8:00pm: The president is killed. Jack is framed. Richard is sworn in as president. Jack is sentenced to death by a secret military tribunal.

8:00pm - 9:00pm: Chloe pleads to Richard, who is now the president, for Jack’s life. Richard agrees to sign a pardon for Jack if she will sleep with him. She agrees, planning to substitute a double, but the only match in the CTU database is Jack’s daughter, Kim Bauer. At first, Jack refuses to allow her participation, but when he realizes he will die otherwise, agrees to go along with the plan.

9:00pm - 10:00pm: Before she can follow through with the plan, Kim appears to die of the virus. Richard has her put in a trunk and dropped into the ocean.

10:00pm - 11:00pm: Kim washes ashore and is recovered by the owner of a brothel and his wife. Some other stuff happens, but nobody really cares. Josh gives a canister of the virus to a mercenary and asks him to attach a timing device set to release the virus at 7am.

11:00pm - Midnight: Not knowing who she can trust, Kim tries to make her way to CTU disguised as a boy, which makes her look exactly like her cousin Josh.

Midnight - 1:00am: Kim is approached by the mercenary who has completed the timing device. He gives it to her, believing she is Josh. Kim returns to CTU with the canister where she is again mistaken for Josh and arrested immediately.

1:00am - 2:00am: Jack escapes custody and heads back to CTU disguised as a bedlam beggar. Kim is interrogated by CTU agents who still believe she is Josh. The mercenary finds the real Josh, and demands payment for the timing device. Josh refuses, insisting he never received it. Hilarity ensues, and then Josh kills the mercenary.

2:00am - 3:00am: Jack and Kim reveal their disguises. Mischievous fairies put a spell on Chloe, who falls in love with Iago. Jack leaves to confront his nephew.

3:00am - 4:00am: Jack captures Josh, and discovers evidence on Josh’s cell phone that proves the mole inside CTU is Iago. He calls Chloe to tell her Iago is the mole. Chloe goes mad, sings a song, and drowns herself in a river.

4:00am - 5:00am: Jack returns to CTU to confront Iago, who at first refuses to speak until he is given immunity, but then confirms that Richard has been responsible for the day’s events. Josh reveals that Jack is his real father, and it was his bitter resentment over his bastardy that made him turn to a life of crime.

5:00am - 6:00am: Kim learns that Josh is not her cousin, but her half-brother, and goes to see him. Josh, moved by his half-sister’s compassion, repents. Jack goes to the White House and slips past Secret Service to confront Richard. Jack and Richard fight, and Richard is slain. Before he dies, he not only confesses to his crimes, but also provides a recap of the entire plot for the season.

6:00am - 7:00am: Messengers from CTU arrive at the White House and report that Josh has had a religious conversion, and has revealed the location of all of the canisters, except for the one he gave the mercenary. Jack realizes that the canister Kim was carrying is equipped with a timing device, and rushes back to CTU. The Attorney General is sworn in as the eighth president in the last twenty-four hours.

7:00am - 8:00am: Jack gets to CTU, but it is too late. Everyone at CTU has fallen to the virus. Jack, believing he has failed, delivers a monologue on the meaningless nature of brief life and commits suicide. After he dies, everyone wakes up from the virus and, seeing Jack dead, kill themselves. The new president arrives at CTU to give Jack a medal. He sees all of the bodies and laments the tragic events of the day. He then pledges to restore peace to the nation.

Click on the link below and you will see the video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” on YouTube.

Rick Astley Video

Did you do it? You’ve been Rickrolled, sucka!

Happy April Fools Day.

UPDATE: Okay, I’m told that you’re not supposed to tell someone that you’re Rickrolling them. So click the “Rick Astley Video” link above, but pretend like you don’t know what it’s going to be. (But it really is the Rick Astley video.)

Did you do it? You’ve been Rickrolled, sucka!

I just watched the March 20th episode of Jeopardy! on the DVR. (I’m a little backed up.) I think I may have found an error in one of the clues.

The category was Battle Cries and the $2000 clue was as follows:

“Per Shakespeare, the British battle cry in this Oct. 25, 1415 battle was ‘God for Harry! England & Saint George!’”

The response given was “What is the Battle of Agincourt?” This was accepted as correct. However, I believe this question has no correct answer.

The Battle of Agincourt is depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and the date in the clue is the correct date of the battle. But the quote comes from an earlier scene in the play, before Henry’s troops take Harfleur. The more famous St. Crispin’s Day speech is given before the Battle of Agincourt later in the play.

I imagine there is a lot of pressure being a writer for this show. If you’re interested in the topic, Ken Jennings just posted to his blog an interview he did with former writer Carlo Panno, which you can read here and here.

I invite my readers to take this awareness test and discuss in the comments: