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Sort of ruins the rhythm

This edit:[1].

By the way, I finished my Folger's A Midsummernights Dream awhile back, and I think it "worked" quite well. I even chuckled a couple of times. Some things feels surprisingly modern, for example there was a scene where one of the girls basically screams "I'M GONNA SCRATCH YOUR EYES OUT BITCH!!". Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet next. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:12, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Heh heh, yeah. Doesn't quite fit iambic pentameter, does it? I'm all for inclusiveness and equality, but maybe not by retconning modern sensibilities into a 400 year old work. That's the sort of thing they did in the Regency, and Shakespeare suffered for it well into the second half of the 20th century. Elizabethan England was antisemitic and misogynist—but, strangely enough, even a few centuries earlier they were not particularly transphobic, it seems—and we'd do best to acknowledge that so we can learn from it rather than repeat it.

Glad to hear the Folger editions worked out. I'd suggest R&J first as it's much nearer to modern story-telling sensibilities. Macbeth isn't that far off either, and short, but it skirts dangerously close to the "a bazillion obscure nobles squabbling over incomprehensible points of honor" that tend to make people run away screaming from the history plays. But if you got through one of them intact, you shouldn't have any real trouble with the rest of them (again, except the histories: they're pretty rough going in places).

And, yeah, when Harold Bloom publishes a book titled Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he's on to something: there are a lot of very modern themes and characters in the plays. Much more than in contemporaries like Jonson, for instance. And when you start comparing it to stuff like the Matter of Britain (think King Arthur) and other roughly mediaeval works like Palmerin of England, you'll be shocked at the difference. Those earlier works read as completely alien! Shakespeare's prose in the original seems straightforward and nearly modern when compared to Chaucer's just a few centuries earlier. Shakespeare (not single-handedly, to be sure) created modern English and invented the tropes and techniques, and even the plots, we take for granted in modern storytelling. You can see his hand all over modern culture; and his works are a watershed in the development of language and literature.

No wonder Shakespeare had the first crazy fans recognizably like the modern meaning of the term. --Xover (talk) 15:49, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Funny thing, when you wrote "retconned" I thought "ok, now I have to tell him about Pippi's dad", but your knowledge about great litterature is without flaw. It's sad, but not unique. Barna Hedenhös got similar issues, and Tintin in the Congo has been quietly removed from libraries... Of course, it's not just a swedish thing: [2]. And Thomas Bowdler waaayyyy predates any of this. I'll take your advice on R&J.

Don't know if you watch Upstart Crow. In one episode S is very pleased with his "big new Jew-play" (The Jew of Malta), but in the end has to give it to Marlowe. His wife then advice him to write another Jew-play, but give the Jew some human characteristics, an idea he finds intriguing. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:43, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: So long as they don't start mutilating Ronja, Mio, and Jonatan and Karl, I suppose we'll have to grit our teeth and take it. Alfons, though, can go jump in a lake (and take Mållgan with you).

Upstart Crow doesn't air anywhere around here, so not watching it. I've been meaning to track it down at some point though.

Oh, and I'm reminded that there's a brief discussion in Jessica (The Merchant of Venice)#Character sources that illustrates pre-Elizabethan attitudes to Jews and other non-Christians (Saracens, in this case). It might also give you a bit of the flavour of the literature of that era. --Xover (talk) 04:23, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Hah! I had no idea Willi Wiberg was such an export success! As I remember, non-caucasians Homo Sapiens aren't even mentioned in the other works, which avoids the problem. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:17, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

About "a bazillion obscure nobles". UC-Will states "The crowd wants plays about posh people. They want gangs of geographically named dukes who wander on at random and say "Come, Sussex, Oxford and Northampton! Let us to York, there to do battle with Surrey, Cornwall, Solihull and Basingstoke!" Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:16, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Bwah ha ha! That's a perfect description of the history plays! --Xover (talk) 08:22, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I suppose the household words in St Crispin are part of this. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:01, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Kit & Will

Question: That these two were actual friends, is it based on more than guessing and artistic license? Though if they collaborated on plays they must of course have known each other. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:19, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: So far as I know, there is no grounds for an assertion that the two were friends. Marlowe died in 1595, and Shakespeare isn't known for certain to have been in London until 1592 (the years 1585–1592 are a giant black hole in Shakespearean biography). It's likely he was in London and writing plays well before 1592, but there's no documentation for this. Marlowe, on the other hand, was famous: the "Shakespeare" before Shakespeare became the "Shakespeare". It's certain that Shakespeare knew of Marlowe. It's very likely that Marlowe knew of Shakespeare. It's plausible that they were on friendly terms. There's nothing implausible, that I know of, about them being friends. Shakespeare alluded to Marlowe's plays (it seems likely that there is some sort of relationship beyond zeitgeist between The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) and The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597)), but I'm not sufficiently up on Marlowe to tell you whether he alluded to Shakespeare's plays. I don't believe there are any generally accepted collaborations between the two, and collaborative plays are pretty unsettled right now (more than usual for such an issue, I mean; and by "right now" I mean the last decade or so). --Xover (talk) 18:04, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

You're one of those Wikipedians that should have a salary, you know that? Thank you. As a reward, take this dialogue from the first episode of Lovejoy:

"You forgot your meat yesterday." "Ah! Now the winter of our discontent is made glorious summer by this loin of pork."

So this sentence from the Marlowe article, "Marlowe has been credited in the New Oxford Shakespeare series as co-author of the three Henry VI plays, though some scholars doubt any actual collaboration.[13][14]" could be somewhat unbalanced, perhaps, maybe, possibly? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:43, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Yeah, the New Oxford Shakespeare did lots of "innovative" things, and I think they did it deliberately to be controversial and other marketing reasons (in addition to reflecting the series editors' views). But as with all things "new", some editors here will think "Shiny!" and rush to update all the articles with the addition of statements like the one you quote. After the New Oxford Shakespeare was released there was also a spate of additions of the nav templates for other playwrights added to the supposed collaborative play's articles and such. None of them taking the big picture into account, and none of them bothering to integrate the material properly into the article. And as a general approach: this kind of stuff belongs wherever the article deals with historiography: that the scholars and critics in 18th-century Andalucia thought one thing, 19th-century Germans another, and the New Oxford Shakespeare a third thing, is entirely reasonable to discuss in the article. Taking the deliberately innovative position of a single and most recent edition as the whole story is not.

In any case, I tend to try to revert such things on our featured articles, but on everything else we tend to have more pressing issues so I don't bother. If we ever get the critical mass to improve them to FA these populist little blurbs will be sorted (removed) anyway.

Paid? While that would be nice I suppose (imagine the paid-editing paperwork! *shudder*), no pay is needed for the opportunity to blather on about my hobbyist obsession. Say rather that I should pay to have an audience for them! :)

In any case, I hope you and yours are all safely out of range of any forest fires and other proof that climate change doesn't exist and is certainly not anthropogenic if it does because raging uncontrollable forest fires in Scandinavia are obviously just part of nature's normal cycle. Right? Right. --Xover (talk) 08:23, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

We seem to have something of a win-win situation, then. Nice to have my ignorant suspicion confirmed.

But this period during the winter was colder than usual! Is that "warming", huh, huh, is it!? Thanks for asking, we're safe and unaffected, in the specific sense. I don't know if you noticed, but the redlinks in the infobox added here [3] was just... oh fuck. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:08, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

And I see now that the Swedish wildfire article got a kickstart, now it actually has some useful sources. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:27, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Orlando Furioso

Hi, I'm writing about your undoing on the page: Orlando Furioso. I've got to say, that I do not agree with it, since translating it with "Raging" totally exclude the prevalent meaning of "crazy" of the word. Roland, once he heard that Angelica and Medoro are in love, do not simply get angry, as "Raging" would suggest, he get crazy. He cries and screams all day, he runs all night randomly in the wood, he lied down in the grass staring at the sky without moving (and eating or drinking) for 3 days and 3 nights then he undress himself and naked uprooted a lot of huge trees with his bare hands, he swam to Africa etc. etc.. He so much lost his mind that Astolfo literally went to the Moon (where there are all the lost things) riding a hippogryph to recover it. In the poem this is called directly "Pazzia" (Crazyness) and he is called "Pazzo"(Crazy man). Thus, I think that raging is inadequate to describe it, considering that rage is only a minimal (and derivative)part of his madness. Mad I think would be the best choice, since not only it has his main meaning of crazy/mentally ill but it has also the meaning of "very angry", exactly as Furioso. So, would be that okay with you if I reverted your undoing? Thank you very much for your time. --LeonardoSaponara (talk) 06:12, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of moving this discussion to the article's talk page and responded there. --Xover (talk) 06:51, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Edit War on Ghost (Hamlet)

Your recent editing history shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See BRD for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.-Kishfan (talk) 12:48, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, you may want to rethink your behaviour if you had planned on being around the project for any length of time. Placing unwarranted warning templates as a means of intimidation is in itself sanctionable behaviour; and making baseless accusations is considered a form of personal attack. I'll leave this here instead of removing it in case you want to strike it; which I really rather strongly suggest you do. Honest mistakes made in the heat of the moment are entirely forgivable (we all make them); it's doubling down on them that usually leads down the unproductive path. --Xover (talk) 18:36, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear, I tried to resolve the issue with you but you can't be reasoned with. All you were doing was edit war instead of assuming good faith. You reverted my edits 3 times and were not ready to resolve the issue on the talk page. I think you must reconsider your behavior if at all you have planed editing for a longer duration. It is your talk page and if you want to remove the warning template, it is entirely up to you but please keep this thing in your mind that you can't just remove the tags only because you feel like doing it. Regards.-Kishfan (talk) 19:07, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Now you're just trolling me, right? You don't seriously imagine that anyone will be fooled by your parroting here? I offered you friendly advice. Whether you want to take it or not is up to you. In any case, I don't see this "discussion" going anywhere productive, so please keep it on Talk:Ghost (Hamlet). Or hey, you could take it to the edit-warring noticeboard. 3RR violations, since that is your latest accusation, they take a particularly dim view of. --Xover (talk) 19:24, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Well, if you will opt for edit warring and continue with this, then definitely I will take up this matter but my best advice is you must calm down and remember editors may not add their own views to articles simply because they believe them to be correct and please do read WP:NOTTRUTH. Regards.-Kishfan (talk) 19:41, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Template Barnstar
		Xover! Thank you so much for the amazing work and help, and for your insightful comments on how to fix {{cite act}}. Without you it'd still be a disgusting mess of {{#if: statements, and no one wants that. Cheers! Hecseur (talk) 13:19, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

@Hecseur: You're too kind. … But I'll happily take it! :-) --Xover (talk) 14:00, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Can't get rid of him

I was going to remove this[4] but noooooo, I had to go and find a pucking source! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:49, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Not to be a party-pooper, but my cursory check suggests Will cribbed this from The Jew of Malta and not from the Book of Daniel. I'll try to remember looking closer into it when time allows. --Xover (talk) 08:44, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Interesting, it may be time for you to think about writing a sternly worded letter to the editor of my source (again)! Although, because gbooks, I can't read the page preceding or following p194[5], so it's possible they get into that.

And of course, UC tells us that Will wrote Malta anyway. The latest episode was a kind of SAQ-special. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:13, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Offending shadows

Had to share a few quotes from the latest episode of UC.

• Mr Shakespeare, is your play suggesting that a drugged person is capable of giving consent?

• -It's high time that the members of the FSNEP-community were properly represented in popular drama-projects! -FSNEP? -Fairie, sprite, nymph, elf and pixie!

• They call me Puck, as in What the?

• A clever bargain will I strike with you sir, in love, methinks, you are a total loser.

Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:50, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Heh heh. Thanks! I really appreciate the laugh. Being currently embroiled in what must be about the dumbest conflict on Wikipedia just now, you've pretty much single-handledly restored my faith in humanity! :) But… "UC"? It doesn't ring a bell… a lightbulb appears Oh, UC! Of course. D'oh! I really have track down that somewhere. I'm beginning to feel downright uncultured in my ignorance of it. --Xover (talk) 18:19, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Resisting urge to add that Shakespeare plays the ghost in in Ruled Britannia. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:09, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Heh. Yeah, that would be borderline, even if the article had a trivia section. But not entirely beyond the pale: movie adaptations have done some… interesting… things with the Ghost. An "In popular culture" type section might actually be warranted if anyone has bothered to cover that stuff somewhere cite-able. --Xover (talk) 19:35, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Speaking of trivia sections, I created Christopher Marlowe in fiction awhile back (and this [6] is the thanks I got ;-)). Seemed better than having that annoyingly large section in the Marlowe-article. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:03, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Ugh. All too common an occurence. I regularly find myself biting my tongue not to say out loud that NPP is a menace. But at least in this instance the patroller in question assumed some measure of good faith, and gracefullt struck the message when the error was pointed out, rather than double down. Far too often I've seen (and occasionally experienced personally) that neither factor is evident. I think it's something about the culture, and possibly the kind of people the task attracts, that leads too many of them into some kind of "I'm the last line of defence before armageddon" mindset. Pity that, because as you said the job is important and the vast majority many (probably most, even, but I'm not in a charitable mood :)) are just quietly getting on with it. But the bad apples do a lot of damage, particularly in scaring away new editors. Oh well. Thanks for the reminder of Christopher Marlowe in fiction (I think I saw the edit at the main article). I'll be sure to take a look once I have the time. --Xover (talk) 20:27, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Meh, I calmed down fairly quickly. Like you said, they politely struck and apologised, and meant well. Funny thing was that I remembered that editor from accepting a new SAQ-article, if you remember Lewkenorian theory of Shakespeare authorship. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Speaking of striking, I'm going to go ahead and strike the question mark I left dangling. It's not fair to the NPP-volunteers to leave that hanging just because I'm feeling crabby and uncharitable toward the systemic problems with it. In any case, yeah, the Lewkenorian theory stuff was actually entirely the right call for NPP: they're only supposed to patrol for blatant copyvio, vandalism, attack pages, and such. Everything that isn't blatant and within one of their narrow categories should be handled through ordinary community processes like AFD.
Which is why my run-in with them (up above here somewhere; regarding James Blair Leishman) was so frustrating: even positing, for the sake of argument, I'd made a really bad error in judgement regarding close paraphrasing, something that isn't blatant copyvio and which comes from an experienced editor is almost always outside the scope of NPP and their approach (i.e. "start at 11"). Experienced editors can have mistakes and errors in judgement pointed out to them and be expected to remedy the issue on their own accord, and most such are not so urgent that normal community processes won't do. I am—and apparently, so are you—ornery enough to push back as needed and get over the poor experience (you with more grace than I); but new editors subjected to it aren't, and are scared away. Oh well. `tis a pet peeve of mine. Apologies for the rant. :) --Xover (talk) 06:22, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Thus speaketh a noble WP-heart! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:55, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Nah. Crabby old man is more like it. But I appreciate the sentiment all the same! :) --Xover (talk) 06:59, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Schadenfreude. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:39, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Live. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:50, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Inget ont som inte har något gott med sig. When I moved Cultural depictions of Belshazzar to mainspace I pinged [7] Cwmhiraeth, and they reviewed it in less than 30 min. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:16, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: As I said corrected myself to mainly good people, mainly doing a good job. It's just the few bad apples and the few mistakes that end up so catastrophic. --Xover (talk) 07:55, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not critizising you, I'm just slightly smug I got an article-review quickly. An article that mentions Shakespeare (though not Gaiman :-(), mind you. Thanks for that [8] edit, BTW. When it occured to me to also google "The writing is on the wall" I actually found something useful. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:19, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Incidentally, if you can find it anywhere, you may want to listen to "Fimbul" from Damebesøk (1998) by Ole Paus and Jonas Fjeld. Just as an illustration of how far the concept has spread and how evocative it can be in context. It's a bit hard to find: it's available for purchase on the iTunes Store, but it's not up for streaming on Apple Music. It might be on Spotify or Tidal, but I didn't see any web links there. In fact I just emailed their manager to ask what's up, but haven't heard back yet. --Xover (talk) 08:43, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Ask them to put it on youtube, where I found "tøffeste gutten i himmlen". Off that topic, this [9] is an oldie favorite of mine. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:07, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Prince Tudor II-theory advocacy

Xover if you are truly interested in Shakespeare and biography you'll enjoy the following. If you are the intellectual coward that the vast majority are (and every other Wikipedia editor and official I've contacted), you will remove this mention and attempt to censor this conversation from ever having occurred.

Enjoy [link removed] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.191.205.162 (talk) 23:28, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi Xover. I moved whatever this is to the bottom of your talkpage so you wouldn't have to hunt for it. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 23:46, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks MarnetteD.

Alan Tarica I presume? I see nothing new in your work linked. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and instead of providing that you ignore all the actual existing evidence and launch into a fanciful reading of a work of fiction, calling it "internal evidence". There is no fundamental difference between your work and the Baconians that see "ciphers" everywhere, you just wrap it in somewhat less obviously conspiratorial language. But you know what the real tell-tale was? Your above attempt at rhetorical blackmail: "Acknowledge me or you're a coward" is rarely even effective in kindergarten. Nobody worth listening to approaches a discussion in such a way. Or the mere fact that you're attempting to advocate this on Wikipedia, which by definition doesn't publish original research. Even if your theory had been entirely correct, it has no place on Wikipedia until the mainstream scientific community adopts it. In other words, you need to persuade Stanley Wells and James S. Shapiro, not random Wikipedia editors.

Oh, and I've removed the link from your message. You don't get to use my talk page (or Wikipedia in general for that matter) to promote your pet theory. --Xover (talk) 05:32, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

As a fellow intellectual coward, I support this message. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:46, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Bard-check

Kindly correct me if you think I'm wrong here:[10]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:18, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Nope. I agree. --Xover (talk) 17:41, 16 September 2018 (UTC)