New Apps for Help Reading Shakespeare

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

Published: November 30, 2012

Like cat videos and political rhetoric, William Shakespeare is free online if you know where to look. Sites like PlayShakespeare.com and Project Gutenberg offer the full array of plays and poetry online or as free e-books.

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"Othello"

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"The Sonnets by William Shakespeare"

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"Shakespeare Pro"

Still, pure text from more than 400 years ago can be a bit bewildering to a modern audience looking to explain lines like “Prithee, keep up thy quillets.” But good cheer! It’s the 21st century, and modern technology has made wonderful advances in making Shakespeare’s plays and poems more accessible — even enticing — for an audience equipped with iPads and smartphones.

“Whatever your experience in reading Shakespeare, it is in performance that his words come alive,” intones Sir Derek Jacobi in a new interactive edition of OTHELLO from Sourcebooks ($5.99). This multimedia version for the iPad makes good on that introductory message. Video clips of selected scenes from a 1987 performance at the Market Theater in South Africa are interspersed with the play’s lines, allowing the reader to see the written words in action.

Photos from various productions over the years and audio recordings (including examples of Paul Robeson and F. Scott Fitzgerald playing the Moor) provide additional sight and sound to go with the words; the text itself has an iPad-friendly component as well: one-touch translation of 1,400 terms throughout the 3,560 lines of the play. Readers can press a finger to the iPad’s screen on select phrases to see a translation into modern English. Once the archaic vocabulary is explained, the reader can then tap back into the text and continue reading without having to leave the line, lose her place or start hunting around on Netflix for the best movie rendition.

Built as an iBooks-enhanced textbook (as opposed to a free-standing iPad app) and part of a series called “The Shakesperience,” this “Othello” takes a little getting used to, but it includes a short introductory section that explains its various features. These include an area to enter notes, and supplementary commentary from an array of academics and actors.

Plays aren’t the only form in which Shakespeare’s words come alive, as demonstrated by THE SONNETS BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, an app designed for the iPad ($13.99). The short poems, each a traditional 14 lines in length, appear in the app as both annotated text and as performance pieces.

Each sonnet has an accompanying video clip that shows an established Shakespearean actor (Patrick Stewart, Fiona Shaw and David Tennant among them) reciting the poem. Stage actors better known for their screen work, like Dominic West, Stephen Fry and Kim Cattrall, also help broaden the appeal for nonsubscribers to the Royal Shakespeare Company. Text and video for each sonnet can be viewed separately, or combined on-screen to highlight each line as it is read aloud, which very effectively displays the power of the poetry.

The overall design of the “Sonnets” app is clean and intuitive, with a simple menu to guide the user to other features, like notation by Katherine Duncan-Jones of Oxford University. Commentary by other scholars and a digital reproduction of the 1609 Quarto, the first published book of the sonnets, round out the experience. Tech-savvy English majors may also enjoy the Share-a-Sonnet feature, which allows the link to a Web-based version of a poem’s performance to be posted on Facebook or Twitter.

Those completists yearning for portable versions of all the plays, all the sonnets and the six long poems attributed to Shakespeare are in luck with a free app called, simply enough, SHAKESPEARE. The app is available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and Android devices. Well organized and smartly designed for touchscreens, “Shakespeare” offers menus for each play, and category headings for the sonnets and poems. Tap a play’s title to jump to the next screen, which offers submenus for the dramatis personae, the start of each act and a scene-by-scene breakdown with a detailed synopsis of the action.

For some, plowing through line after line of iambic pentameter on a four-inch screen may actually be a more comfortable way to focus on Shakespeare than grappling with the bulky Riverside edition. Font size can be easily adjusted in the app’s settings, as can the colors for text and background.

“Shakespeare” also includes a small glossary to help leap from Elizabethan to modern English, but to get the full 40,000-word integrated glossary, a $9.99 upgrade to the SHAKESPEARE PRO version is required; it is available only for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. “Shakespeare Pro” has plenty of extra features designed for students, including a guide to scansion, biographical information and a portrait gallery.

The text used in both versions of the app is provided by the PlayShakespeare.com site and was compiled from a combination of sources, including the First Folio of 1623 and the Globe edition of 1866. While no video clips are included, the app itself has been used in performance — in 2009, the Modern Shakespeare Company gave a dramatic reading of “Macbeth” at an Apple store in San Francisco using “Shakespeare” on their iPhones.

Perhaps all the world is a stage. Thanks to these ingenious apps, the world of Shakespeare is certainly much easier to comprehend.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 2, 2012, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Shakespeare.

Start with 5-year-olds to Raise Shakespeare Lovers

Children as young as five should be exposed to Shakespeare, according to the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who believes the plays can teach important life lessons.


  Even the youngest children can have their lives transformed by seeing a Shakespeare play, and they are not put off by the complexity of the language, said Gregory Doran. The Government’s sole national curriculum provision for Shakespeare — the requirement that pupils study two plays between the ages of 11 and 14 — is inadequate and comes too late in a child’s life, he believes.


 Although some primary schools choose to tackle Shakespeare, they are not required to do so. Mr Doran has scheduled a meeting with Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, to lobby for more Shakespeare in schools. “You have to let the bug bite before kids get cynical.

 Letting them get involved when they are 13 is much harder than getting to kids earlier, without all the prejudices and stresses and strains of the idea that Shakespeare is somehow difficult or boring or academic,” Mr Doran said. “What Shakespeare is brilliant at is speaking to a lot of audiences at the same time and we can appreciate it on many different levels. And it doesn’t just have to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet.

“With my own experience of getting to know Shakespeare as a child, I was grabbed by the stories first of all. Then you grow up and become engaged by the language. But it’s more than just good stories and nice language. It’s about ethics and morality.” The RSC has been working with several primary schools across Britain and has found that children from Key Stage 1 (aged five to seven) have been “captivated” by Shakespeare. They work with abridged versions of the plays, focusing on particular scenes, but are exposed to the original language rather than a simplified version of the text. Mr Gove backed an initiative last year to introduce young children to Shakespeare, but the focus was on bringing the Bard into other areas of the curriculum, such as lessons in Elizabethan cooking or sewing Tudor money bags in design and technology classes.

 Mr Doran said exposing children to Shakespearean language via live performance was crucial. “If you’re reading Shakespeare you can get baffled by the language, but if you see actors deliver it with passion and engagement, even if you don’t pick up every word, you can follow a story and be transported to a different world.” In a recent experiment, the RSC streamed video of its production of Richard II, starring David Tennant, to more than 7,000 primary school children. One teacher from Bolton wrote of her seven-year-old pupils: “About 20 minutes into the performance, as I looked around at all the wide-eyed little faces looking up toward the screen, I thought I was going to cry. It gave our kids the opportunity to see the RSC for the first time in their lives. As one child in Year 3 said, 'Miss, is this for real?’ ”

 Jacqui O’Hanlon, the RSC’s director of education, is in charge of getting broadcasts of performances into schools. She said: “Even for the youngest children, it is all Shakespeare’s language. They are never, ever working with translation. They don’t want to be patronised. When you’re at primary school, nobody has told you Shakespeare is difficult. The earlier we start with children, the more is possible. And there isn’t a play that you can’t do.”

 In Stratford-upon-Avon, Mr Doran is planning to stage every First Folio play over the course of six years, meaning secondary school children could work through the entire canon during the course of their education. He said: “Michael Gove should be much bolder and say, 'Let’s follow the RSC’. I don’t see why I shouldn’t at least propose that. He will probably guffaw, but there is a real opportunity here to re-engage with what Shakespeare means.”
 Shakespeare's lessons

 ROMEO AND JULIET Don’t inherit your parents’ prejudices “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life/Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.”

 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Be kind and merciful to others “The quality of mercy is not strained/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

 OTHELLO Don’t be jealous of others “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy/It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on.”

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Understand the difference between appearance and reality “My Oberon, what visions have I seen!/Methought I was enamoured of an ass.”