Week 29: How much Shakespeare does a player need?
Taking apart another book gives me an opportunity to answer this question, and show you how to apply it elsewhere.
It's fundamental to high school quiz bowl, and Jeopardy!, and it's been the subject of a recent Buzzword special event (Season 3 Now Playing). But Shakespeare's plays are not as useful when dealing with college quiz bowl, bar trivia, or especially televised quiz bowl. That seems odd, and there's a couple dynamics playing out in this phenomenon.
The first of these is is you want to make Shakespeare the answer to a question, you preclude questions about all of his works in the rest of the set. In one of the early drafts of the second book, I phrased this as: If you only could give your students one thing to study, it might be Shakespeare's Hamlet, because it comes up so often. After all if you look at Frequency List numbers, its appearances in questions almost match the number of sets used to calculate any Frequency List. But that number also tells you that on average you're only getting one question in a set relating to Shakespeare the writer, often at the cost of a question on a work.
The second problem Shakespeare poses is he's the answer of least erudition. That is, if someone knows nothing of the practices of quiz bowl, and only knows a little about literature, they will be inclined to guess what they know, and they will know Shakespeare. It's highly likely that they will guess what they think will be the most common answer. Writers when considering this situation, hate to create questions where someone arrives at the answer faster than an expert, because they had fewer possibilities in their mind to sift through.
The third problem is a guiding point of "good quizbowl" writing practice goes awry here. You may have heard the point argued as "writing obscure clues about common answers." Well in this case, in totality Shakespeare's plays are better known than Shakespeare's poetry. So if you're writing a question about Shakespeare the writer, your tendency is to start with obscure parts of a subset of his works (poetry) and then confine your question to that subset. In actuality most of his plays are more obscure than his poetry, but there's ten or twelve which are much, much less obscure than his poetry.
The marginal value of learning about the Nth most famous Shakespeare play.
(And by extension every other finite subcategory in quiz bowl.)
Almost all high schools will give you knowledge of 3-4 Shakespeare plays, but the rest can definitely be grouped into tiers.
1) What you will learn in class (non major):
Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet
Zero additional effort is required by you the player to encounter this material, it's in the curriculum, you actually have to force yourself to avoid having these in your high school reading list.
2) What you will learn in class (major or advanced English)
Othello, The Tempest, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice
Here you also see a correspondence between quiz bowl frequency and classroom presence. All of the first two groups are in the top ten for usage in quiz bowl questions. (The tenth being "Much Ado About Nothing") But unlike category 1) you need to make effort to encounter them in classwork, unless you're intending to specialize in the subject in education, not merely in quiz bowl.
3) The plays which get mentioned at a reasonable frequency in quiz bowl
4) The plays which get mentioned rarely in quiz bowl.
3) and 4) are hard to get a handle on especially if you're just learning all the things that quiz bowl can ask about. Fortunately frequency lists exist and you can use them to calculate how often you would have encountered a particular question subject in the past.
For what I did here, I took an old frequency list and filtered out all but Shakespeare's works. I then converted the data into percentage mentions and a cumulative percentage (based on the principle that starting from the most useful is the way to approach a subcategory like this.)
Now take this with three grains of salt:
- Data is from a narrow time period, a wider time period would have a sharper drop from the dominant works, but also its peak might be suppressed as in-set repeat checking would limit the number of appearances.
- Data is not recent. (I believe Much Ado About Nothing's high finish in this sample is a product of popular films created within the timeframe, which could push questions out of category to mention it.)
- Data is not filtered out according to level (that is high school and college sets are mixed in this calculation)
Work % Cumulative%
Hamlet 9.38% 9.38%
Tempest 7.25% 16.63%
Macbeth 6.03% 22.66%
Othello 5.25% 27.90%
Midsummer 5.02% 32.92%
Lear 4.91% 37.83%
Romeo 4.58% 42.41%
Caesar 4.58% 46.99%
Merchant 4.58% 51.56%
Just over half of the questions which reference a Shakespeare play reference these nine. Adding in seven more plays gets you to 75%:
Much Ado 4.24% 55.80%
12th 3.68% 59.49%
Taming 3.35% 62.83%
Pericles 3.35% 66.18%
Asyoulikeit 3.13% 69.31%
MerryWives 3.13% 72.43%
Richard III 2.79% 75.22%
Which means less than half the works cover three-quarters of the content. It’s not quite an 80/20 rule, repeat checking tends to skew that. For that remaining quarter, and even some of the third quarter, most players can get by with knowing maybe one or two facts about a play, because writers use that clue as shorthand to point to that particular play every time. For example--
- The cannon shot in Henry VIII which burned down the Globe Theatre
- The stage direction "Exit pursued by a bear" or the fictional coast of Bohemia in The Winter's Tale
- The bloodthirstiness of Titus Andronicus
Another alternative is to work a study of each play through the construction of a shot for each. Whatever path you take is a function of what time and effort you want to invest in the subject.
This approach can work for pretty much any author's catalog of works, or any composer or artist's catalog. Utilizing a frequency list, or constructing it yourself gives you a guide to what will be important and what's in the long tail. Once you know that, and you figure out what you need to feel comfortable with a category (knowing where 50% of the questions come from, or you might find yourself comfortable with 60% or 70%)
I used this technique for myself once, after discovering the Netflix (in its DVD distribution days) had a set of dramatizations of the works of Henrik Ibsen, which I knocked through in a week, but decided that the bonus feature on one disc, a 6-hour radio dramatization of Rosmersholm wasn't really a bonus I needed in my life. I don't think I will pay the price for playing the percentages in that case.
The book for this week is Outlines of Shakespeare's Plays. It was one of the Harper Collins College Outline Series, the copy I have dates to 1970, when it was Harper Perennial. It's a representative of the college outline books that a lot of publishing houses did after World War II, which today is a market occupied pretty much only by Sparknotes and Cliffs. There's tons of copies of these types of books in used bookstores, and what's interesting about a lot of other ones in those series is how they're time shifted, focusing on authors and works (or artists, or musicians...) which were considered exemplars of an older era, which today is not even considered, except in quiz bowl or a much higher level class than most non-majors would take. These types of books give a different route to higher-difficulty answers.
The other features of use in this book are its genealogy charts from the history plays, a list of titles of other works and expressions taken from Shakespeare, and a history of Shakespeare's sources.
1
While waiting for wedding preparations at Messina, Don Pedro proposes to perform "one of Hercules' labors" by getting his Paduan friend to fall in love with the governor's niece.
A. Name this Shakespearean comedy which also follows the romance of Claudio and Hero.
answer: Much Ado About Nothing
B. The romance of these two sharp-tongued figures egged on by the "honest conspirators" forms much of the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing.
answer: Beatrice and Benedick
C. What villainy takes place in Much Ado About Nothing comes from this character's attempts to revenge himself on his brother Don Pedro, by promoting jealousy among the lovers.
answer: Don John
2
During one of these events in Much Ado About Nothing, Don Pedro attempts to woo Hero on Claudio's behalf.
A. Name this specific type of party permitting confusion over identity which appears in many Shakespeare plays.
answer: masked ball
B. The two title characters of this play view each other at a masked ball organized by the Capulets.
answer: Romeo and Juliet
C. The disguised title monarch enters a banquet thrown by Wolsey turning it into a masque, shortly thereafter he first sees Anne Bullen.
answer: Henry VIII
3
Answer the following about the sources employed by Shakespeare in writing his plays.
A. Part of a section of this Greek-born biographer's Life of Alcibiades was used to write Timon of Athens, while the parallel life in that pair was used for the plot of Coriolanus.
answer: Plutarch
B. Most of the histories and Macbeth were influenced by this writer's Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
answer: Raphael Holinshed
C. The farce Menaechami, or The Twins, by Plautus informed this play relating two sets of twins named Antipholus and Dromio.
answer: The Comedy of Errors
4
The use of the phrase "Greek to me" stems from its use in the play, where it is said by Casca.
A. Name this Shakespeare play where it is used to describe a festival where the title character was offered a crown.
answer: Julius Caesar
B. Casca said the phrase to this other conspirator described by Caesar as having a "lean and hungry look"
answer: Cassius
C. Cassius met his end by suicide in the first of these two battles, but for convenience Shakespeare combined them into a single battle.
answer: Battle(s) of Philippi
5
This time period is described as creeping "in its petty pace from day to day."
A. Give this word thrice repeated and separated by "and" in a soliloquy in Act V, scene five given by Macbeth.
answer: Tomorrow
B. The soliloquy refers to "a tale told by an idiot, full of” these two qualities, which were borrowed for a title by William Faulkner
answer: sound and fury
C. In referring to life, the soliloquy uses the term "brief candle", which was used by this author for his short story collection Brief Candles. He also appropriated from Miranda's speech in a different Shakespeare play, The Tempest, "O Brave New World that has such people in't."
answer: Aldous Huxley
For next week, I'm going to ask a question:
If you have a high school student or recent graduate under your roof, you are one or were one recently: before COVID did you know where each of the following were within your school:
- A globe or world map and/or a map of the US?
- A poster of the planets or constellations?
- A periodic table?
- A calendar or poster with the heads of the US presidents?
I'll explain why next time.