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Shakespeare

Who wrote the work attributed to Shakespeare?

  • Mr Shakespeare.

    Votes: 35 74.5%

  • Mr Marlowe.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Mr Bacon.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Lots of different people.

    Votes: 6 12.8%

  • Someone else entirely.

    Votes: 1 2.1%

  • Aliens.

    Votes: 5 10.6%
  • Total voters
    47
Ronson8 said:
Actually he was a woman. :D
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/28woman.htm
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Apologies to all female participants on the forum: the forthcoming anecdote is from unenlightened times many decades ago.

A self-styled scholar was proclaiming that intensive study of Shakespeare’s writings and the background thereto, had led him to the conclusion that Shakespeare’s works had in fact been written by Queen Elizabeth I.

A more-established erudite gent ridiculed his idea, along the general lines that “material of such literary genius / wisdom / poetic insight / breadth of knowledge could not possibly have been created by a mere woman”.

Reply from the chap with the interesting theory: “Ah, but it is also my contention that Queen Elizabeth I was really a man.”
 
amyasleigh said:
,,,Reply from the chap with the interesting theory: “Ah, but it is also my contention that Queen Elizabeth I was really a man.”
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There is a story that Queen Elizabeth I died as a girl and was substituted by a boy actor. The instigators of the plot were then obliged to maintain the deceit or end up in the Tower. It explains why Good Queen Bess never married. It's an early conspiracy theory and as bonkers as most of them are.

I can't remember the book, it was something about Historical Imposters and Google isn't helping.
 
Historical-fiction authors nowadays seem to churn out an endless flood of novels about the various Tudor women -- of which I've read a certain number, some of them postulating decidedly interesting scenarios about Liz's putative love/sex-life. This tale about her, would seem potentially splendid grist to these writer's mill...
 
The problem I always have with these theories is the sonnets.

Writing plays was seen as "beneath the station" of someone of noble birth, certainly, but writing sonnets is something that the nobility did without shame.

Even Queen Elizabeth wrote the odd rhyme, which is still attributed to her. (Although Shakespeare may have helped her with the title.)

So if Queen Elizabeth, or whoever the suspect du jour is, wrote the Shakespeare plays, and presumably the sonnets, why are there poems and other literary works attributed to them under their real name? And why is the one example of Elizabeth's poetry I've read so dull? (No, I don't mean the one I alluded to above.)
 
Timble2 said:
...There is a story that Queen Elizabeth I died as a girl and was substituted by a boy actor. The instigators of the plot were then obliged to maintain the deceit or end up in the Tower. It explains why Good Queen Bess never married. It's an early conspiracy theory and as bonkers as most of them are.

I can't remember the book, it was something about Historical Imposters and Google isn't helping.
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That wouldn't be the Bisley Boy bit of (forteanly enough) Bram Stoker's, Famous Imposters, would it?

There's a distant memory knocking somewhere in the attic that the whole Bisley Boy thing was created as a joke by some clergyman. (Probably reported as fact in the Mail sometime soon afterwards: New European legislation on ginger virgins means Queen has to talk about football and leave the seat up. There are now more Huguenots in a square yard of Southwark than there are sheep in the entire world. Board of Trade send Sir Francis Drake to investigate Spanish fishing fleet stealing English kippers from channel. Now they're telling us that burning Catholics in an enclosed space gives you the bloody flux.)
 
Spookdaddy said:
Timble2 said:
...There is a story that Queen Elizabeth I died as a girl and was substituted by a boy actor. The instigators of the plot were then obliged to maintain the deceit or end up in the Tower. It explains why Good Queen Bess never married. It's an early conspiracy theory and as bonkers as most of them are.

I can't remember the book, it was something about Historical Imposters and Google isn't helping.
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That wouldn't be the Bisley Boy bit of (forteanly enough) Bram Stoker's, Famous Imposters, would it?
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You're probably right, it's around 25 years since I read the book, which I found in Southampton Library.
 
Shakespeare is an immortal figure and therefore probably still alive in some sense his/her/its attributes therefore being possibly very variable
 
Luvvies fall out:

Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance criticised for doubting Shakespeare wrote plays
Leading theatrical figure Dame Janet Suzman has dismissed two of her fellow actors for believing the “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by an aristocrat.
By Martin Beckford
1:21PM BST 19 Aug 2012

Dame Janet Suzman, who has starred in and directed many of the Bard’s plays, said it was “snobbish” to believe that the true author could not have been a playwright from Stratford.
She said it was “strange” that the acclaimed Shakespearean actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance took the “haughty” view that the dramas must have come from the pen of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Dame Janet added that last year’s film Anonymous, which portrayed Shakespeare as a drunken idiot and the Earl as a literary genius, was “far-fetched” and a waste of money.

The South Africa-born actress and director, ex-wife of former Royal Shakespeare Company director Sir Trevor Nunn, told a Sunday newspaper that she got “mad as a snake” about what she sees as the myths surrounding Britain’s greatest playwright.
“It annoyed me… I suddenly felt like Joan of Arc riding into battle.”

Earlier this year Jacobi said that Shakespeare was just a “frontman” for the 17th Earl of Oxford, because the nobleman could not be seen as a “common playwright”.

Rylance, currently performing in Richard III at the Globe, has pointed out that the details about Italy in Shakespearean plays are “exact”, and that the Earl knew the country well.

But Dame Janet wrote in a new book: “You have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine the earl secretly wrote 37 plays, performed and printed over a quarter of a century, without being found out.
“And you have to be a snob if you just hate it that the greatest poet the world has produced was born into the humble aldermanic classes of a provincial town.”
She went on: “How strange it is that Jacobi and Rylance, hundreds of years later, with their outstanding acting instincts, should embrace such a haughty view of the man who has made them as big as they are.”

A spokesman for Rylance said he did not only promote the “Oxfordian” theory while Jacobi was unavailable for comment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/thea ... plays.html
 
How should Shakespeare really sound?

Audio: The British Library have released the first audio guide to how Shakespeare's plays would have sounded in the original pronunciation.

Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that American accents are "closer" than contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard's day.

The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent.

Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in modern day Shakespeare productions. Well, now you can judge for yourself.

There have been a handful of attempts to revive what The Globe call Shakespeare's "original pronunciation", but until now they have only been put on stage.

The British Library's new CD, Shakespeare’s original pronunciation, is the first of its kind featuring speeches and scenes which claim to be performed as Shakespeare would have heard them.

The CD is said to bring to life rhymes and jokes that are not audible in contemporary English - as well as to illustrate what Hamlet meant when he advised his actors to speak “trippingly upon the tongue”. (‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue’ -- Hamlet, Act 3)

The recording has been overseen by Ben Crystal, who has chosen the actors, and curated and directed their speeches.

"For the first time in centuries, we have 75 recorded minutes of sonnets, speeches and scenes recorded as we hope Shakespeare heard them. It is, in short, Shakespeare as you've never heard him before.

“The modern presentation of Shakespeare's plays and poems in period pronunciation has already attracted a wide following, despite the fact that hardly any recordings have been publicly available," he said.

The CD is also said to illustrate what Hamlet meant when he advised his actors to speak “trippingly upon the tongue”.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... sound.html
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There are several sample sound files to enjoy on the page! :D Not very "Brummie" it has to be said.

Incidentally, the Ben Crystal mentioned in the article is the son of David Crystal, the eminent linguist and historian of the English Language, whose work I'd highly recommend. He presents an Open University programme on the Shakespeare pronunciation, along with Ben, which goes into more depth about the research and realisation of the project, with more explanations and demonstrations and vitally, analysis of how it often changes our understanding of the original meaning of many lines.

Enjoy it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
 
A good find and thanks for posting it.

I might use those clips when I'm next faced by pupils protesting that Shakespeare is posh!

If I have doubts, it's about the way those very intimate readings would have projected.
Macbeth, certainly, could not have used a microphone voice way-back! :)
 
And this also raises the question of how the present day Brummie accent arose (which is a long way from Mummerset!)
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On second thoughts, Shakespeare left home while still a young man, and may well have lost any local accent he might have had while working in The Smoke, and touring around the rest of the country.

So is this Original Pronunciation actually a version of London English, perhaps with other dialects thrown in?

To say it has a lot in common with American English merely reflects the fact that AE derives quite strongly from that of West Country sailors and Irish immigrants.

England (not to mention the rest of the UK) still has a range of regional accents, so the more I think about it the more it seems difficult to pin down a pronunciation from the 1600s. If certain puns or jokes worked in London, did they still work so well in the provinces?

As so often, a touch of enlightenment has actually left me more confused! :(
 
Shakespeare scholars try to see off the Bard's doubters
By Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent

This is the 449th birthday of William Shakespeare. Well, actually, it might be his birthday, because we don't really know when he was born.
There is a date for his baptism - with his name recorded in Latin as "Gulielmus" - and then it's a case of working back a few days.

It's an educated guess. And much of the endless debate about the identity of the author of Shakespeare's plays is because so much of the presumed life story is educated guesswork.

But a new book - William Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - wants to put the record straight once and for all, as a forthright counterblast against those who question his authorship.

Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and eminent Shakespearean scholar, now aged 82, has marshalled an international line-up of academics to defend the Bard.
This literary raiding party rounds up and brings to book claimants such as the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.

But why have there been so many questions about the identity of the author?
"I think the phenomenon goes down partly to snobbery; to a feeling of resentment, even anger, that someone from a relatively humble background should have been able to create such works of genius," says Prof Wells.

He also rejects as ill-informed the suggestion that Shakespeare's limited formal education rules him out as the author of the plays.
"A lot of it is due to ignorance, especially of the Elizabethan educational background, of the sort a boy in Stratford could have got at the local grammar school.
"It was rather limited, but a very intense classical education, in rhetoric and oratory, speaking Latin from the time they were eight years old, having to speak it in the classroom and the playground."

Co-editor Paul Edmondson, head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, says the authorship attacks are part of a wider culture of conspiracy theories.
There is a constant curiosity to show that "reality is not what it seems".
But the book also shows how long this struggle has been running.

In the 1850s there were claims for Francis Bacon. When this fell out of fashion, Christopher Marlowe was touted as the secret author, with the argument that he had faked his death and borrowed Shakespeare's name for his writing.

This theory was somewhat scuppered in the 1920s when the coroner's report from Marlowe's inquest was discovered. He might have been killed in very suspicious circumstances, but he was fairly unambiguously dead and buried before many of Shakespeare's plays had been written.

etc, etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22206151

Will's DoB may be slightly iffy, but today is also the anniversary of his death in 1616.
 
First this evening we have Mr Norman Voles of Gravesend, who claims he wrote all Shakespeare's works. Mr Voles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?

That is correct. I wrote all 'is plays, and me wife and I wrote 'is sonnets.
 
Lost work, re-writes, additional scenes, by Shakespeare the jobbing playwright, identified by computer.
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/12/shakespeare-new-plays

Shakespeare's fingerprints found on three Elizabethan plays

Computer analysis gives the Bard a hand in three late 16th century dramas, says scholar Jonathan Bate

The Observer, Dalya Alberge. 12 October 2013


The hand of William Shakespeare has been identified in scenes or passages in three Elizabethan plays previously believed to have been written by others, following linguistic "fingerprinting" tests and other new research.

Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy and Mucedorus will now be included in a major edition of collaborative plays bearing the Bard's name. Jonathan Bate, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, said the evidence has convinced him that specific parts within those plays must have had input from Shakespeare.

The three plays will be included in the edition which he is co-editing with other scholars in a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Palgrave Macmillan. Plays known as the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" have long intrigued scholars, with claims and counter-claims over whether he could have written dramas beyond the 36 in the First Folio, the edition put together by his fellow actors after his death. Arguments over plays beyond the "authorised" collection have raged since the 18th century. The strengthened evidence will be outlined in the book, William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, to be published on 28 October.

Bate, professor of English literature at Oxford University, says the issue is "perhaps the single most significant lacuna in 21st-century Shakespearean scholarship". Advanced computer-assisted analysis of every surviving play of the period has allowed the authors to go "quite a lot further than previous scholars" in establishing Shakespeare's involvement, he said, noting that it presents Shakespeare in a new light – as "reviser, rewriter and collaborator".

Arden of Faversham – which the RSC will stage in spring – is a 1590s domestic tragedy, published anonymously. It tells of a woman from Faversham, Kent, who conspires with her lover to murder her husband, seeking to "wash away this blood" in a manner reminiscent of Lady Macbeth. The book points out that rare words such as "copesmate" (companion), alongside distinctive imagery such as comparing a troubled mind to a muddied fountain, suggest Shakespeare's hand.

"It is a well-known play among aficionados," said Bate, "and there have been many arguments about who wrote it. But our new evidence is that at least one scene – a central encounter between the lovers – is by Shakespeare and that, possibly, Thomas Kyd is the author of other scenes." Kyd is best-known for The Spanish Tragedy, a 1580s revenge drama with later extra scenes which the computer testing now attributes to Shakespeare rather than his rival, Ben Jonson.

"There are some remarkable additional scenes and amazing dialogue about whether it's possible for a painter to portray grief or whether only a poet can produce a portrayal," said Bate.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that The Spanish Tragedy passed to Shakespeare's acting company and that the central character was played by his friend Richard Burbage, for whom he wrote Hamlet and King Lear.

Mucedorus is a 1590s tragi-comedy which Shakespeare's acting company revived in 1610 with extra scenes. Bate said: "At least one of those scenes is, we think, linguistically full of his fingerprints." It uses phrases unique to Shakespeare such as "worthless trunk" (also in Henry V) and "high extolment" (Hamlet) and his famous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear" (The Winter's Tale).

But ultimately, is the writing worthy of Shakespeare? Bate said: "The passages in The Spanish Tragedy genuinely are. That has long been recognised."Another scholar, Stanley Wells, said "Shakespeare was both a great genius and a jobbing playwright. Taking a fresh look at plays that he may have had a hand in doesn't turn them into better plays than we thought they were, but it may well both increase our understanding of his professionalism."

Gregory Doran, the RSC's artistic director, described the new research as "fascinating", although he believes the ultimate test is when words are delivered from actors' mouths. "The plays were much more collaboratively written than we realise. We're suspicious in the theatre – but not in film or telly – of joint authorship," he said.

Commenting on Arden of Faversham, Doran said: "It is an absolutely terrific play. The complexity of the storytelling is brilliant and it does have strokes of absolute genius, so I'm very ready to accept that scholars might think there's Shakespeare's hand in it."
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Collaboration between Shakespeare and some of the finest playwrights of period. A busy time for theatre, an amazing time for the English language.
 
The plays and poems of the period are rich and allusive texts, which always raise more questions than we can possibly answer.

It seems to me genuinely odd that the only question which is likely to make it into today's papers is that of authorship - even when all sides admit we know pretty near damn-all about Shakespeare!

The first two plays used to figure on the reading-list of First Year English Students, though it was usual to disparage Kyd - the nominal author of The Spanish Tragedy - as a crude but effective journeyman, whose work was preparatory to that of the immortal bard.

But let us be thankful that Eng. Lit. merits a column inch or two at all in these dark days. :)
 
William Shakespeare, the 'king of infinite space’
Was the Bard a science-fiction writer 200 years before Mary Shelley?
By Dan Falk
8:26PM GMT 27 Jan 2014

Shakespeare spoke of “the inaudible and noiseless foot of time” – but the revelry will likely be quite audible indeed when the playwright’s 450th birthday arrives in April. A major anniversary is a good excuse (as if we needed one) to celebrate his life and legacy. But we may also wonder: after four and a half centuries, can there possibly be anything left to say about Shakespeare that hasn’t already been said?

The genius from Stratford-upon-Avon has worn many hats over the years, with imaginative scholars casting him as a closet Catholic, a mainstream Protestant, an ardent capitalist, a Marxist, a misogynist, a feminist, a homosexual, a legal clerk and a cannabis dealer – yet the words “Shakespeare” and “science” are rarely uttered in the same breath.

A surprise, perhaps, given that he was producing his greatest work just as new ideas about the human body, the Earth and the universe were transforming Western thought. But a re-evaluation is on the horizon. Scholars are examining Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time – what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work.

Take astronomy. The plays are full of references to the Sun, Moon, stars, comets, eclipses and heavenly spheres – but these are usually dismissed as strictly old-school, reflecting the (largely incorrect) ideas of ancient Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy. Although Copernicus had lifted the Earth into the heavens with his revolutionary book in 1543 – 21 years before Shakespeare’s birth – it supposedly took decades for the new cosmology to reach England; and anyway, the idea of a sun-centred universe only became intellectually respectable with the news of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in 1610. By then, Shakespeare was ready for retirement in Warwickshire.

But we shouldn’t be so hasty. The Copernican theory attracted early adherents in Britain, beginning with a favourable mention in Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge in 1556. The first detailed account of the theory by an Englishman came from Thomas Digges, whose book included a diagram of the solar system in which the stars extend outward without limit – a vision of a possibly infinite cosmos.

Shakespeare had multiple connections to the Digges family. For a time they lived a few hundred yards apart in London, and Digges’s son, Leonard, was a fan of the playwright and contributed an introductory verse to the First Folio.

Other science-minded Englishmen were flourishing in Shakespeare’s time. There was Thomas Harriot, for example, who aimed a telescope at the night sky several months before Galileo. And John Dee, who was something like a science adviser to Queen Elizabeth (and who has been suggested as the model for Prospero in The Tempest).

The Italian philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno travelled to England in the 1580s lecturing on Copernicanism. The curriculum at London’s Gresham College, founded in 1597, included astronomy, geometry and medicine. Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, championing observation and empirical knowledge, was published in 1605, around the time Shakespeare was working on King Lear. Michel de Montaigne’s sceptical essays had appeared in English two years earlier.

Shakespeare could have seen evidence of the “new astronomy” with his own eyes. In November of 1572, a bright new star appeared in the constellation of Cassiopeia. (We now know it was a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star.) Shakespeare was only eight at the time – but we know Digges made observations of it, as did astronomer Tycho Brahe in Denmark. Today we call it “Tycho’s star”.

Donald Olson of Texas State University has argued that the star observed by Prince Hamlet shining “westward from the pole” was inspired by Shakespeare’s boyhood memory of Tycho’s star – reinforced, perhaps, by a reference to it in Holinshed’s Chronicles 15 years later. (At the very least, Shakespeare would have seen the next supernova, “Kepler’s star”, in 1604.) One might note that Brahe observed the stars from the Danish island of Hven, a stone’s throw from the castle of Elsinore, Shakespeare’s setting for Hamlet.

Astronomer Peter Usher, recently retired from Penn State University, takes the story further, arguing that Hamlet can be read as an allegory of competing cosmological world views. The evil Claudius stands in for his namesake, the ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern represent Brahe, and Prince Hamlet is Thomas Digges. When Hamlet envisions himself as “a king of infinite space”, could Shakespeare be alluding to the new, infinite universe described – for the first time – by his countryman, Digges? 8)

Usher’s proposal strikes most Shakespeare scholars as far-fetched – yet even sceptics do a double-take when they look at Brahe’s coat of arms, noticing that two of Brahe’s relatives were named “Rosencrans” and “Guildensteren”. :shock:

Finally, Shakespeare wasn’t quite ready to retire in 1610. This was the year he wrote Cymbeline – containing, arguably, an even more tantalising allusion to the new cosmology. In this admittedly weird play, Jupiter himself descends from the heavens. Could the four ghosts that dance around the play’s hero represent the planet’s four newly discovered Jovian moons, described by Galileo earlier that year? Usher suspects so – and so does Scott Maisano of the University of Massachusetts in Boston, along with John Pitcher at Oxford, who have each written in support of the idea.

Several well-known Shakespeare scholars concede the playwright was likely aware of the newly emerging picture of the heavens. Jonathan Bate of Oxford points to passages that “may hint of the new heliocentric astronomy”; James Shapiro of Columbia University writes that Shakespeare knew Ptolemaic science “was already discredited by the Copernican revolution”.

When I spoke to him recently, Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard remained agnostic on the question of Shakespeare’s astronomical knowledge, but added that the playwright had a “scientific sensibility” and was “surprisingly alert to, and interested in, the 'scientific naturalism’ of his time”. We sense this, perhaps, in the way that some of his characters speak out against superstition: In King Lear, Edmond dismisses those who blame their misfortune on the heavens as guilty of “the excellent foppery of the world”. In Julius Caesar, Cassius declares: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Shakespeare’s was still, to use Carl Sagan’s phrase, “a demon-haunted world” – but machines and mechanistic explanations were on the rise. Shakespeare seems to have had a near obsession with clocks and measurements of time; his characters speak of clocks even when they’re deep in the Forest of Arden. Even more sophisticated than the mechanical clocks were the robot-like “automata” on display in Europe’s royal gardens. Maisano has argued that Shakespeare may have had such devices in mind when he penned the climax to The Winter’s Tale, in which a motionless “statue” springs to life. In fact, Maisano sees the play as a kind of proto-science-fiction – beating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by 200 years. :D

Of course, one has to tread carefully. As with the Bible, one can find anything in Shakespeare if one looks hard enough. He was not a scientist, but perhaps he was more conscious of changing conceptions of our world than we imagine. If he were alive today, who knows what he would make of a 14-billion-year-old universe awash with neutrinos, dark energy and Higgs bosons?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/1059 ... space.html
 
I would guess that we could find equally informed scientific references in Shakespeare's contemporaries. Jonson certainly enjoyed the jargon of every conspiracy against the laity. I would need to delve into the footnotes to see how how up-to-date he was: he certainly viewed the dubious lingo of the alchemists in the light of superior knowledge.

It was an age of discoveries and playwrights prided themselves on reflecting that. The study of the Bard in glorious isolation risks attributing to him everything of the temper and culture of the age, further obscuring his unique qualities. :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
It was an age of discoveries and playwrights prided themselves on reflecting that. The study of the Bard in glorious isolation risks attributing to him everything of the temper and culture of the age, further obscuring his unique qualities. :)
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Or perhaps it redresses the balance, countering all those commentators who locked him away as a child of the classical age, all Latin and Greek, and Italian stories, but nothing more.

Why did Shakespeare set Hamlet in Elsinore, "a stone’s throw" from Hven, site of Tycho Brahe's observatory, Uraniborg?
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ent ... #Uraniborg
"From this new headquarters, which included apartments for the entertainment of dignitaries as well as a separate observatory for his students, Tycho received royalty from his home country and from around the world, including an eight-day visit from King James VI of Scotland."
(Who, in 1603, became James I of England, so his activities and interests would have been well known in Shakespeare's time.)

By all accounts, Uraniborg was quite palatial, so basing a play about a palace intrigue there seems quite natural.

And then there was "Brahe’s coat of arms" which referred to his relatives “Rosencrans and Guildensteren”, which was news to me!

So perhaps old Will was not just a fuddy-duddy rehashing old tales, but was actually writing a satire on the major scientific dispute of his age. I like to think so, and I like him better for it. 8)
 
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