There was Hillary Clinton refusing to eat cheesecake, which in turn inspired Stephen Colbert to show her how it's done in New York (without a fork and with your hands, duh).
Well before all of that was Ted Cruz glumly eating a pie:
There was also Donald Trump, of course, who has found new ways to innovate in this department. He is on record as one who eats pizza with a fork, but he revealed a truly groundbreaking method over 20 years ago: eating pizza backwards:
Ultimately, however, the winner this year was John Kasich, who housed an exceptionally large amount of Italian food in the Bronx:
Politicians eating food is not a new phenomenon, mostly because not eating is a fine way to die. But eating in public is a choice. Hillary chose not to (because, she rightly pointed out, the press would find a way for her to look ridiculous), while Kasich made the diametrically opposed choice (the press, in his case, didn't need help making him look ridiculous.)
How informed is that choice? For presidential candidates, the answer tends to be: very, according to Jeff Guillot, a partner at Millennial Strategies, a New York City-based political consulting firm.
Every candidate, Guillot says, has state, county, and local leaders advising them before any visit anywhere, in part to act as local guides.
Which means, among other things, that Chris Christie probably knew what he was getting into when he ate fried peanut butter and jelly last year at the Iowa State Fair.
"It’s really important to have a staff that know the customs on the ground," Guillot says.
In New York City, home to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities in the world outside of Israel, that can mean more than just pizza and odd fried things. It can mean, at some events, complying with Jewish dietary law.
"We’ve had to advise some candidates, lay off the cocktail shrimp at events," Guillot says.
In some Asian cultures, it isn't proper to leave food on your plate. The advice then?
"Don’t order it if you can’t finish," Guillot tells candidates.
Guillot's advice when it comes to protocol that is not actually offensive, but is highly debated, such as the correct way to eat pizza, is pretty simple: Be yourself.
"I think the most important thing for any candidate is to find a way to be genuine. If that means eating pizza with your hands, or eating a corn dog at the county fair, you have to do that," Guillot says.
Voters, he says, can see through anyone faking it.
"They're going to go with the person they think you can drink a beer with," he says.
But do embarrassing photos of candidates eating in public actually matter when it comes to election day? Guillot doesn't think so, offering a convincing counterexample: Bill de Blasio. A Red Sox fan who famously eats pizza with a fork, de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City, where residents eat pizza with their hands and support baseball teams that are not the Red Sox.
As for Guillot's own preferences, his answer is a Solomonic version of having your pizza and eating it too. Plain pizza, he says, he eats with his hands. But if there are toppings?
Yi Xing was a bit of an overachiever. A mathematician, engineer, Buddhist monk and astronomer, Xing was asked to improve calendars in China. He took it one step further, building upon centuries of Chinese innovation to create an astronomical clock to which he gave the catchy name “Water-Driven Spherical Bird’s-Eye-View Map of the Heaven.”
The clock was slightly more complicated than the average timepiece today, measuring not only time but the distance of planets and stars. A water wheel turned gears in the clock, with puppet shows and gongs set to emerge at various times.
Dating to the year 725, Yi Xing’s ingenious version of an alarm clock is one of the world’s earliest recorded devices of that nature. Along with the water clock Plato used to wake himself up for his legendary dawn lectures in the 4th century BCE, it is evidence that humans have been looking for ways to rise on time for thousands of years.
The idea was repeated by Europeans who created complex displays within chiming clocks in town squares. The next step was to make such clocks smaller, so they could be used individually. Historians believe personal mechanical alarm clocks originated in Germany in the 15th century, but their inventors are unknown. Most people didn’t own such clocks, though, and had to rely upon the sun, servants, or prayer-chiming bells. As work hours became more rigid, factory whistles were blown to encourage people living near their places of employ to get up.
The first known mechanical alarm clock inventor is Levi Hutchins, an American who in 1787 invented a personal alarm device to wake him at 4 a.m. He didn’t even have to be at work early, it was simply his “firm rule” to wake before sunrise. Though other alarm clocks existed previously, it seems Hutchins had not heard of them.
He wrote of his invention, “It was the idea of a clock that could sound an alarm that was difficult, not the execution of the idea. It was simplicity itself to arrange for the bell to sound at the predetermined hour.”
An illustration for an 1846 advertisement for a "double-action alarm clock", which are "in daily use by postmen, policemen, railwaymen and others who have to get up early in the morning". (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)
However Hutchins, more interested in morning rising than mercantile benefits, never patented his invention. Half a century later, Frenchman Antoine Redier became the first to patent an adjustable alarm clock, in 1847. The adjustable alarm clock allowed the user to set a time to awake, rather than being ruled by the dictates of others.
Each adjustable alarm clock had a hole in each number on the clock dial. A pin was placed in the hole responding to the time you needed to be up. Very simple, unless you wanted to be more specific than the closest hour!
Redier’s patent didn’t cross the oceans though, so American Seth E. Thomas got in on the action in 1876, patenting his own version. His eponymous company became a mass-producer of the alarm clock, bringing the invention to the masses.
“In an expanding urban and industrial world, people were obligated to know the time and to be on time," writes historian Martin Levinson. "By the late nineteenth century, many consumers were actively seeking alarm clocks.”
Not everyone felt the need for a mechanical solution, though. Since the Industrial Revolution began, people had been finding ways to make sure they got to work on time. One popular method, at least in Britain and Ireland, involved hiring a knocker-upper. Using everything from a truncheon to a pea shooter, the knocker-upper would bang on doors and windows to wake those inside.
Often this service worked on a sort of subscription basis, with those being roused paying a few pence to the rouser. Everyone from old people to policemen got in on the action, with industrial towns hiring large numbers of knocker-uppers. By the 1920s however, as alarm clocks spread, the unique profession began to fade away.
During the mid 1900s alarm clock companies continued to innovate, with portable travel alarm clocks and radio alarm clocks that allowed consumers to wake up to something more compelling than a bell.
Then the Second World War began, putting the brakes on the alarm clock industry's growth, as nearly all factories in the US and Britain were mandatorily converted into zones for war-related production. As war workers needed to wake up on time, too, both governments did allow some alarm clocks to be manufactured.
Metals were scarce at the time, though, so most war-clocks were made of a combination similar to a reinforced egg carton, with pulped paper and pressed wood. Nonetheless, they were still thin on the ground, with production levels almost six times lower than before the war began. Due to this decreased supply the U.S. War Production Board requested “that no one buy a war alarm unless it satisfies real need, not merely want, wish, or whim.”
The war may have limited production, but it couldn’t halt the passage of time forever–or the people who were worried about knowing what that time was. As the war dragged on and old alarm clocks began to break, pressure for greater supply increased. The government, recognizing that alarm clocks had become essential to the smooth running of industry, allowed some factories to re-commence selling their products. With factories back in business as early as 1944, alarm clocks soon became one of the first products to debut so-called post-war designs.
Enter, the snooze button. Popular opinion has it that the snooze was the feat, or fault, of Lew Wallace, the famous author of Ben-Hur. However, the Lew Wallace Museum asserts that Wallace could not have created the snooze button, although he did invent a few other things. Indeed, the author died in 1905, nearly a half-century before General Electric-Telechron made a clock with the snooze function. Nevertheless, the function quickly became popular and exists today as an essential part of alarm clocks.
These days the alarm clock, in its original form, is endangered, since alarm apps are now ubiquitous. In 2012, when UK carrier O2 surveyed their customers about the ways their smartphones replaced other devices, they found that the alarm clock was the most commonly replaced; 54 percent of O2’s smartphone customers had relegated their alarm clocks to the dustbin of history.
Though its form may change, its unlikely the alarm clock will ever go away. Or that you’ll ever get up without at least one snooze.
Now, though, the organizers of the George A. Wyman Memorial Project think they may have found it.
Once he made it across the country, Wyman turned over his bike for display. After all, it was the first motorized vehicle to cross America! After a few weeks in New York City, the bike spent a couple of years in a museum in Golden Gate Park. But by 1905, Wyman later said, even he didn’t know where it had gone to. “Urban legend has it was purchased by a bar in San Francisco and hung from the ceiling for a time,” the Wyman Memorial Project reports. “Or, it was lost in the great earthquake of 1906.”
In the 1970s, though, Otis Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and a motorcycle enthusiast, bought a beat-down 1902 California motorbike, just like the one Wyman had ridden. It came from a garage in San Francisco, and the person who sold it to Chandler convinced him that it was the 1902 California Wyman had ridden across the country. In 2006, after Chandler’s death, a friend and fellow collector, Dave Scoffone, bought the bike. Recently he got in contact with the Wyman Memorial Association and told them them: this might be Wyman’s bike.
Right now, the only evidence backing up the bike’s identity is Chandler’s conviction that he’d bought Wyman’s bike. As a collector of rare motorcycles, perhaps he had a good reason to believe so.
Wyman made several modifications to his bike to aid his journey across America—he added a carrying rack to hold extra fuel and cargo and a small storage compartment underneath the seat post. When Chandler bought the bike it was in terrible shape, so he restored it. But if it is Wyman’s bike, in its pre-restoration state, there could have been traces of those modifications.
Wyman added the triangular storage container under the seat post. (Photo: Wyman Memorial Project)
“We are searching for any ’as found’ photographs the Otis Chandler acquisition team might have taken at the time it was purchased by him,” says Tim Masterson, the project manager of the Wyman Memorial Project. “Also, any documentation, bills of sale, transfer or other items that can be traced back the last known public showing in the Museum at Golden Gate Park in 1903to 1905 or ’06.”
Even if it’s not Wyman’s motorcycle, the memorial project believes this bike is “the finest example of the Regular Model 1902 California yet to be found.” Looking at the bike, it’s incredible to think that one just like this made it all the way across the country at a time when there were few paved roads outside of cities: Wyman crossed roughly the first half of the country by bumping along railroad tracks.
If it is Wyman’s bike though, it could be, as the Wyman Memorial Project puts it, “a national treasure of the first order."
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
“Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in free America.” - William Howard Taft, 1920
A noble sentiment, but, according to a historic letter that has just gone on auction, former President Taft wasn’t always so woke. The anti-Semitic letter, written in 1916 and addressed to Taft’s good friend and Washington journalist Gus Karger, makes an offensive case against the appointment of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, based on the “clannishness” of a “Jew of Jews.”
Taft had left the presidency in 1913, replaced by Woodrow Wilson, who championed Jewish lawyer and political advisor Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court in 1916. A former lawyer and judge himself, Taft and Brandeis had clashed in the courtroom before, and Taft was also stung that he himself did not receive the nomination. So, just two days after Brandeis’ nomination, he penned the letter that is now on auction, with bidding starting at $15,000.
In it, Taft attacks Brandeis’ liberal views as well as, Taft says, his use of his place in the Jewish community for political gain. He writes that the “intelligent Jews of this country” aren’t behind Brandeis’ nomination, but that the “clannishness” of the larger Jewish community prevents them from doing anything about it. Taft accuses Brandeis of not claiming his Jewishness until it was politically expedient saying, “If it were necessary, I am sure he would have grown a beard to convince them that he was a Jew of Jews.”
Taft’s attack on Brandeis was not the only opposition to his nomination. Because of Brandeis' socialist-leaning politics and some senators' blatant anti-Semitism, the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the first time, held a hearing to discuss the nomination. Brandeis was finally confirmed by the Senate four months after his nomination.
A police office holding one of the cobras caught in Springfield, Missouri, in 1953. (Photo: Courtesy History Museum on the Square)
In 1953, Springfield, Missouri, was a city of about 65,000 people and at least 11 escaped Indian cobras slithering loose on the streets.
Between August and October, at least 11 of the snakes were either killed or captured in Springfield, much to the alarm of residents, many of whom fought back with a common gardening tool.
While a local pet shop was always suspected to be the source of the snakes, its owner denied any involvement. It would be 35 years until the person who set the reptiles free came forward.
The first cobra was spotted in a yard on August 15; the homeowner quickly killed it with his garden hoe. A week later, the same thing happened across the street. The police were called, and a local science teacher identified the species, native to a region thousands of miles away.
The police visited Mowrer Animal Company, the pet shop a block away. Reo Mowrer acknowledged he kept cobras, but said none had escaped.
As the weeks progressed, however, snakes kept appearing. The third, in a yard, was also dispatched with a hoe. The fourth, on a roadway, was run over repeatedly with a car. The fifth appeared in a woman’s garage, where she happened to keep her hoe. The sixth was captured by Mowrer himself near the shop.
Police officers searching for cobras in Springfield, as a crowd watches. (Photo: Courtesy History Museum on the Square)
The seventh cobra prompted the greatest response. A man saw it disappear beneath his house, and called the police. The chief arrived with a homemade “snake catcher,” a rope noose attached to a 10-foot pole. When it proved of little value, police threw a tear gas grenade under the house. The cobra came out, and was hit by five slugs from an officer’s pistol. But the reptile wasn’t quite dead. So the police got a garden hoe.
Mowrer was ordered to move his animals outside city limits. Antivenom was shipped in. The eighth cobra was crushed by a rock. The ninth, again, met a hoe. The city’s health director drove a truck around, blaring so-called “snake-charming” music. The tenth snake was killed that same day.
Mowrer denied involvement in the great snake escape up until his death in the 1970s, and locals assumed the chance of learning what really happened had passed with him. Then, in 1988, a man named Carl Barnett made a shocking statement in the Springfield News-Leader: “I’m the one that done it.”
Barnett had been 14 years old when the cobras appeared. After 35 years, he said, a friend had convinced him the community deserved an explanation. And an attorney had assured him he wouldn’t be charged.
Barnett told the newspaper that Mowrer gave him an exotic fish in early August 1953, as part of a trade. But the fish died the first night Barnett brought it home, so he went back to complain. “He was just ugly about the deal and told me ‘That’s tough, kid’—get lost,’” Barnett recalled in the News-Leader.
Leaving the shop, Barnett saw a crate of snakes out back, and assumed they were harmless. He released them, and figured he and the shop were even. When the cobras began appearing, Barnett recalled, “I realized what I’d done, and I was scared to death. Every time someone mentioned the cobras, I just wilted.”
The 11th snake was captured on October 25, 1953, and taken to the local zoo. It died there two months later. For a while, residents feared more snakes would appear. But this was to be the last of the escaped snakes. The cobra scare was history.
This Tuesday afternoon in Britain, millions of internet users emailed dinner plans, business deals, and/or life-changing secrets to their friends, family and coworkers.
Or so they thought. Instead, all these emails got redirected to a guy named Steve Webb. For three hours on Tuesday, UK internet giant BT forwarded all messages sent through their network on to "stevewebb2@btinternet.com," The Register reports.
BT, which serves about 8 million customers, told The Register that they had run into a "testing error," and that the emails had been routed to an internal account. But customers who sent messages through the company received bouncebacks that looked like this:
The Register followed the Webb of intrigue all the way to LinkedIn, a time-tested source of mysterious emails from people you don't know. There, they found a Steve Webb who works as a tech support specialist for Synchronoss Technologies, the very company that recently started handling BT's cloud services.
While there's no reason to think stevewebb2 wasn't a test account, it's certainly the kind of test account that makes you wonder how the real Steve Webb's day went. "I am currently waiting to find out if my role will change in the new organisation," his profile begins. Looks like he just got an update.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials. But no actual papers trade hands: everything is digital, and the internet-accessible content is not banned for shocking content so much as that modern crime, copyright infringement.
But for the people who run the world’s pirate libraries, their goals are no less ambitious for their work’s illicit nature.
“It’s the creation of a universal library of the best stuff,” says Joe Karaganis, who studies media piracy at Columbia University’s policy think tank, American Assembly. “That will not include the latest Danielle Steel novel.”
It does, however, include hundreds of thousands of books and millions of journal articles that otherwise are found only through expensive academic journals. Scanned and uploaded, they are available through pirate libraries for free.
The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia’s cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and poor. Pirate libraries have become so popular that in 2015, Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in America, went to court to try to shut down two of the most popular, Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.
These libraries, Elsevier alleged, cost the company millions of dollars in lost profits. But the people who run and support pirate libraries argue that they’re filling a market gap, providing access to information to researchers around the world who wouldn’t have the resources to obtain these materials any other way.
The lawsuits, wrote one group of pirate library supporters, “come as a big blow” to researchers whose only source of scholarly material is in these sites. “The social media, mailing lists and IRC channels have been filled with their distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications,” the brief states.
In other words, they believe there are researchers who are never going to be able to pay the steep price of academic articles; either they use pirate libraries, which give them efficient access to information, or they don’t get to read those books and journals at all.
Today’s pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information underground, in opposition to government censorship—part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections “retreated from the public view,” writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. “The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete,” he writes, and instead migrated to “closed, membership-only FTP servers.”
More recently, though, those collections have moved online, where they are available to anyone who knows where to look. One of the earliest pirate libraries on the web, lib.ru, was created by one of those Russian academics. In the past decade or so, there have been a succession of libraries—Gigapedia, Kolkhoz, Librusec, and most recently Libgen and Sci-Hub, that have grown to gigantic size, only to be broken up or shut down. LIbraries that started as repositories primarily of Russian-language text grew to include a corpus of English-language works, which fueled their growth.
“There’s been a shift from Russian-language system to one that’s systematically mining the libraries of Western universities and publishers,” says Karaganis.
There’s always been osmosis within the academic community of copyrighted materials from people with access to scholar without. “Much of the life of a research academic in Kazakhstan or Iran or Malaysia involves this informal diffusion of materials across the gated walls of the top universities,” he says. What changed more recently is the speed and technology through which that happens.
Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who created Sci-Hub, for instance, was able to rig up a system that basically jumped the fence of journal paywalls. When someone requested an article, her system first checked the LibGen database. But if the article wasn’t there, the system used donated passwords to log into journal websites, download the article, and deliver it both to the user who requested it and the main database. It’s a much more efficient system than the informal #icanhazPDF economy in which researchers would request certain documents on social media and hope a kind soul would provide.
Libraries full of books fixed a different information scarcity problem. (Photo: Bruno Delzant/CC-BY-2.0)
Who’s benefiting from this? The workings of pirate libraries are necessarily opaque, but Bodó’s research into one in particular shows that users come from both countries with high GDP and developing countries where students and scholars likely have poor access to academic materials. Bodó found that the most downloads came from Russia, Indonesia and the United States, in the case of this library, with the most per capita coming from Central and Eastern European countries. The average document had been downloaded three times.
His research also showed that access could be driving the market for these libraries: two-thirds of the downloads were for books that didn’t have a Kindle version, and in developing countries, people were more likely to be downloading titles that just weren’t available in print.
Publishers are facing great difficulty controlling the growth of the world’s pirate libraries, as they can be set up as open source entities that let anyone provide access to their base catalogue, along with whatever else they want to share at their particular site. But the pirate librarians also lack conventional library controls. Organizers can prevent books from entering the collection, but they can’t necessarily requisition or order particular articles or books, the way that a librarian would. The result is vast but eclectic collections of work, mostly very serious, but sometimes not. Libgen, Karaganis notes, in addition to its high-brow academic collection, also has an enormous store of pirated comic books.
You're probably heard "Amazing Grace" a bunch of times. But have you heard it played on a cabbage, by an endlessly cheery Japanese man, to the accompaniment of a synth backing track?
Junji Koyama makes musical instruments out of fruits and vegetables. His creations, which he shows off with spirited performances of classic songs on YouTube, include a celery nose flute;
Koyama has been uploading his food instrument videos for nine years. He says he spends up to an hour browsing the local market for suitably shaped vegetables to carve, and usually eats his musical instruments at the conclusion of each recital.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Over 108 years ago, George P. Bidder III cast more than 1,000 messages in bottles into the North Sea, off Britain's eastern coast.
His goal was to track ocean currents, and, amazingly, his experiment sort of worked: around 55 percent of the messages were eventually returned to Bidder, a member of Britain's Marine Biological Association.
Some ended up on the shores of continental Europe, while others ended up closer to home.
Bidder died in 1954, but the return rate for his letters ticked up a notch early last year, when a woman walking on a beach on the North Frisian Islands near the German border with Denmark discovered a Bidder bottle.
The finder, a retired German postal worker named Marianne Winkler, promptly returned it to the Marine Biological Association, which also gave her the reward: one shilling, or about 17 American cents.
“We found an old shilling, I think we got it on eBay," Guy Baker, a spokesman for the association, told the Guardian. "We sent it to her with a letter saying thank you."
Guinness World Records has since verified the claim of it being the oldest message in a bottle ever found.
"It is not known how Marianne plans to spend her shilling," the organization remarks.
This Tuesday, historically-minded citizens in Rochester, New York found a new use for their "I Voted" stickers—they gave them to Susan B. Anthony.
After casting their ballots, dozens of happily enfranchised voters headed from their polling places to Mt. Hope Cemetery, where Anthony's "modest white marker" sits within a family plot. The social reformer spent decades leading the fight for women's suffrage, and was even arrested for attempting to vote in Rochester in 1872. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 2014, writer Caurie Putnam noticed a similar sticker tribute and traced it back to Sarah Jane McPike, who has brought flowers to Anthony's grave since the first year she voted, in 2004. That year, McPike photographed two stickers on the headstone, placed right above Anthony's name.
This year, though, the site was even more festive—there were several bouquets, small rocks stacked on top of the stone, and enough stickers that many of them had to be pressed on its sides, like jaunty feathers in a cap.
Throughout her life, Anthony saved trunks' worth of letters, newspaper clippings, and other voting-related errata, which she used to write the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. She collected so many materials, she nearly collapsed her sister's attic, which she was using as storage space. Still, she'd probably welcome this new batch.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
George Shaw's depiction of a duck-billed platypus from 1809. (Photo: New York Public Library)
In his laboratory study in 1799, biologist George Shaw stared down at his new specimen in disbelief. The creature from the colony of New South Wales came preserved in pungent alcohol, and he carefully snipped the thick, brown pelt around the creature’s beak, sure he would soon reveal the stitches where an expert taxidermist had fused the bird and beast together. It was like nothing he had seen before: the creature had the body of a furry brown cat, four short legs and sharp claws over webbed feet; the tail of a beaver, but the beak of a duck.
Shaw had met his first platypus, and did not for a moment believe it was possibly real. Still, he couldn’t find any evidence that it was a fake, either. That year in his book The Naturalist’s Miscellany, he described it as having the “perfect resemblance of the beak of a duck...grafted on the head of a quadruped.” Such an animal “naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means,” he confessed.
The scientific world was moving through a new, exciting age of discovery and debate. Biologists in Europe were close to developing a classification system for animals, and theories on how those animals came to be were brewing. The platypus, with its flexible beak and venomous spurs, was a crowbar in the gear-work of known science, causing debates that would not be resolved for 90 years.
Shaw’s suspicions were understandable; the 18th-century scientific community had been burned a few times. Right before entomologist William Charlton died in 1702, he sent in a new species of butterfly, which Carl Linnaeus would later include in his influential Systema Naturae. The scientific community accepted Charlton’s discovery until 1793, when another entomologist discovered ink marks carefully placed on its wings.
In 1725 Dr. Johann Beringer was tricked by local boys into collecting over 2,000 false fossils and publishing them in a book before he realized he was subject to a hoax. What’s more, fishermen had been buying expertly sewn monkey-and-fish taxidermy creations from East Asian artists for years, one of which became P.T. Barnum’s famed Feejee Mermaid just a few decades later.
An 1842 advertisement for P.T Barnum's "Feejee Mermaid", and also "the Duck-billed Platypus, the connecting link between the bird and beast". (Photo: Public Domain)
Even two decades later scientists weren’t convinced that the creature was legit; anatomist Robert Knox announced that the platypus was a “freak imposture”, and that ”the scientific [community] felt inclined to class this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art.” The veracity of this “amphibious creature of the mole kind,” as New South Wales colonist David Collins described the animal in 1797, would be in doubt for many more decades.
The animals kept sailing in from the colonies, but even after biologists agreed the platypus was real, no one knew what to think of it. What was it, exactly? A creepy, furry reptile? A mammal-bird? And what allows such a creature to exist in the first place?
According to Ann Moyal’s book Platypus, theories about the platypus developed even before specimens were shipped from Australia to Europe. Soon after setting sight on the animal in 1793, Australian Governor John Hunter declared that “a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all these different animals” might be how the platypus had come to be. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Dr. Erasmus Darwin used this quote to bolster his budding statement of evolution in his 1796 book, Zoomania.
Australia began sending platypus organs preserved in alcohol to Europe in alarming numbers. An article in International Science and National Scientific Identitywrites that, “Literally thousands of preserved and stuffed platypus and their uteri were shipped back to Britain for research. It’s a miracle they still survive today after such slaughter.”
Anatomists of the time needed to know how to classify this animal, and of course this provoked arguments too. While looking at his plentiful platypus organs, British anatomist Everard Home of the Royal College of Surgeons in London found that the beak was actually a sensory apparatus, and that the platypus’s sexual organs were like those of an oviparous reptile. Home believed the platypus had to be a new kind of mammal more closely related to birds, while others insisted it was a mammal. Anatomist J. K. W. Illiger deftly placed it in a new class called Reptantia. Jean Baptiste-Lamarck insisted it was a new non-mammal, and called its class Prototheria.
George Shaw's illustration of the beak and feet of the platypus. (Photo: New York Public Library)
Lamarck had already introduced the idea of transmutationism, a controversial early theory of evolution that said new creatures formed through adaptation, and ideas about how the platypus fit into this bounced aggressively off university walls. Anti-transmutationists of the mid-1800s felt these ideas were too simplistic for the platypus. Biologist and anti-transmutationist Richard Owen believed platypuses were mammals that gave birth through eggs which developed viviparously, and particularly disliked that transmutationist Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire put the platypus into a new, transitional class called Monotremata.
Charles Darwin was also intrigued at the platypus’s existence, and seeing it in a 1836 excursion to Australia may have inspired him to connect his own thoughts on evolution. Smithsonianreports that Darwin’s descendant, Chris Darwin, was told from a young age about the “platypus moment,” a factor that made the influential scientist “question creationism for the first time” while in Australia.
More than three decades after it was first described, biologists were still unsure if the platypus laid eggs or gave birthand nursed, which would dictate its classification. Even more complicated was that the female platypus has no teats to nurse her young—it wouldn’t be until 1833 that biologist George Bennett went to Australia and discovered that the animals do indeed nurse—the female platypus actually secretes milk from its pores, which pool into ridges on the platypus abdomen like little milk dishes for her young.
In the late 1800s, Scottish zoologist William Hay Caldwell finally managed to dissect fresh platypus eggs and confirmed once and for all that the animal did in fact lay them, though the embryos partially developed inside the platypus’s body, which also nursed its young. The platypus was classified as a mammal—one of five that are known to lay eggs, in the order Monotremata.
The platypus is no longer a source for constant debate, but the weird little creature still has a lot to teach. In fact, revisiting platypus genetics is helping biologists learn about the evolution of Ribonucleic acid (RNA), and how mammals began to pass XY chromosomes–the platypus, like birds, have multiple X’s and Y’s versus the mammalian single pair.In 2010, the 80 toxins of the platypus’ venomous spurs were discovered to have come from separate animal lineages. And in 2013, a giant ancient platypus tooth was found, which might rearrange some of what was thought about the platypus’ evolution before.
While some members of the public might like to see it, the original platypus specimen given to Shaw is now too delicate to be exhibited. Shaw’s original, skeptical cut marks are still visible on its pelt, though, which spends its afterlife in a box in the “Mammal Tower” of London’s Natural History Museum.
Prince was a beloved singularity, whose career stretched across nearly four decades, with tours spanning the globe. But nowhere was more important to Prince than Minnesota. He grew up in Minneapolis, played his first show there, and, for the past 28 years, lived and recorded in Chanhassen, Minnesota, a suburb outside of the Twin Cities, at a studio where the artist built his dreams.
"Prince never left us and we never left him," Betsy Hodges, the mayor of Minneapolis, said in a statement Thursday. "For many of us, we grew up with his music and it became an essential part of our youth."
Near his Chanhassen studio and home, known as Paisley Park, a highway was shut down after hundreds of fans streamed there, many clutching purple flowers.
This was the man who created the "Minneapolis sound," but why Minnesota? In the course of his 57 years, Prince arguably become more important to the state than Bruce Springsteen is to New Jersey.
"I can go out and not get jumped on," he told Rolling Stone in 1985. "It feels good not to be hassled when I dance, which I do a lot. It's not a thing of everybody saying, 'Whoa, who's out with who here?' while photographers flash their bulbs in your face."
"It's a good and a bad thing that I live here. It's bad in the sense that I can't be a primo 'rock star' and do everything absolutely right," he added. "I can't go to the parties and benefits, be at all the awards shows, get this and get that. But I like it here. It's really mellow."
Prince was hardly the first Minnesota music star, of course. But he might have been the first to make it big and stay.
"People knew you could make it out of here and make it big. Bob Dylan is from here. He went to college here, but he had to move to New York to make it," Jon Bream, the longtime music critic at the Minneapolis Star Tribunetold NPR in 2011. "Prince proved you could stay here to make it, and you could make it huge."
Prince might have been tied to Dylan thanks to Minnesota, but he seemed to acknowledge early on that the two didn't have a whole lot in common.
"I don't know too much about Dylan," Prince said, "but I respect him a lot. 'All Along the Watchtower' is my favorite of his. I heard it first from Jimi Hendrix."
Prince was shuffled around his parents' homes when he was younger, after they split up, later attending Minneapolis's Central High School, before cutting a demo tape at a studio in the city and landing a recording contract.
Prince used a different Minneapolis venue, First Avenue, in the filming of his 1984 movie, the lightly-autobiographical Purple Rain, and for a time many of the film's locations, especially the downtown club, became fan destinations. That made it harder for Prince to go dancing there without interference, but, he said in Rolling Stone, after a few years the old scene came back.
"There were a lot of us hanging around the club back in the old days," he said, "and the new army, so to speak, is getting ready to come back to Minneapolis. The Family's already here, Mazarati's back now too, and Sheila E. and her band will be coming soon. The club'll be the same thing that it was."
Prince's Minnesota, in other words, was all about the music. He completed his studio at Paisley Park in 1988 and never left, recording more than two dozen albums there.
He was found dead at the Paisley Park studio on Thursday. He was probably working on new music.
Last week, MuckRock reviewed the Drug Enforcement Administration's training documents on techniques to obscure the classified or sensitive origins of investigative leads, which include both parallel construction and another, more secret, method. One of the released DEA presentations features an "interesting" digression to remind field agents of the "fact" that marijuana is still a bad, bad drug without any medicinal value, no matter what federal medical research scientists may say.
The 2011 presentation, obtained by MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella, was a two-hour module on the constitutional viability of a secret evidence management method. A year before the passage of Colorado's Amendment 64 to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a counselor from the DEA's Denver office claimed that pot has no discernible medicinal value.
After reviewing such tactics as the protective sweep and routine traffic stops for collecting evidence, the slides veer into justification for enforcing the Controlled Substances Act, the federal legislation passed in 1970 that lumps marijuana and heroin into the same class of illicit substances. This section of slides points first to the October 2009 Department of Justice memo that directs DOJ investigators to focus on marijuana trafficking, since such activity "provides a significant source of revenue to large-scale criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels." Accordingly, the Denver DEA slides emphasize that the agency "seeks to dismantle and/or disrupt the highest level of violators" rather than focus on low-level users.
From there the presentation moves abruptly away from policy matters into bold scientific assertions about the individual health impacts of marijuana use.
"While it should come as no surprise to this audience," the attorney notes, "there is no science that has concluded marijuana is medicine."
The same slide asserts that medicinal pot carries a "high potential for abuse," and that there is a "lack of accepted safety for the use of the drug under medical supervision." The next slams marijuana as harmful and addictive, and classifies it as a "stair-step drug" that may become a "bridge" to abuse of other substances.
To close the section, the DEA trainer refers curious agents to the National Institutes of Health for more information on the adverse impacts of marijuana intake. Interestingly, in the very same year as the presentation, the NIH and the National Cancer Institute published an overview of the usefulness of cannabinoids in treating cancer. A request by Phil Mocek previously disclosed the NCI's contentious revision process for its review of cannabis and cannabinoids as cancer treatment.
Even as federal scientists cautiously confirmed that marijuana compounds have medicinal value, then, one DEA lawyer was teaching law enforcement precisely the opposite. To determine whether DEA training material has changed since 2011, MuckRock has requested all of the agency's learning modules on medical pot and on enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act in states that have legalized recreational marijuana use.
With Harriet Tubman coming to the American $20 bill, and other changes being made to the look of money in the United States, the design of dollars is once again set to evolve. But our current bills still hold many of the symbols and motifs that existed in our earliest paper money, the Colonial and Continental currencies.
Back then, when the bills were being produced by each of the colonies, they were both wilder and more elaborate. Incorporating early versions of the filigree and emblems, like the pyramid, still found in American currency today, these proto-dollars are terrific artifacts from a more primitive economy. Until 1797, they did not even use the "$" symbol, which had to be invented by a bankrupt Irishman first.
Take a look at some of the most gorgeous money from the 1700s.
When the first British settlers established themselves on American shores in the 1600s, their economy relied on bartering, foreign money, and commodity-based trade (beads, skins, wampum, etc.). But by the 1700s as the colonies began to claw their way to independence, they began printing unique promissory notes to more efficiently conduct transactions.
Since each colony was producing its own script, the independently produced paper money covered a wide range of values. A piece of Colonial currency from the Connecticut Colony might entitle the bearer to 40 shillings, while a similar bill from Georgia might be worth $40. Many of them bore the threatening slogan, "To Counterfeit, is Death."
Even as the Revolutionary War began, and the newly formed Continental Congress began to issue more formalized dollar bills, known as Continental currency, the amounts were still odd (there were bills for a third of a dollar and $55) and their actual worth was not assured.
By the end of the 18th century, both Colonial and Continental currencies had proven to be a flop, even giving birth to the phrase, "worthless as a Continental." But the burgeoning government learned from their mistakes and began taking steps that would lead to the more stable monetary system that exists today.
Even though the Colonial and Continental currencies weren’t that effective as economic vouchers, their unregulated and independent development of their designs left us with some uniquely beautiful numismatic treasures, each different from the last.
For a late 19th-century actor looking for a little self-promotion, there was one simple answer: a studio portrait.
These photographs often showed the actor as a character from a play. Sometimes the performer stood against a backdrop of scenery; frequently, he or she adopted a dramatic pose. These theatrics are very apparent in the portraits of actors in Shakespearean roles.
Some of the greatest actors of the time were associated with a particular Shakespearean character. Ellen Terry, for example, made such an impact as Lady Macbeth that she inspired a painting by John Singer Sargent. (Interestingly, her pose in the painting—arms aloft, lowering a crown towards her head—was not part of Terry's performance. Sargent made it up.)
One of the most famous actresses of the time, Sarah Bernhardt, played both Shakespeare’s heroines and heroes, appearing as Hamlet in a five-hour production in 1899. Reportedly, to help her prepare for these tragic roles, Bernhardt slept in a coffin.
Coffins aside, the acting style of the time leaned more towards exaggeration than naturalism. There was a greater emphasis on deliberate poses and clear, strong elocution to carry through theaters.
Exaggeration is certainly true of these portraits. Robert B. Mantell, described by the New York Times in 1915 as the “Dean of American Shakespearean actors,” glares over his villainous mustache as Iago. George Rignold, in suit of armor as Henry V, lunges awkwardly between a sword and a flagpole.
The actors, accustomed to being animated and lively on stage, had to take all of that vitality and channel it into a moment of stillness for each photo. The poses and facial expressions suggest great drama, but without movement and vocals they remain suspended, as an intake of breath before a line is delivered.
Nevertheless, what these images lack the sound and motion, they make up for it in sheer melodrama. On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, regard with wild-eyes and clutched hands these most theatrical and entertaining portraits.
It’s no secret to anyone who’s taken freshman English that William Shakespeare loved—loved—puns. Helge Kökeritz’s classic 1953 book Shakespeare’s Pronunciation lists many dozens of them, from “pasture”/”pastor” to “fleece”/”fleets.”
Whether these puns are an example of the Bard’s brilliant wit or a superficial distraction from it depends on which critic you talk to. Samuel Johnson, the author of the most authoritative English dictionary before the OED, was definitely in the latter group. Punning “has some malignant power over [Shakespeare’s] mind,” Johnson wrote in a preface to an edition of Shakespeare’s collected works in 1765.
However you feel about Shakespeare’s puns, though, one thing's clear: most readers (including Samuel Johnson) have missed a lot of them. English pronunciation has changed a great deal since Shakespeare wrote his plays, with the result that many words that were homophones then no longer sound that way now. For instance, can you spot the pun in these lines from Taming of the Shrew?
LADY: I hope this reasonstands for my excuse.
BEGGAR: I, it stands so that I may hardly tarry so long.
No? That’s understandable—contemporary pronunciation is in your way. In Elizabethan times, the “ea” in “reason” would have been pronounced like the “ai” in “raising,” yielding a dirty joke: the beggar is joking that he can’t tarry because he has a boner (a “raising”) to attend to. (Groan.)
There’s more to this than dick jokes, though. Shakespeare’s career took place on the tail end of the linguistic cataclysm known as the Great Vowel Shift, which transformed the pronunciation of the five long vowels of Middle English (phonetically /i:/, /e:/, /ɛː/, /a:/, /u:/, /o:/, /ɔː/) into the Modern English vowels we’re familiar with today. For instance, “bite” in 1350 would have been pronounced like “beet,” “mate” like “met,” and “out” like “oot.” (This is part of what makes Chaucer’s 14th-century Canterbury Tales so inaccessible to the modern reader.)
Even though the Great Vowel Shift was largely complete by 1600 or so, vowel pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time was still very much in flux. Samuel Johnson wouldn’t write his comprehensive English dictionary until 150 years later. In Elizabethan London, words still had no standard spellings, so they didn’t have standard pronunciations, either. What’s more, a flood of migrants from the countryside had brought with them their own idiosyncratic regional pronunciations.
In his 2010 book Shakespeare and Language, professor Jonathan Hope argued that Elizabethans wouldn’t have acknowledged these regionalisms as “accents”—they were just part of the eclectic hodgepodge that was the English language at the time. (He points out, for instance, that Shakespeare’s stage directions only ever call for foreign accents like French and German, never regional English ones—as if those regional English accents didn’t exist.) That meant that performers at the Globe could pick and choose whatever regional pronunciations they felt worked best for a scene, sometimes mixing and matching them within a single sentence.
For instance, here’s a dirty pun on female fertility from Much Ado About Nothing. It plays off of “bairn,” a borrowed Scottish word for “child,” which at the time could have been pronounced as a homophone for “barn.” (It might also help to know that “stables,” as in “firm, erect,” is yet another boner reference.)
BEATRICE: Ye Light alove with your heeles, then if your husband have stables enough, you’ll look he shall lack no barns.
Some other dirty homophones you might have missed due to the fluidity of Elizabethan vowels, according to Kökeritz in Shakespeare’s Pronunciation: “neck” and “nick,” a slang term for vagina; “grace” and “grease,” which is a great pair for punning about the womanly virtues of greasy kitchen maids; and “pistol” and “pizzle,” or bull’s penis. It’s not necessarily that all of these would always have been pronounced as homophones—just that in Shakespeare’s time they could be pronounced that way. For the Bard, that was usually enough.
But this all raises the question: Why did Shakespeare load his work with so many puns—more, it turns out, than we even knew—when puns are inherently kind of silly?
Hope makes an interesting argument that it wasn’t just homophones that came across differently in Elizabethan times—the whole concept of a pun was different, too. Without standardized spelling or pronunciation, the meaning of any given sentence was a lot more ambiguous to an Elizabethan listener than it is for us today. A pun, then, was less about superficial wordplay and more about sorting out nuances in meaning—“active processes of disambiguation,” in Hope’s words. For Shakespeare, then, puns would have seemed more like their sophisticated cousins, the metaphor and the simile.
So maybe Samuel Johnson was wrong to cast aspersions on the humble pun. If you think like an Elizabethan, wordplay isn’t a distraction from the nuances of Shakespeare’s verse; it’s an enhancement. One that makes his plays both dirtier and more sophisticated than our modern minds could know.
In their most iconic form, coral reefs are found in crystal-clear tropical waters, not the muddy mouth of a river. In fact, Patricia Yager, a oceanographer at the University of Georgia “kind of chuckled” when a Brazilian colleague, Rodrigo Moura, suggested they search for a reef in the mouth of the Amazon, The Atlantic reports.
When their team found evidence of a reef there, she told the magazine, “I was flabbergasted, as were the rest of the 30 oceanographers.”
The reef they found is more than 600 miles long and covers 3,600 square miles, they describe in a study published in Science Advances. In parts, it’s covered by the silty outflow from the Amazon River only three months of the year, so that the corals’ photosynthetic symbiotes can photosynthesize at will. In large parts of the reef, though, sunlight is harder to come by, and those areas are populated by sponges and carnivorous fish.
The scientists did have a clue that they might find a something of interest in this area: Moura had found a paper from 1977 in which fish indicating the presence of a coral reef had been found in the area. On a research cruise, the team dredged the ocean floor and came up with coral, sponges and reef fish. They had found exactly what they were looking for.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Richard Burton as Henry V. (Photo: Maurice Ambler/Getty Images)
Among the First Folios and rare quartos and historic theatre costumes at the British Library’s recently opened exhibition, Shakespeare in Ten Acts, there’s a book. About the size of a modern paperback, it’s neither particularly old—it’s from 1907—nor is it particularly rare. But what is interesting about it is that, unlike many of the other pieces on display, this book is about how awful William Shakespeare is.
Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was not a fan of Shakespeare, professing himself in this book, Tolstoy on Shakespeare, to be in “complete disagreement with this universal adulation”. When he read Shakespeare, he said, “I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium”, and wondered whether he was just wrong to see “works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad”, or if the civilized world was just mad. He read them all, and now, as “an old man of seventy-five”, he could look back and say with honesty that all he ever felt was “repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment”.
Left, Leo Tolstoy in 1897, not a fan of Shakespeare; right, his book Tolstoy on Shakespeare, on display at the British Library exhibition. (Photos, from left: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ppmsca-37767; Courtesy of the British Library)
“The contents page of the book is wonderful because he lists everything he thinks is wrong with Shakespeare,” said Zöe Wilcox, curator of Shakespeare in Ten Acts. It is an exhaustive list, including that Shakespeare’s characters speak “the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak”. And it’s refreshing evidence that not everyone has always loved Shakespeare.
But this April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and, Tolstoy notwithstanding, we celebrate the Bard as the best the world has done and could ever do as a playwright; even broadsides fired by angry Russian writers have done little to damage a reputation carved in stone and held in place by the vast industry devoted to it.
The 1623 First Folio, from the British Library. (Photo: Clare Kendall)
But exactly why do we still care about Shakespeare, a playwright who died before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, several major wars, and the advent of the technology that dominates our lives today? We barely even speak the same language –what makes him relevant? Why do we still perform his plays?
Ironically, it’s Tolstoy—the man left positively ill after reading Shakespeare’s works—who may have the answer, or at least part of it. What frustrated Tolstoy the most was how Shakespeare neglected to furnish his characters with clear reasons for their actions, how he left a play’s meanings and intentions ambiguous. “From a novelist’s perspective, he felt that Shakespeare wasn’t good because he didn’t explain his characters’ motivations properly,” says Wilcox.
But those blank spaces have been filled, time and time again, with interpretation. Says Wilcox, “[Tolstoy] criticized Shakespeare for having stripped those things away, but the ambiguities have led people to be able to adapt the plays in so many ways, and that’s really a strength.”
Richard Burbage, an actor at the Globe. (Photo: Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London/Courtesy the British Library)
There’s even reason to believe that Shakespeare built in that ambiguity on purpose, to enable players, often actors he knew personally, to craft their own interpretations. “We have to remember that Shakespeare was an actor. We have to remember that he knew that every character was to going to be filled in by the man or the boy who played that part,” says Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen, co-founder and mission director of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Va., one of the US’s most significant hubs of Shakespearean study and performance. “He also knew that it would be filled in by the audience.”
How Shakespeare’s plays have been performed and, crucially, adapted in the last four centuries has necessarily changed according to cultural context, regard for Shakespeare’s reputation, and technological capability; some contexts have transformed the plays almost beyond recognition. Over the century after his death, Shakespeare’s reputation was positive, but his plays were also considered old-fashioned and in some cases, problematic.
Left, the frontispiece to King Lear "reviv'd with alterations" by Nahum Tate in 1681; right, an 1817 engraving of Act V, sc 1, with lines from Tate's version. (Photos, from left: Public Domain; Folger Shakespeare Library/cropped/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Restoration audiences, in the years after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 following the brutal Commonwealth years, didn’t like everything they saw and a number of Shakespeare’s plays were completely re-written to better suit the time. King Lear, for example, the story of a king driven mad by his bad decisions and poor treatment of the only daughter who truly loved him, was too sad, and its characters’ motivations too inscrutable to be left alone. Nahum Tate, who would later become England’s poet laureate, rewrote the play entirely in 1681, ditching the Fool and furnishing virtuous Cordelia with a love story and the whole play with a happy ending. The few stalwart critics went unheeded, meaning that it was Tate’s version of Lear that audiences saw up until 1838, when the Victorians decided they liked their Shakespeare “original” (although given that the sources Shakespeare lifted his story from actually did have a happy ending, perhaps the Tate version was more accurate). Now, playing Lear is what brilliant male actors—Ian McKellan, Laurence Olivier, Michael Gambon, John Gielgud—do when they approach retirement age; the play, as Shakespeare wrote it, routinely ranks as one of his best.
Shakespeare’s version of TheTempest, the story of sorcerer Prospero shipwrecked on an island of spirits with his daughter, was also “fixed”, or, perhaps more accurately, transformed into an over-burdened spectacle. In 1667, the play was re-written and re-titled The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island by John Dryden and William D’Avenant; simplified in parts, and plumped up in others—Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, gains a sister, as does the enslaved Caliban, and the new version made liberal use of advances in stagecraft technology. The Enchanted Island, like Tate’s Lear, became the dominant version for nearly 200 years, culminating in Charles Kean’s bloated 1857 staging in London that lasted five hours and needed 140 stagehands to execute. Hans Christian Anderson, the Danish fable writer, was in the audience and later proclaimed the experience exhausting, noting, “Everything was afforded that machinery and stage direction can provide, and yet after seeing it, one felt overwhelmed, tired and empty.”
“Throughout the history, you just see what is going to be popular with audiences, so directors are just going to bring out what’s going to be a big hit at the box office. The Enchanted Island made a fortune, it drew in crowds all the time,” says Wilcox. “It wasn’t just in that period that directors are kind of taking what is going to be popular about Shakespeare, that’s obviously something that we’re doing now.” And it is: The exhibition also includes a movie poster from West Side Story, one of the more famous adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, but there probably wasn’t enough space for My Own Private Idaho (Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Henry V), Ten Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew), Forbidden Planet (The Tempest), O (Othello), or Ran (King Lear), or any of the other dozens of modern adaptations of old stories. The words change, but the heart of the stories remains the same.
Film adaptations include: West Side Story, My Own Private Idaho and 10 Things I Have About You. (Photo: Folger Shakespeare Library/CC BY-SA 4.0; Courtesy Fine Line Features Courtesy Touchstone Pictures)
“Which goes to show, it’s such a cliché, but Shakespeare really is the poet of human nature,” says Dr. Cynthia Lewis, professor of Shakespeare at Davidson College in North Carolina. “There are some things about human nature that, though cultural impulses shift, they just take on different incarnations. You know, a grieving son is a grieving son in some ways.” The current of what Shakespeare taps into in Hamlet runs through The Banquet and The Lion King, of course, but also, as Lewis wrote in a recent essay for literary journal Shenandoah, in NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s bewildered grief in the wake of the death of racing patriarch Dale Earnhardt Sr. in 2001.
But we don’t only adapt his plays to fit our current cultural and social forms—we also continue to perform his plays as he wrote them, word for word. So what Shakespeare excelled at was not only finding and polishing the rights stories, but also expressing them. “He just has a ear for how we speak,” says Cohen. “Not just how we speak, how we listen, how we respond, when we fail to speak, he just had an ear for that…. He was a great poet, but he was a great mimic, too.” In other words, it’s not just that he rendered humans poetically—he made them feel real.
Vivian Leigh on stage as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic, 1937. (Photo: J W Debenham/ Courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol and ARENApal/British Library)
That language, however, can be lost on the page, when we only hear it in our own heads. Perhaps Tolstoy’s biggest problem was that he was reading Shakespeare—Shakespeare, scholars and actors alike say, is meant to be performed. “It’s still difficult, we don’t understand every single word, but there’s so much that an actor can bring in the meaning and the sense, it just naturally falls into place once they're performing it,” says Wilcox. Cohen, who has directed Shakespeare for most of his life now, explained that one of the joys of his work is watching audiences discover Shakespeare through performance. Often, they’ll approach him after a show with congratulations: “My favorite is ‘How great! Who translated it into modern English?’ and we go, ‘We didn’t touch a word.’”
So the plays are still relevant because we perform them, not the other way around. It’s not so much that each production breathes new life into a character or a play, but rather that they keep these plays breathing, in and out, sustaining them.
The Cushman Sisters as Romeo and Juliet. 1846. (Photo: Folger Shakespeare Library/CC BY-SA 4.0/Courtesy of the British Library)
It’s also about who is playing Shakespeare now. The fourth act in the British Library’s Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition is the advent of women on the stage in 1660, when London’s newest playhouse—built in a converted tennis court—saw the role of Desdemona in Othello played by a woman for the first time. Her name was not recorded, but a prologue was read out before the play, assuring the audience that Desdemona was indeed a real woman because, the actor was meant to say, “I saw the lady drest.” Women on stage opened up new avenues of interpretation and meaning for the plays, but also revenue streams: Audiences swelled when, for example, women played male roles because male theatre-goers so enjoyed the sight of their legs in tights.
The London exhibition also has a section that focuses on Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to play Othello on the British stage in 1825. Aldridge was an American who left crushing racial prejudice in the States to forge an acting career in England; though he faced racism throughout his career in Europe, he also played roles from many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Shylock from Merchant of Venice, Richard III in Richard III and Lear. While Aldridge’s career didn’t spark a sudden revolution in casting, it did pave the way for later generations of non-white actors; “color-blind” and multi-cultural castings and staging of Shakespeare’s plays became increasingly popular throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. “It brings home the relevance to us now: If we didn’t see people like ourselves performing those plays, then we might not be as interested in them any more,” notes Wilcox.
Playbill for Ira Aldridge’s performance as Othello at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 10 April 1833. (Photo: Courtesy British Library)
Now, adaptations of Shakespeare on stage and in the theatre are increasingly challenging, for lack of a better word; while they are by no means uniformly good or even coherent, they are non-traditional, different. The last act in the exhibition is the New York-based Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet, in which the actors are performing with a projection of the film of Richard Burton’s famous turn as the tortured prince as the background. The production has an eerie choral effect when the Wooster actors actually speak with Burton delivering his lines, reinforcing the production’s acknowledgement of the weight of 400 years’ worth of performing Hamlet.
But that we can do weird, exciting things with Shakespeare’s plays stems from our deep familiarity with his stories; as Cohen says of Hamlet, “It’s in the DNA of the world so much that we all love Hamlet, we’ve all seen Hamlet.” Wilcox agreed, noting, “The familiarity leads to the infinite possibilities to re-interpret in various ways; we can compare it to previous interpretations, and that text and those characters.”
The Wooster Group's Hamlet, which performed the play against a projection of Richard Burton's film. (Photo: Mihaela Marin)
A still of Ethan Hawke in the film Hamlet, 2000. (Photo: YouTube)
The National Theatre's 2015 production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which was screened to cinemas around the world as part of the 'National Theatre Live' program. (Photo: YouTube)
But familiarity also breeds contempt and Shakespeare today could be mistaken for as much a product of his own genius as a product of the industry that keeps crowing about his genius. “I have mixed feelings about it because the industry keeps Shakespeare current and performed,” says Lewis. “But there’s a downside to it, there’s a side to it that can make you cynical, in which the agenda is about revenue and commodifying Shakespeare and fragmenting him into so many key chains and T-shirts and mugs and junk, Shakespeare kitsch.”
Cohen acknowledged that the industry around Shakespeare can be powerful, but that there’s a reason for it that goes beyond simple revenue. “I do think Shakespeare is one of the great miracles,” he says, with a laugh and noting that he also appreciates many other playwrights. “But no one who’s in anything doesn’t talk himself too much into believing these things.” Still, he continued, “I don’t think it’s an industry that can survive on self-delusion, it just couldn’t.
Bardolatry aside, these plays do mean something to us. We like them. Some of us even love them. “The simple answer to the question of why we perform Shakespeare's plays,” says Lewis, “would be that they seem to feed us.”
Workplace safety in the '80s was no joke—in fact, it was more like a horror movie. At least that's how the above video makes it seem. The short film was made to show factory workers that unsafe working methods can lead to tragedy.
The shots show various workers meeting brutal—really brutal—ends at the hands of factory equipment and machinery, interspersed with clips of "victim testimonials." The backing track is essentially cheesy samba music inserted into a horror movie soundtrack. It's not clear which is scarier—the gore, or the 80s music—but it certainly makes for an entertaining watch.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
